By Mark Van Proyen
For several decades, the art world has witnessed a widespread resurgence of fantasy figuration, reaching a high point in the 2022 Venice Biennale exhibition titled The Milk of Dreams. That designation was taken from a book of the same name by Leonora Carrington, casting her as an early progenitor of the recent turn toward painterly dreamlands. Nonetheless, it still remains difficult to place her work into any art historical pigeonhole. Was she a Surrealist? André Breton thought so, even though she refused the role of muse valorized by male Surrealist artists. An early feminist? Her life story says yes, but Carrington’s work is far too private and introverted to confirm that ascription. Was she a magical realist? Like many other artists of her generation, she ended up in Mexico City after the outbreak of the Second World War, living and working there until her death in 2011 at the age of ninety-four. There, she incorporated much of that country’s imaginative folklore into her work, which grew ever more lyrical and dreamlike during the final decades of her life. During her time in Mexico, Carrington wrote two novels and a collection of short stories, all qualifying as magical realist literature. Some of the visual work that she produced in Mexico also had a magical realist quality, oftentimes mixed with gloomy neo-gothic stylistics reflecting northern European sources.
Mythopoesis contains a selection of fifteen works by Carrington dating from 1940 to 1987. Two of the three drawings included in the exhibition were executed in Spain, the rest in Mexico. She was briefly institutionalized in a Francisco Franco-era mental institution at the age of twenty-three, but was able to escape further institutionalization in 1941, immigrating to New York, then Mexico. Untitled, Santander, page from sketchbook, executed in 1940 while Carrington was incarcerated, shows the ghostly rendering of a solitary woman floating upward in a wisp of serpentine smoke. Another, titled More Frontiers of Space (1941) was created in Madrid, depicts a female cyclops transforming into a harpy attacking a prostrate horse amid a volcanic landscape.
Three of the seven paintings in Mythopoesis are oil on canvas or panel, with the another three being gouaches, pastels, or watercolors, and the final one being egg tempera. Sidhe, the White People of Tuatha dé Danaan (1954) is a standout, depicting a quintet of translucent spirit figures hovering around a table to partake from a bowl of beet soup. The scene echoes an ancient Celtic story about an otherworldly marriage feast, here portrayed in a darkened chamber described in radiant ranges of copper and orange. Similar spirit figures are visible in El Toro, a 1969 gouache, charcoal, and pastel on paper. The image of a blue bull is seen at the right of composition, fleeing from two trios of figures painted in a pictographic style that recalls Paleolithic cave images. An untitled tapestry made at some point between 1948 and 1955 also bespeaks Carrington’s interest in symbolic material derived from multiple cultural sources: here she shows Quetzalcoatl transformed into a cosmic boat piloted by chimerical deities from Aztec and Egyptian traditions. The tapestry was designed by Carrington and then created by master weavers from San Miguel, Chiconcuac, obliquely conjuring her father’s ownership of a textile mill in Lancashire, England. The most recent work in the exhibition from 1990, portrays a rain-soaked English country house in a very traditional style that seems like the recovery of a lost childhood memory.
Mythopoesis also includes a trio of rarely exhibited poetic objects made by Carrington during her early years in Mexico. La cuna (The Cradle) (ca. 1945), the most impressive of these, was created in collaboration with woodworker Jose Horna. It takes the form of a small sailboat precariously perched atop a stylized wave form, also made of wood. Around its outer gunwales, Carrington has painted a colorful frieze of floating animals and other storybook characters, telling a story of fair winds and calm seas lurking on an imaginary horizon.
This abbreviated selection of Carrington’s work reveals a surprising range of theme and media running from classic Surrealist dream pictures to other works that bespeak a kind of Jungian primitivism. Although Mythopoesis is not the extensive retrospective that Carrington’s career deserves, it does point to the many facets and complexities that the organization of such an exhibition would have to take into consideration. It also invites the kind of sustained examination of individual works unencumbered by the sheer overwhelmingness of a more extensive exhibition. There is a lot to be seen in each of Carrington’s works, requiring time for them to fully bloom in the viewer’s experience.
