Leonora Carrington's Tarot
Witchy, weird, wonderful
Many art lovers have found their occultist souls awakened when gazing upon the surrealist paintings of Leonora Carrington. More figurative than Hilma af Klint, slightly less surreal than Remedios Varo, Carrington is one of the dark ladies of the visual arts whose work has been hailed as revolutionary and deeply original, as well as unapologetically feminist. Born in Great Britain, she spent some time among the art community in New York in the early 1940s, but Carrington lived and worked mainly in Mexico and became a staunch advocate for women’s rights there in the 1970s.
Yesterday The Guardian featured a small selection of her tarot paintings, seen in an exhibition in Mexico City in 2018, and now available in a book from Fulgur Books. The images are startling, beautiful, and sometimes a bit disturbing. The Star, for example, has a pale brown background, like aged gesso, and a sky full of large blue pentagrams, with a nude white female figure pouring water from two jugs, her blue hair spiky, her eyes wide yet serene, attended by a white ibis with a blackhead. The Tower features two chalky white figures fallen from a burning red stone tower against a black sky; the sun and stars are also red. But wait; is that figure falling, or is she sliding down the outer wall of the tower gracefully, sensually?
There is also a partial tarot deck of Carrington’s images available from this publisher, with 22 Major Arcana cards and an accompanying booklet written by tarot scholar Rachel Pollack.
Interest in Carrington is growing, perhaps due in part to the groundswell of enthusiasm for Hilma af Klint’s abstract art after an acclaimed exhibit of her large paintings at the Guggenheim museum in New York. A fascinating documentary film about her life and art, Beyond the Visible, was released last year; in it, art historians advance the argument that Hilma af Klint was, in fact, the first Abstract painter.
Once thought the purview of male artists, it’s become clear that many women painters were invested in and engaged with Surrealism, and their work is being newly discovered in recent years. Another British surrealist painter and author whose work also embodies occult themes, and who has been recently rediscovered, is Ithell Colquhoun, the subject of a new biography by occult scholar Amy Hale.
But more to the point, these artists are clearly deeply engaged with occult symbolism and magical imagery. It strikes me that the explosion of interest in them these days is evidence of our cultural hunger for art by woman that expresses the numinous, the mysterious, the magical and the depths of human experience, knowledge and seeking.