This is the final installment about the Surrealist painter,
sculptor, and writer Leonora Carrington.
The first part can be found here.
The second, bringing the story of her paintings up to the beginning of
the 1960s, can be found here. Some of
the information below about Carrington is from Susan Aberth’s book Leonora
Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art .
The 1960’s
In 1960, there was an exhibition of 55 Carrington pieces at
the Museo National de Arte Moderno in Mexico City. The next year, the Museo Nactional de Arte
Moderno and the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexcio City included
Carrington in the exhibition El Retrato
Mexicano Contemporaneo, as a Mexican artist.
Mexico had become her cultural home.
During this time Carrington received a government commission
to paint a mural for the Museo Nacional de Antropologia, located in Chapultepec
Park in Mexico City. Her mural was for
the section in the museum dedicated to the state of Chiapas and so she
travelled there in 1963 to study the region and the culture.
“In San Cristobal de las Casas she stayed with the Swiss
anthropologist Gertrude Blom, whose fieldwork focused on the Lacandon Indians
who lived in the area. Through Blom she
was introduced to two Chiapas curanderos (healers) from the village of
Zinacantan (called ‘House of the Bats’) and, although wary of foreigners, they
were so impressed by her knowledge of and respect for traditional healing that
they allowed her to attend some of their ceremonies.” (Aberth, p 97)
For the next six months Carrington worked on preliminary
drawings of the villagers and local animals.
When she returned to Mexico City she began to study the Popul Vuh, the sacred book of the ancient Quiche Maya, in order
to better understand the pre-conquest belief systems of the Chiapas Indians,
descendents of those who wrote the Popul Vuh.
The result was the mural El
mundo magico de los mayas.
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| El Mundo Magico de los Mayas, 1963 |
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| Chrysopeia of Mary the Jewess, 1964 |
In the mid-sixties, Carrington began exploring Kabbalah lore, a branch of
Jewish mysticism that seeks to explain the relationship between the realm of
the eternal and unchanging and the finite, ever-changing world. Kabbalistic methods of spiritual realization
are, for the most part, the foundation of European alchemy.
Of course, she couldn’t help but play around with the sacred
in the same way she’d done with icons of institutional Christianity. When nothing is sacred….everything is sacred.
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| The Bath of Rabbi Loew, 1969 |
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| Details from Chrysopeia |
A Surrealist Master
There is a chapter in Alejandro Jodorowsky’s spiritual
autobiography, The Spiritual Journey of Alejandro
Jodorowsky, called A Surrealist
Master that tells the tale of his odd, spiritual apprenticeship to
Carrington some time during the mid-sixties. (For those unfamiliar with
Jodorowsky, he is most famous as the writer/director of the cult films El Topo and The Holy Mountain. He is
also a playwright, actor, and graphics novel writer – his most famous comic being The Incal – in collaboration with the
cartoon artist Moebius. On top of all
that, he is also a spiritual guru of sorts, having developed his own spiritual
system he calls “Psychoshamanism”).
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| Jodorowsky in the 60s |
In the Spiritual
Autobiography, Ejo Takata, the Zen master under which Jodorowsky was
studying at the time, suggested that – because of Jodorowsky’s issues with his
mother, and consequently women in general – he should spend some time as
Leonora Carrington’s spiritual apprentice.
In the master’s words: “Accept my
friend Leonora Carrington as your teacher.
She doesn’t know any koans, but she has resolved them all.” (Spiritual
Autobiography, p 43)
(In the autobiography it is never clear what Carrington’s relationship
was with Ejo Takata, but he obviously knew her well enough to suggest the
apprenticeship and she accept).
At their first meeting she asked him to move for her,
knowing that he had once been a mime. He
did so. Afterwards, she silently left
the room, came back with tea and biscuits.
Jodorowsky: “She sipped the
drink, which was sweetened with honey, then lifted her tunic, which covered her
down to her ankles, and showed me a small wound on her calf. With the teaspoon, wearing the childlike
expression of a sorceress, she scraped the scab away from the wound and let the
spoon fill with blood. She brought it
carefully over to me without spilling a drop, emptied the red liquid into my
glass, and bade me drink it…Then, rummaging in an oval box, she pulled out a
pair of scissors and cut my fingernails as well as a lock of my hair. She put them all in a tiny sack she hung
around her neck. ‘You will return!’ she
said.” (Spiritual Autobiography, p 49)
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| The Ancestor, 1968 |
That night he dreamed she was beckoning him to her. He woke, found himself running through the
streets of Mexico City back to her house.
He let himself in with the key that she had given him that day, climbed
the stairs, and found her seated on a wooden throne whose back was carved with
the bust of an angel, naked except for a Tallit (a Jewish prayer shawl),
reciting a strange litany in English.
She took no notice of him.
“I, the eye that sees
nine different worlds and tells the tale of each.
I, who saw the guts of
pharaoh, embalmer, outcast.
