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Tarot of Leonora Carrington

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Of the essays, the first is an illuminating introduction/memoir by her son Gabriel Weisz Carrington which offers direct insight into Carrington’s world as experienced by one who both lived and collaborated with her. On the basis of this, I look forward to a lengthier volume of his recollections due to be published later this year by Manchester University Press. Escape from Europe was offered by a marriage of convenience to a Mexican diplomat and poet, and she moved first to New York and then Mexico City, where she settled, marrying Emerico Weisz, a Hungarian photographer.

The Tarot of Leonora Carrington is the first book dedicated to this important aspect of the artist's work. It includes a full-size facsimile of her newly discovered Major Arcana; an introduction from her son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington; and a richly illustrated essay from Tere Arcq and Susan Aberth that offers new insights--exploring the significance of tarot imagery within Carrington's wider work, her many inspirations and mysterious occult sources. This new edition also reproduces previously unpublished photographs and images, as well as exciting new research into Carrington's influences, emphasizing the authors' claim that her work on the Major Arcana represents an esoteric roadmap to Carrington's feminist vision and wish for a new global gender equality toward a better ecological future for our planet. FROM THE ARTBOOK BLOG CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 12/8/2022 Magical 'The Tarot of Leonora Carrington' is NEW from RM Featured spreads (picturing The Hanged Man, The Lovers and The Sun) are from RM's highly-anticipated, expanded edition of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, featuring new archival materials and research by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq, alongside an essay by Carrington's son Gabriel Weisz Carrington. "Leonora's tarot is endowed with a subliminal iconography, a window opening to a performance of the marvelous," Weisz Carrington writes. "What retains such a seductive allure is that whenever we get the opportunity to play with these cards, each one of us is invited to day dream; the cards also guiding players and observers through an adventure into an unknown domain of feeling and subliminal transformation." continue to blogThis initially explores her work and the influences from the occult learnings of various groups in the 19th and 20th century, including The Golden Dawn, mesoamerican myths and culture, Celtic gods and goddesses, feminism, Jungian theory, and explored this amalgam through examples of Leonora’s works. Although she grew up in a traditional Catholic household in the north of England, it was the examination of other spiritual traditions including magic and later Buddhism which most informed her art. She spent the first part of her childhood in a gloomy gothic pile in Lancashire riding (and to her later regret, foxhunting). She was passionately attached to animals, a love that persisted and is evident in the magical bestiary of her art, her paintings a menagerie of cats and dogs and birds but also griffins and salamanders and many nameless creatures that hover between human and animal. She was expelled serially from Catholic boarding schools; she seemed to have an inbuilt loathing of institutions and authority of all kinds. Her short story, The Debutante – in which the young narrator of the story, about to have a ball held for her, swaps places with a hyena, with gruesome consequences – gives a sense of her absolute hatred of the tropes of upper-class life (and also, perhaps, of the nastiness and even violence veiled beneath manners and polite rituals). Nonetheless, her writing does have a kind of crystalline detachment and light irony that connects her to her class and to a literary tradition that includes Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear. The images, both extraordinary and vivid, are part of a set of tarot cards, painted by the British-born Mexican surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. From the cover to the end this book is so opulent, glistening in gold, shining in silver, and all on excellent quality paper making it an object of desire within itself.

Her account of her escape from this situation is also remarkable. Her parents planned to send her to another institution, this time in South Africa, and she was accompanied to Lisbon so that she might take a ship. She told her chaperone she needed to go to the lavatory, nipped into a cafe, ran out of the other exit and into a cab which she had take her to the Mexican embassy, where she knew a diplomat, Renato Leduc. He did indeed come to her aid – by marrying her and taking her with him to Mexico (via New York, where she once served André Breton a meal of hare stuffed with oysters). She never saw her father again. No wonder, perhaps, that after this life of reversals, flights, expulsions and exiles, she craved routine in Mexico City. Aridjis remembers someone “sane and stable but giving the impression that she lived in a permanent state of anxiety – had no inner peace”. One day, the neighbours sent in workmen to prune the overhanging branches of the tree she had planted in her front yard decades before. She passionately, angrily, pleaded with them to let its wide-spreading boughs alone. When you’re ready, walk over to the last figure at the table. The most central one in the pink flowing gown. Who is this magical creature? . . . Examine the thin, almost translucent hand extending out from the sleeve. As the figure reaches out their hand to you, picture yourself placing your hand in theirs. How does this feel? How do you communicate with this being, and what would you like to ask? For the former, she took inspiration from Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, the poet’s 1948 study of poetic myth-making and divinity, a subject to which she was drawn throughout her adult life. This week, a widely expanded edition of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington will be published that will place her tarot in the context of her wider career.After all that digging around I just had to get the book as soon as it came out and brilliantly enough the release coincided closely enough with Christmas for it to be one of my presents! Another missed opportunity and one that might have a more direct bearing on Carrington is scarcely any discussion of the theories of Gurdjieff and, especially Ouspensky in relation to her tarot. For example, the authors reference her famous 1939 ‘Portrait of Max Ernst’ who is shown carrying a lamp which the authors assert represents Carrington as his ‘guiding light’. In a later self-portrait, she also carries a lamp representing Ouspensky, but this ’guiding light’ not explored at all despite it being known that Carrington (and Varo) were involved with Ouspensky’s post-Gurdjieffian’ Fourth Way’ in Mexico City, although, to be fair, Carrington appeared to wary of most organised groups of occultists. Born in Lancashire in 1917 into a family of wealthy mill owners, Carrington rebelled at school, later attending art school. Meeting Ernst in the late 1930s, who left his wife for Carrington, the couple moved to France where Carrington became part of the surrealist circle around Breton. Ernst, a German citizen, was interned twice after the outbreak of the second world war, prompting Carrington to suffer a breakdown in Spain – where she had fled – and she was admitted to hospital. A key figure in the surrealist movement, and a noted writer as well as a painter, Carrington was highly regarded by peers such as André Breton, although long overlooked by the art establishment. Once you start reading and finding all about the occult life of Leonora Carrington though you are transported to another time, a brilliant introduction, touching opening essay from her son, then onto the meat of the book, her work.

