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Lot Essay
Carrington once described herself as “born loving [animals],” and after establishing herself in Mexico in 1942 she naturally embraced “the Indian belief that each one of us possesses an animal—nahual—soul as well as a human one” (M. Warner, intro. to The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below, New York, 1988, p. 1). Animals long inhabited her paintings, from early sketchbooks (e.g., Animals of a Different Planit [sic], circa 1927) to her mural for Mexico City’s Museo Nacional de Antropología, El mundo mágico de los mayas (1964), which features myriad native species from jaguars and turtles to armadillos, monkeys, quetzals, and deer. Carrington embraced the many wonders of Mexico—styled the “Surrealist place, par excellence” by André Breton—upon her arrival, 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’s close-knit émigré community as she explored subjects encompassing nature, mythology, feminism, and world religion. A syncretic energy suffused Carrington’s mature paintings, and the enchanted beings that progress through The Journey of Ay Ching Gão manifest the animism and alchemy that permeated her practice.
The animist dimensions of Carrington’s work have sources in art-historical tradition, from the phantasmagorical bestiaries of the northern Renaissance to the trecento and quattrocento cassoni paintings and predella panels that she knew years earlier as a boarding-school student in Florence. “Carrington was influenced by the Renaissance ideal of ut pictura poesis, or story-telling in pictures,” Marina Warner has remarked, and she found a natural affinity with the artists of the early Renaissance, who were likewise “dealing in miracles and transformations.” Her teeming menagerie and hybrid bodies carry on the cosmic tradition of Bosch and Bruegel, imparting glimpses of “the unseen, magico-mystical universe” beyond the observed world through “paranormal incident and anthropomorphic animals.” Yet Carrington upset the “usual hierarchy of beings” in paintings like The Journey of Ay Ching Gão, Warner explains. “The human emerges as only one, lesser aspect of a polymorphously organic universe, and people in Carrington’s paintings gain in stature and, by implication, in wisdom, the closer they come to the creaturely” (“Leonora Carrington’s Spirit Bestiary; or the Art of Playing Make-Belief,” Leonora Carrington: Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures, 1940-1990, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London, 1991, pp. 13, 16-17).
Carrington deftly inverts the natural order in The Journey of Ay Ching Gão: the parade of animals follows the shape of the canvas, ultimately arriving at an upside-down landscape whose panoramic, snowcapped peaks evoke the Valley of Mexico. The mustachioed, pipe-smoking protagonist faces the viewer with an expression of shocked disbelief—“¡ay, chingao!”—as a sleek black horse strides forward into a steep ascent, driven and beckoned by strange, simian figures. The Journey of Ay Ching Gão numbers among the large, “cosmological” canvases that Carrington made beginning in the mid-1960s and that probe universal mythologies, among them Adieu mon général (1969)—a nod to Charles De Gaulle’s resignation of the French presidency—and Le Retour de la Grande Ourse (1966). The scholar Jacqueline Chénieux considers Adieu mon général a “humorous double” of the present work, and the paintings are indeed alike in their composition (requiring the canvas to be rotated) and in their wry humor (“Leonora Carrington: Le jeu du monde,” Pleine marge 48, December 2008, p. 28).
In a broader sense, The Journey of Ay Ching Gão reflects upon the nature of transitions between spaces and states of being. “Carrington’s recent paintings depend on a vibrant metalanguage to overcome the limitations of linear space and time and communicate the interdependence of all aspects of the phenomenal world,” notes Whitney Chadwick. “She often refers to these paintings as ‘liminal’” (“Painting on the Threshold,” Leonora Carrington: Recent Works, exh. cat., Brewster Gallery, New York, 1988, p. 2). Animals often preside over these thresholds—notably in Took My Way Down, Like a Messenger, to the Deep (1977); Ikon (1988); and Juan Soriano de Lacandón (1964; Art Institute of Chicago)—and here her fantastical creatures bear witness to a surreal and seemingly irresistible journey.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
The animist dimensions of Carrington’s work have sources in art-historical tradition, from the phantasmagorical bestiaries of the northern Renaissance to the trecento and quattrocento cassoni paintings and predella panels that she knew years earlier as a boarding-school student in Florence. “Carrington was influenced by the Renaissance ideal of ut pictura poesis, or story-telling in pictures,” Marina Warner has remarked, and she found a natural affinity with the artists of the early Renaissance, who were likewise “dealing in miracles and transformations.” Her teeming menagerie and hybrid bodies carry on the cosmic tradition of Bosch and Bruegel, imparting glimpses of “the unseen, magico-mystical universe” beyond the observed world through “paranormal incident and anthropomorphic animals.” Yet Carrington upset the “usual hierarchy of beings” in paintings like The Journey of Ay Ching Gão, Warner explains. “The human emerges as only one, lesser aspect of a polymorphously organic universe, and people in Carrington’s paintings gain in stature and, by implication, in wisdom, the closer they come to the creaturely” (“Leonora Carrington’s Spirit Bestiary; or the Art of Playing Make-Belief,” Leonora Carrington: Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures, 1940-1990, exh. cat., Serpentine Gallery, London, 1991, pp. 13, 16-17).
Carrington deftly inverts the natural order in The Journey of Ay Ching Gão: the parade of animals follows the shape of the canvas, ultimately arriving at an upside-down landscape whose panoramic, snowcapped peaks evoke the Valley of Mexico. The mustachioed, pipe-smoking protagonist faces the viewer with an expression of shocked disbelief—“¡ay, chingao!”—as a sleek black horse strides forward into a steep ascent, driven and beckoned by strange, simian figures. The Journey of Ay Ching Gão numbers among the large, “cosmological” canvases that Carrington made beginning in the mid-1960s and that probe universal mythologies, among them Adieu mon général (1969)—a nod to Charles De Gaulle’s resignation of the French presidency—and Le Retour de la Grande Ourse (1966). The scholar Jacqueline Chénieux considers Adieu mon général a “humorous double” of the present work, and the paintings are indeed alike in their composition (requiring the canvas to be rotated) and in their wry humor (“Leonora Carrington: Le jeu du monde,” Pleine marge 48, December 2008, p. 28).
In a broader sense, The Journey of Ay Ching Gão reflects upon the nature of transitions between spaces and states of being. “Carrington’s recent paintings depend on a vibrant metalanguage to overcome the limitations of linear space and time and communicate the interdependence of all aspects of the phenomenal world,” notes Whitney Chadwick. “She often refers to these paintings as ‘liminal’” (“Painting on the Threshold,” Leonora Carrington: Recent Works, exh. cat., Brewster Gallery, New York, 1988, p. 2). Animals often preside over these thresholds—notably in Took My Way Down, Like a Messenger, to the Deep (1977); Ikon (1988); and Juan Soriano de Lacandón (1964; Art Institute of Chicago)—and here her fantastical creatures bear witness to a surreal and seemingly irresistible journey.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park