I, the lion goddess
who ate the ancestors and churned them into gold in her belly.
I, the lunatic and
fool, meat for worse fools than I.
I, the bitch of
Sirius, landed here from the terrible hyperbole to howl at the moon…”
(Spiritual
Autobiography, p 50)
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| Portrait of Carrington by Jodorowsky |
Carrington intoned the litany until her husband Chiki
arrived in the room, lifted her gently from the throne and walked her into the
bedroom, stretching her out on the bed, never once acknowledging Jodorowsky’s
presence. Carrington continued to murmur
her chant until she drifted off to sleep.
In the rest of the chapter, Jodorowsky talks about several
initiation-type rites Carrington put him through, her speech full of surreal
parable-esque questions and anecdotes, pretty much in the same style as her
surrealist stories.
“Everything that lives is because of my vital fluid. I wake when you sleep. If I stand up, they
bury you. Who am I?”
“A transparent egg that emits rays like the great
constellations is a body, but it is also a box.
Of what?”
An even more revealing and interesting article on Carrington
during the 60s was penned by Rita Pomade, talking about her friendship – and
dream apprenticeship – to the artist. This
article is a wonderful mix of both the magical and the mundane in Carrington's life. It can be found here.
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| The Candle Game, 1966 |
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| Sachiel, angel of Thursday, 1967 |
“I visited her on a day she had taken ill and was confined to her bed. The bedroom is on the second floor and there is an outside walkway to reach it. As I approached her room, a black cloud floated out the door and rose into the clear, blue afternoon sky. I entered the room determined to say nothing, not even sure that I had actually seen anything. I sat on the only chair next to her bed. "You saw it," she said. "Yes," I answered. She went on to say she had brought on her illness through negative use of her powers and was exorcizing herself to get well. I believe it was during this time of deep personal reflection that she fully understood the double-edged power of the gift that had been imparted to her.
“Leonora loved her sons fiercely, but she claimed a legacy of ancient knowledge that she couldn't pass on to them. It was oral wisdom transmitted through women from one generation to the next, and she believed me to be a good candidate. I was given a task. "I'm planning to paint my own Tarot deck," she said, "and I want you to dream images for me to draw." She suggested an astral visit from her. I didn't relish an out of body visitor and asked her to stay home. I promised to dream, and I did...”
The 1970s
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| Mujeres Conciencia, 1972 |
Beginning in 1968 and throughout the 70s Carrington spent a
significant amount of time in the United States, primarily in New York and the
suburbs of Chicago. Although she was not
particularly interested in the work of Freud or Jung, while in NY she became a
regular visitor of the Kristine Mann Library of the C. G. Jung Center, pouring
through ARAS (Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism), a vast collection
of visual materials.
It was also in the 70s that Carrington came into contact
with the feminist movement, designing a poster for Mexican women’s liberation
entitled Mujeres Conciencia. As Aberth puts it, “some of her creative
isolation she had experienced was beginning to dissipate as interviewers and
historians sought her out.” In 1974
Gloria Orenstein wrote a feature on her for Ms
Magazine.
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| A Warning to Mother, 1973 |
The Crone
Reaching her sixties in the late 70s, she began to
tackle the question of age. Elderly
women or ‘crones’ begin to appear in her work.
In a catalogue essay for such works, Whitney Chadwick says:
“The multiple realities that Carrington confronts in her
work include the reality of old age.
Aging has occupied her thoughts more and more as she considers how to
live the remainder of her life. Focusing
on the image of the crone, the ancient woman; she has rejected the ideals of
youth and beauty that dominate both contemporary culture and most of the
history of western painting…the painting of aged and wrinkled faces – along
with the restoration of knowledge and power to the elderly – are perfectly in
keeping with Carrington’s belief that unless women reclaim their power to affect
the course of human life, there is little hope for civilization.” (Leonora
Carrington – Recent Works, NY, Brewster Gallery, 1988, p 4)
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| Grandmother Moorhead's Aromatic Kitchen, 1975 |
Ever the iconoclast, she (humorously) took on the Bogey Man of
the Western world: Age…and so, Death. (Here
in the US, the constant message from the culture at large is that you must
cling to youth – at all costs. It has
something to do with the constant cry for ‘the new’ that is fuel for the engine
of Capitalism. Planned obsolescence for
human beings. If you are no longer
youthful, then you are no longer relevant, become a cast-off and invisible like
clothes hanging from the racks in Good Will.
If it’s last year’s dress, it must be useless.
The desire to remain ever youthful has made us a nation of
perpetual adolescents – still star-struck and obsessed with immature idols who
crash and burn at an early age. Granted,
this is not just true for the US…but I’m living in the US right now…
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| Kron Flower, 1987 |
Paradoxically, the culture says to women ‘maintain your youth
at all costs’ (meaning, maintain your sexual desirability at all costs), but
then ruthlessly mocks those women who cannot resist the shame-inducing
admonitions of the culture and feel the need for excessive make-up, a face-lift,
or still dress in tight, provocative clothes.
