On The Tarot of Leonara Carrington

THE TAROT OF LEONARA CARRINGTONEdited by Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq, introduced by Gabriel Weisz Carrington. London, UK: Fulgur Press, 2022. Pp. 118, deck of 22 cards. Hardcover, $160. In 2018, at Mexico City's Museo de Arte Moderno retrospective “Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales,” twenty-two small (16 × 14 cm) luminous canvases depicting the Major Arcana of the tarot were displayed publicly for the first time. Fulgur Press has issued a gorgeous book reproducing these twenty-two pictures along with a deck of tarot cards. Editors Aberth and Arcq describe how the tarot haunted the young Carrington's intellectual milieu. In her native Ireland, the Golden Dawn brought out the Rider-Waite tarot deck. T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats made poetic allusions to tarot images. Meanwhile, the surrealists in Paris, whom a young Carrington would join, took inspiration from the traditional Tarot de Marseilles. A key to Carrington's devotion to the tarot is revealed by her son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington, who writes of how his mother most favored “the tarot and all the exotic legends surrounding the Bohemians or gypsies [who during WWII] intervened to help her flee from her captors.” Carrington's harrowing captivity in a mental hospital after being raped by Spanish soldiers while fleeing the Nazis is recounted in her classic memoir Down Below (recently reissued by the New York Review of Books in a new introduction by Marina Warner). Like the myth propounded by German artist Joseph Beuys, who claimed to have been saved by shamans after crashing his plane in the Russian snowy steppe, thereafter making the felt and animal fat with which he was tended part of his creative practice, Carrington may have imaginatively identified with and found inspiration in the tarot-reading of the gypsies who helped her. Carrington's life offers a case study in the ways an individual can be pigeonholed and punished by patriarchal society: first, as a debutant to be married off, then as an artist's model or muse—not fully accepted as an artist herself—then as an objectified body to be sexually assaulted and as a vulnerable mind to be cruelly experimented upon, or even as a madwoman whom the surrealists took for inspiration for their program of transcending rationality. Yet, in her prolific writing and art, Carrington does not dwell upon herself as a victim. While celebrating her femininity and vocally feminist in her sensibility, she consistently reclaims her individual agency as an artist and as a practitioner of magic. Carrington's devotion to the tarot may have helped her cultivate self-reliance. As shown in this beautiful book, Carrington created a suite of paintings, simple washes of color mixed with silver and gold from which emerge distillations, line drawings of the archetypal tarot characters—from the fool and the magician to the divine nude female figure who embodies the world. Aberth and Arco note that Carrington was careful never to explain any of her pictures, which were often filled with wonderfully weird images that might be from her dreams or might be from world mythology. Instead, she insisted that individual viewers should discover meaning as they looked for themselves. In The Way of the Tarot, Alejandro Jodorowsky recalls Carrington in Mexico, challenging him to look at the twenty-two Major Arcana and tell the meaning of what he sees. “With a mysterious smile on her lips the painter whispered to me, ‘What you just dictated to me is the secret. As each Arcana is a mirror and not a truth in itself, become what you see in it.’” In The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, the artist's simple tarot pictures, contextualized with her more elaborate fantastical paintings, offer the individual reader the opportunity for self-initiation into the artistic and spiritual traditions of the world, particularly the tarot—an invitation to look for oneself. Fulgur also sells a deck of cards to accompany the book, but these are flawed. Too large and square to fit the hand, the backs are a dull, unornamented pewter hue that, when shuffled, do not offer the kaleidoscopic undulations of pattern one expects before reaching for a card that might inform one's fate. Finally, turning over any card, one notices a distracting copyright sign. This deck is thus not ideal for divination. Better to ponder Carrington's images as beautifully reproduced in life-size in the book. In fact, Carrington did not intend her paintings to be a deck of cards. She respected and used the popular decks already in circulation, the humble fortune-telling cards of the gypsies

Citation · Full color · Library science · Physics · Social science · Sociology · Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · Middle East Politics and Society · Public Spaces through Art