Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg

Gallery Wendi Norris - Offsite Exhibition New York City, May 23rd, 2019 to June 2019

Margaret Carson

Margaret Carson’s translations include Remedios Varo’s Letters, Dreams & Other Writings (2018) and Sergio Chejfec’s Baroni, A Journey (2017, reviewed in Review 99) and My Two Worlds (2011). A former co-chair of the PEN Translation Committee, she teaches in the Modern Languages Department at Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY

After an absence of more than twenty years, Leonora Carrington returned to New York in the not-to-be-missed gallery show “Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg,” a small but impressive grouping of seventeen paintings and six masks dating from the 1940s to the mid-1970s, some on public view for the first time. Organized by the San Francisco-based Gallery Wendi Norris and installed on Madison Avenue in a vacant storefront that had once been a pharmacy—an appropriate setting, given Carrington’s fascination with alchemy, not to mention her drug-infused tale from the 1960s, “How to Start a Pharmaceuticals Business”—the exhibition took as its central theme her devotion to the egg, the traditional symbol of fertility and renewal that the artist long exalted as a custodian of life in times of crisis. Though Carrington is probably best known for her years as a young artist when she escaped a stifling English upper-class milieu by running off with Max Ernst and becoming part of André Breton’s circle in Paris, the exhibit steered clear of the Surrealist banner and instead engaged with her art on its own terms. The title—a nod to her 1969 play “Opus Siniestrus: The Story of the Last Egg” [see excerpt following this review], which tells of a failed effort, post-apocalypse, torecreate life from a single ostrich egg in a world without women—was also an invitation for viewers to look for correspondences between Carrington’s artworks and her equally luminous writings.

Indeed, for a new generation of admirers who became acquainted with Carrington through her wild and wonderful books—her memoir Down Below and The Complete Stories were both recently republished, and The Hearing Trumpet has long been a cult classic—there were plenty of connections to be made. Readers of Down Below, the artist’s harrowing account of her stay at a mental hospital in Santander, Spain, would surely have been riveted by the show’s first work, her extraordinary 1940 painting, also named Down Below (see fig. 1), done during her internment. Against a murky green landscape with an Italianate castle in the distance, we see a colorful quartet resting on the lawn, perhaps circus performers who have just come out of the blue tent behind them. A bird-headed woman, naked and covered in soft white feathers, stretches out, odalisque-like. Beside her is a green-skinned woman with long black hair, also naked, who looks out impassively, as if catatonic, while a colorfully attired male acrobat with a heart-shaped face reclines in front of them. At the painting’s center and dominating the group is a masked woman wearing a black corset and thigh-high bright red stockings that stand out against her alabaster skin. Behind the eye openings of her face mask, however, we see only the green of the landscape. Where are her eyes? we wonder. We might think this sensual beauty represents Carrington herself, with the empty space an especially apt comment on her mental state (as her memoir describes, for her treatment she was injected with a drug that induced convulsions). In fact, each of the figures might be a self-representation, including the high-stepping horse (her celebrated alter-ego) as well as the woman with verdant wings who is standing at the far right, looking dully into space. “The garden was very green despite the tufts of bluish vapour of the tall eucalyptus trees,” she writes in Down Below. 1 The painting can perhaps be considered an early draft of the memoir, first published in VVV magazine in 1944.

The horse, the hybrid creature, the mask, the bright reds, yellows, and blues, and the theatrical tableau of that painting are elements the artist used to great effect throughout her long career, as seen in several other works in the exhibit. In Green Tea (1942) (see fig. 2), painted in New York before Carrington left for Mexico, a minutely detailed topiary garden is the backdrop for a strange grouping: to the left, a tall, masked figure swaddled in a piebald cloth—a sort of sentinel or caryatid—stands barefoot within a circle traced on the ground, while behind it the heads of four antlered creatures emerge from an egg-shaped purple cauldron. To the right is a reddish hyena, eyes wide open and teeth bared, tied by the collar to a sapling that doubles as the tail of a white horse. The horse, in turn, is tied to the hyena’s tail, also a sapling; you can easily imagine this pair of tethered animals circling each other endlessly in a kind of perpetual merry-go-round. If this scene weren’t baffling enough, a narrow strip at the bottom of the canvas depicts a spooky underground, where bats, nesting vultures, and cocooned zombies dwell, a netherworld in dingy browns just beneath the garden’s finely manicured lawn. Having been “down below” and back, who better than Carrington to show us what is found there? The painting, at once soothing in its polished perfection and disturbing in its dark enigmas, was a standout in the show.

