LEONORA CARRINGTON (1917-2011)
LEONORA CARRINGTON (1917-2011)
LEONORA CARRINGTON (1917-2011)
2 More
LEONORA CARRINGTON (1917-2011)
5 More
LEONORA CARRINGTON (1917-2011)

She Walks

Details
LEONORA CARRINGTON (1917-2011)
She Walks
signed and dated 'Leonora Carrington 1975' (lower right)
oil on canvas
28 1⁄8 x 36 in. (71.6 x 91.4 cm.)
Painted in 1975
Provenance
Jackson-Iolas Gallery, New York (1975).
Arthur M. Young, Pennsylvania (acquired from the above).
Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (gift from the above); sale, Sotheby's, New York, 20 May 1987, lot 154.
Private collection, New York (acquired at the above sale).
By descent from the above to the present owner.
Exhibited
New York, Jackson-Iolas Gallery, Leonora Carrington, December 1975.
Further Details
We are grateful to Dr. Salomon Grimberg for his assistance cataloguing this work.

Brought to you by

Margaux Morel
Margaux Morel Associate Vice President, Specialist and Head of the Day and Works on Paper sales

Lot Essay

“Leonora has crossed more frontiers and passed over more mountain ranges than any other, and sailed across more deeps,” wrote her friend and noted Surrealist patron Edward James. “The paintings of Leonora Carrington are not merely painted, they are brewed. They sometimes seem to have materialized in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight, yet for all this they are no mere illustrations of fairy tales” (Leonora Carrington: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., Center for Inter-American Relations, New York, 1976, pp. 11 and 14). Carrington explored themes of magic and transformation across eight decades of painting, describing a reality at once animist and miraculous. She embraced the myriad wonders of Mexico—styled the “Surrealist place, par excellence” by André Breton—upon her arrival in 1942, at the age of twenty-five, in the wake of a harrowing escape from war-torn France. Associated with the Surrealists since 1938, she found emotional asylum in Mexico City as she recovered from the wartime internment of her lover Max Ernst, their separation, her subsequent flight to Spain, and the nervous breakdown that followed. A syncretic energy permeates Carrington’s work in Mexico, and the enchanted beings conjured in She Walks embody the fabulism and strange felicities of her pictorial imagination.
“Leonora Carrington is one of the vintage grandes dames of Surrealism,” wrote critic Suzi Gablik in her review of Carrington’s solo exhibition at Iolas Gallery, New York in December 1975, at which the present work was displayed. “Then, as now, she transports us to a self-invented universe of demonized creations,” Gablik continued. “It is a mythical cosmogony which harks back to the origins of the universe,” teeming with “Cabalistic, Tantric and alchemical symbols, [with] Jungian archetypes, whirling dervishes and the mysteries of the Tarot. We are surrounded everywhere by magic animals”. (“Leonora Carrington at Iolas and the Center for Inter-American Relations” in Art in America 64, no. 2, March-April 1976, p. 111). A menagerie of esoteric and hybrid beasts verily inhabits She Walks, their movements highlighted against a blood-red ground (alternatively, in grisaille) and their anthropomorphism at once seductive and predacious. “Saturated with a certain menace, these scenes may well oppress and trouble the spectator’s soul,” Gablik acknowledged, describing at length the uncanny iconography of She Walks: “A lady’s black fur coat opens to reveal a mournful landscape where an old man fishes on a lake bordered by a canopy of swans. The lady has a few pterodactyls lurking in her hair, and a celestial stag leaps past a mound of trees just at the crown of her head” (op. cit., 1976, p. 111). The idea to embed a fishing scene within the woman’s body came to her, she noted, “after seeing a woman strolling through Gramercy Park” (in J. Perlez, “Surrealism Lives,” New York Post, 6 December 1975). Carrington stayed at the fashionable Gramercy Park Hotel when she came to New York, and the hotel would have provided her with coveted access to the private park.
A latent feminist impulse filters through She Walks, propelled by the pointy, patterned boots that support the elegant protagonist as she strides ahead, her presence matronly and commanding. “Most of us, I hope, are now aware that a woman should not have to demand Rights,” Carrington wrote in September 1975. “The Rights were there from the beginning; they must be Taken Back Again, including the Mysteries which were ours and which were violated, stolen or destroyed, leaving us with the thankless hope of pleasing a male animal, probably of one’s own species” (“Commentary” in exh. cat., op. cit., 1976, p. 23). It is tempting to see in the two diminutive and contained “male animals” that appear in She Walks—one of them in a bowler hat that instantly recalls René Magritte, a protégé of Alexandre Iolas—an assertion of her independence from the old Surrealist circle. One hundred years after Breton published his Manifesto of Surrealism (1924), Carrington has long since entered the Surrealist pantheon, no longer its femme-enfant but a woman in full control of her powers.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park

More from Impressionist and Modern Art Day Sale

View All
View All