Tarot of Leonora Carrington

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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 blog When you see the cards, you realise they were central to her entire production, including the question of what is the nature of the esoteric. What makes the cards so unique is that they were her own tools for exploring her own personal consciousness.”

A significantly expanded edition of Carrington’s acclaimed Tarot series, featuring new archival images and research 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. 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. Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was born in Lancashire, England. In 1936, she saw Max Ernst’s work at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, and met the artist the following year. They became a couple almost immediately. When the outbreak of World War II separated them, Carrington fled to Spain, then Lisbon, where she married Renato Leduc, a Mexican diplomat, and escaped to Mexico, where she became close with Remedios Varo and other expat Surrealists. 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.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. 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. An elite cadre of committed scholars and researchers, including surviving family members, has made sure that a number of excellent studies of her life and work have already been published -- and have identified her also as a significant proto- environmentalist, feminist, and animal rights activist. 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. 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.

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.It is she, Carrington, who -- in spite of her reclusive life -- has, almost single-handedly, guaranteed that the supreme style of Western Art -- Surrealism -- will never die. 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. Spirituality was very fundamental to her. She was a seeker all her life and Leonora was always searching, always going out of her comfort zone, looking for where mystery of life might be revealed. She went through periods of intense interest in Buddhism, the Kabbalah, tarot. All these worlds around that felt closer when she took you with her, including the worlds of plants and insects. It also talks about her relationship with other artists who used the subconscious and the occult as part of their practice and shows her influence on them, placing her firmly within the canon of surrealism and at the same time making you wonder how she was so firmly hidden for so long. Hers was, as her son Gabriel Weisz Carrington puts it, “a permanent inquiring mind” shaped by a range of influences including Golden Dawn literature, Egyptian mythology, Surrealist rejection of logic, and indigenous witchcraft in Mexico, where she lived for most of her life. And, of course, she was a devout student of tarot. She not only read spreads but also incorporated icons such as The Magician, The Hanged Man, and The Chariot into her paradoxical visuals that refused intellectualization.