Moorhead is a relative of the artist who became close to her at the end of her life. “She was a very spiritual person. We’d both been raised in the Catholic tradition but she became very critical of it and she had broken away from formal Catholicism although it still imbued her thinking,” she says. Aberth believes the opportunity to study Carrington’s tarot finally has made sense of elements in her wider art that have long perplexed those who have tended to place her fantastic figures in the context of surrealism alone. Fulgur has a reputation for producing nice books and this is certainly the case here. Large format, finely printed, full size, full-colour reproductions of Carrington’s Tarot cards alongside two essays on the artist, each of these accompanied by other Carrington and related images such as images by Remedios Varo. I have a liking for Carrington’s work (one of the few British surrealists I do like) so in this respect I am a happy man.

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A far more exhaustive joint essay follows by Susan Arbeth and Tere Arcq. Both are art historians with a lot of previous with regard to female surrealists (especially Carrington) and their/her relationship with Mexico and Latin America. Although I suspect that neither are occultists per se, I cannot imagine there will many better placed to give insight into some of the symbolism found within her Tarot and their comments and observations are hugely interesting, especially to those Europeans (like me) largely unfamiliar with Mexican mythology and iconography. As any occultist knows, it is important to create your own magical tools, and the essay gives us some sense of Carrington's possible processes that led to the symbolic content of the cards. However whilst much of the essay is masterful there were some elements within it that grated on me, pitfalls(?) that might have been avoided given more rigorous editing. For Carrington, tarot symbolism was “deep and interchangeable,” Aberth and Arcq write. It “permeated most of her work and just kept recombining in new ways to suit her esoteric thinking and development.” A significantly expanded edition of Carrington’s acclaimed Tarot series, featuring new archival images and research The British-born Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) spent a lifetime exploring the esoteric traditions of diverse cultures, and incorporated their ideas and symbols into her artistic and literary oeuvre. Tibetan Buddhism, the Kabbalah, ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian magic, Celtic mythology, witchcraft, astrology and the Tarot were filtered through her feminist lens to create a visionary, woman-centered worldview. Another book by Carrington’s biographer, Joanna Moorhead, examining the places Carrington was most strongly associated with, is due out next spring, amid growing interest in the artist’s work and her ideas as a pioneering feminist figure with an interest in ecology.

We then move on to the cards of the Major Arcana themselves and look at each one in turn. Each cards symbolism is explored in relation to traditional forms and how this was adapted to be significant to Leonora’s idea of divination from the card. This second, considerably expanded edition—encouraged by the overwhelmingly positive reception of Fulgur’s publication in 2020—explores further the central position that the Tarot held in Carrington’s work. The volume includes an introductory text by her son Gabriel Weisz Carrington, who recalls his mother’s long involvement with the Tarot, followed by a revised and more extensive essay by scholar Susan Aberth and curator Tere Arcq, including detailed analysis of each card: their color symbolism, their relationship to other works and their iconographic origins in ancient esoteric beliefs, including the Mesoamerican influences of her adopted country. Now, another stunning -- and hitherto secret -- surprise from this terrific artist reaches the full light day, thanks to Susan Arberth and Tere Arcq : The Major Arcana of the Tarot that Carrington painted in the 1950's. The Tarot of Leonora Carringtonis the first book dedicated to this important aspect of the artist’s work. It includes a full-size facsimile of her newly discovered Major Arcana; an introduction from her son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington; and a richly illustrated essay from Tere Arcq and Susan Aberth that offers new insights ­—­­­ exploring the significance of tarot imagery within Carrington’s wider work, her many inspirations and mysterious occult sources.

Some diverged greatly, with different colours and icons used whilst others stayed mainly the same though with important changes to fit into the mythology of the cards that were being developed.

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