Tarot of Leonora Carrington

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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. 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. 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. 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.”

The images, both extraordinary and vivid, are part of a set of tarot cards, painted by the British-born Mexican surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. 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.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. 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! 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. 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. 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? 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. 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.I was forwarded the Guardian article about this by a friend and immediately went down a rabbit hole, trying to find out everything I could about Leonora Carrington who I had never heard of previously. 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. 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.

Criticisms of minor shortcomings of the publication are utterly pointless. The illustrations are excellent, the accompanying text is highly relevant, and those are the things that matter now. 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.

Customer reviews

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. 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. 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.