No one wins. Which is
exactly what those who are making money off the fear of ageing want. They want us to be in so much fear when we
look in the mirror that we can’t see that the lines on our faces are a well-earned
map of lived experience. That lived
experience shouldn’t be automatically labeled ugly. It shouldn’t automatically be labeled beautiful,
either. As the Tao Te Ching says: "Is and Isn't Produce Each Other." Our face maps are simply what is. But I digress…)
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| The Magdalens, 1986 |
In the mid-seventies, Carrington published The
Hearing Trumpet, a surrealist novel
that centers around an old woman, Marian Leatherby, abandoned by her
family and put in a home – Lightsome Hall
– run by the Well of Light Brotherhood. The buildings are shaped like toadstools,
boots, birthday cakes. With the aid of a
hearing trumpet – her magical horn – Marian gains extrasensory perception.
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| Ikon, 1988 |
At the bottom of it all is the quest for the Grail. Four different quests, in fact: Doña Rosalinda’s quest; Marian’s search; an odd band of magicians, poets and animals who set out to reclaim the Grail together; and the author’s own search. Magic mingles with kitchen alchemy. And slapstick reigns supreme over all.
The 1990’s
In the nineties, Carrington produced an amazing series of sculptures, copies of which can be seen in parks around Mexico City. Most notable is the huge work, How Doth the Little Crocodile… based on the painting of the same name, the title taken from a poem in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
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| How doth the little crocodile... |
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| How Doth... sculpture, 2003 |
Leonora Carrington and I…
After getting home from work a couple weeks ago, I found
myself paging through the Carrington reproductions at the end of Aberth’s book
(Sacrament, Temple of the Word, The
Chrysopeia of Mary the Jewess; Sachiel, the Angel of Thursday…). I spent quite a while looking at Took My
Way Down, Like a Messenger, To the Deep.
This painting could be seen as a play on a Christian
triptych. Instead of three horizontal
panels, with the image of Christ at the center, Carrington’s panels rest one on
top of the other, drawing the eye down.
A robed white crow floats in the top left hand corner, pressing an
elevator button, wishing to descend to the panel below – maybe transformed in
the next realm into a black robed gargoyle figure clutching its totem, a white
hyena-cat. Skulls sit on a Mayanesque pyramid, a pink-robed elephant-headed
shaman walks down the pyramid towards the lowest level, swinging a monstrously
large garlic. At the bottom, a
black-robed, black-skulled Death floats past a blood-red triangle, guarded by
two deer-snails.
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| I took my way down, like a messenger, to the deep, 1977 |
I fell asleep looking at the reproduction of the
painting. When I woke, it was dark. Outside, shapes took form in the hemlock
trees beyond the window – robed and hooded figures very much like the squat,
robed figures in Carrington’s later work.
The figures moved very slowly, hunched with the strain of pushing dark
carts or sleds. Maybe they were pushing
enormous books on wheels, who knows?
I fell asleep again, and the painting continued on, shadows
against the shadows of the trees. In
the middle of the night, I suddenly opened my eyes, and was confronted by a
huge, triangular Carrington-like mask staring at me with one green eye. Chair, desk, laptop, and zafu (sitting on top
of the closed computer) had merged to form a mask-like face. It stared at me, curious. Maybe it had just opened its eyes, too, and
was looking at the shadow of my face, wondering if I was some ragged leftover
from its last dream.
One panel was bleeding into another…
Leonora Carrington 1917-2011
A wonderful clip of
Leonora ruminating on her life, art, etc., from the film Gifted Beauty
(Ragg Films, 2000) by Pamela Robertson-Pearce can be found below:
Below is a link to a hilarious
interview of Carrington by a distant cousin - who ‘discovered’ her living
in Mexico:
A good commentary on this video, about how “the
English-speaking world can’t comprehend — without a lot of rationalizing — that
the world is an irrational place,” can be found here.
Another good BBC documentary by Kim Evans, called House of Fear, can be found below
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4aooKLEHQg
*************************************
Addition
(November, 2015):
If
you're interested in a song with fascinating lyrics about the original
proto-surrealist, Hieronymus Bosch, check out my series of blogs on the
demo tapes of Zak Jourek (a forgotten singer-songwriter) here.
Or listen to the song (and his other songs) on Soundcloud here.
*****************************
MEANWHILE....
Michaela Kahn and I will be doing a reading in Kingston, NY this Saturday, June 2nd, 2012. See below:
Chronogram Open Word
Reading Series
with
Michaela Kahn & Christien Gholson
hosted by
Chronogram Poetry Editor
Phillip X. Levine
June 2nd, 2012
7:00 PM
@
OUTDATED - AN ANTIQUE CAFE
314 Wall Street
Kingston, NY
(formerly The BEAHIVE)
