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Lot Essay
“Leonora has crossed more frontiers and passed over more mountain ranges than any other, and sailed across more deeps,” wrote her friend and noted Surrealist patron Edward James. “The paintings of Leonora Carrington are not merely painted, they are brewed. They sometimes seem to have materialized in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight, yet for all this they are no mere illustrations of fairy tales” (intro. to Leonora Carrington: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., Center for Inter-American Relations, New York, 1976, p. 11, 14). Carrington explored themes of magic and transformation across eight decades of painting, describing a reality at once mystifying and miraculous. She embraced the myriad wonders of Mexico—styled the “Surrealist place, par excellence” by André Breton—upon her arrival in 1942, at the age of twenty-five, in the wake of a harrowing escape from war-torn France. Associated with the Surrealists since 1938, she found emotional asylum in Mexico City as she recovered from the wartime internment of her lover Max Ernst, their separation and her subsequent flight to Spain, and the nervous breakdown that followed. A syncretic energy permeated Carrington’s work in Mexico over the ensuing decades, and the menagerie of enchanted beings—part-human and part-animal—assembled in Ikon embodies the sacred animism that long imbued her practice.
Carrington decamped to New York in the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit Mexico City in 1985. “Carrington had joined in the relief work,” notes art historian Marina Warner, “but when the sniffer dogs that had been flown in by an agency to trace survivors in the rubble were diverted and sold as pets, Carrington found she could bear to stay no longer. She settled in New York, in a single basement room (she has a fear of heights and prefers to live grounded) where she began painting the sequence of nineteen major canvases or panels”—Ikon among them—“which were exhibited recently at the Brewster Gallery in New York.” Many of these works, which also include The Magdalens (1986) and The Lovers (1987), “evoke, without melodrama, the primal fear of submergence, remembering cracks and fissures in walls and figures alike,” Warner continues. “It is, however, revealing of the artist’s intense sympathy with all creatures that the sale of the dogs, the perversion of animal faculties and wisdom, should have driven her to seek and make another life.” Among the recurring “motley animals” in these paintings is “the pit bull with a black patch over one eye,” featured prominently in Ikon, who suggestively emerges as “the mysterious [doctor] of this hidden learning” (“New York, Leonora Carrington,” The Burlington Magazine 130, no. 1027, October 1988, pp. 796-97).
In Ikon, Carrington’s abiding animism is mediated through the intercessions of wizened women—crones and magdalens, in her phrasing—whose presence implies new (feminist) meditations on old age for the artist as she entered her seventies. “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,” observed art historian Whitney Chadwick. “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, exh. cat., Brewster Gallery, New York, 1988, p. 4). A devotional image (an “icon”) in the style of the gold-ground paintings of the Trecento that Carrington had long admired, Ikon reimagines the nature of divine wisdom and worship through its procession of astonishing acolytes—black and white, masked and shrouded—and their canine interlocutors. “Metamorphosis inspires her subject matter, and comes, it would seem, naturally to her in the conduct of her life,” Warner concluded. “New York in the late 80s has provided her with only the latest of her changing resting places, though resting place is hardly the word, for Carrington alights, rather than rests” (“New York, Leonora Carrington,” op. cit., p. 796).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Carrington decamped to New York in the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit Mexico City in 1985. “Carrington had joined in the relief work,” notes art historian Marina Warner, “but when the sniffer dogs that had been flown in by an agency to trace survivors in the rubble were diverted and sold as pets, Carrington found she could bear to stay no longer. She settled in New York, in a single basement room (she has a fear of heights and prefers to live grounded) where she began painting the sequence of nineteen major canvases or panels”—Ikon among them—“which were exhibited recently at the Brewster Gallery in New York.” Many of these works, which also include The Magdalens (1986) and The Lovers (1987), “evoke, without melodrama, the primal fear of submergence, remembering cracks and fissures in walls and figures alike,” Warner continues. “It is, however, revealing of the artist’s intense sympathy with all creatures that the sale of the dogs, the perversion of animal faculties and wisdom, should have driven her to seek and make another life.” Among the recurring “motley animals” in these paintings is “the pit bull with a black patch over one eye,” featured prominently in Ikon, who suggestively emerges as “the mysterious [doctor] of this hidden learning” (“New York, Leonora Carrington,” The Burlington Magazine 130, no. 1027, October 1988, pp. 796-97).
In Ikon, Carrington’s abiding animism is mediated through the intercessions of wizened women—crones and magdalens, in her phrasing—whose presence implies new (feminist) meditations on old age for the artist as she entered her seventies. “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,” observed art historian Whitney Chadwick. “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, exh. cat., Brewster Gallery, New York, 1988, p. 4). A devotional image (an “icon”) in the style of the gold-ground paintings of the Trecento that Carrington had long admired, Ikon reimagines the nature of divine wisdom and worship through its procession of astonishing acolytes—black and white, masked and shrouded—and their canine interlocutors. “Metamorphosis inspires her subject matter, and comes, it would seem, naturally to her in the conduct of her life,” Warner concluded. “New York in the late 80s has provided her with only the latest of her changing resting places, though resting place is hardly the word, for Carrington alights, rather than rests” (“New York, Leonora Carrington,” op. cit., p. 796).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park