The curiously named Ulu’s Pants (1952) (see fig. 3) presents a similar kind of tableau, although here the lush garden of Green Tea is replaced by an ethereal blue labyrinth with oddly-shaped compartments. Tiny figures in a slightly lighter blue are depicted within these spaces: a longhaired woman in flight, a shepherd tending animals at pasture, a Minoan bull on the alert. In the foreground we see an entourage of motley creatures, a white horse and a moth-headed bird among them. They march toward a small edifice guarded by a lime-green sphinx and a figure in a white robe whose butterfly head is painted in brilliant red with two white dots for eyes. In the edifice’s interior is the transcendent egg—ostrich-sized—that we imagine must be the treasure they have come to behold. (It’s no surprise that Carrington’s fondness for eggs also extended to her frequent use of egg tempera, as in this canvas.) The pageantry is caught just moments before the actual encounter; whether the sphinx or the white-robed guardian will allow these creatures to approach the egg remains unknown. Drawing on the fairy tales and fables she was immersed in as a child, the artist has given a female-centered, ceremonial spin to the mythic search for the Holy Grail.

Years later, Carrington would re-enact the encounter, this time as a farce, in her play “Opus Siniestrus: The Story of the Last Egg.” Two works included in the exhibit, Untitled (Preliminary sketch for the play “Opus Siniestrus”) (1965) (see fig. 4) and Sinister Work (1973), are the artist’s visualizations of the play (it was never actually produced, and the script, written in English, has not yet been published). In the first preparatory sketch a typical Carrington bestiary—hybrid creatures, a birdman, swine, standing cobras—appears in a flat, perspectiveless space. At the center is a boiling cauldron with two ghostly figures inside it—perhaps they had been in pursuit of that last egg?—with a trio of cartoonish cannibals circling the pot. The second painting, a watercolor, was done when a staged production seemed on the horizon. There are new elements here, such as an enormous green ostrich and a porcelain-blue egg, along with dancing, music-making cannibals, each wearing a unique mask. Several such masks seemed to have stepped out of the painting to materalize in the gallery space, as metal and mesh assemblages suspended from the ceiling (see fig. 6). Designed by Carrington and crafted in 1976 by artists Jane Stein and Vita Giorgi for the never-realized play, these oversized masks, two to three feet high, were an imposing reminder of Carrington’s engagement with masks throughout her career.

There were a few unexpected associations. The enormous light-bulb-like head occupying most of the canvas in Canultrafax (1969)—a hybrid name combining canul (Mayan for “protector”) with Ultrafax, a military telecommunications system developed in the 1940s—was disconcerting in its surveillance-age aura. The lines passing through Canultrafax’s skull were like waves of electromagnetic radiation, and the black fraying wires emerging from its elongated face seemed like electrical probes. An anticipation of data harvesting, at its dystopian worst?

The last work in the exhibit, A Map of the Human Animal (1962) (see fig. 5), seemed like a page from an illuminated manuscript of a little-known hermetic tradition. It shows an assortment of delicately drawn creatures —a black swan, a cobra, a blind leopard carrying a many-headed monster, among others—positioned around a central mandala ringed by three ouroboros. Carrington’s written observations are scattered across the page: “This dance is to be conceived in spiral motion in 8 directions.” “Fire burns under water.” And: “P.S. Please note before jumping to conclusions that the word ‘Psychosis’ was invented as an Ego Saver for the puzzled Psychiatrist,” a caustic rejoinder years later to the circumstances memorialized in the exhibit’s first painting. In its handful of exceptional paintings and masks, the show offered a fresh take on Leonora Carrington for a new audience, leaving it eager to discover more of this remarkable artist’s work.

Leonora CarringtonGallery Wendi NorrisJune 17, 2020