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Lot Essay
“Here lives the Sphinx! That is what Edward James wrote some years ago over the entrance to Leonora Carrington’s house,” recalled the gallerist Inés Amor (1912-80). “As if it were necessary to further link this mysterious artist to the world of myth!” The legendary director of the Galería de Arte Mexicano, established in 1935, Amor promoted generations of the Mexican avant-garde from Frida Kahlo and María Izquierdo to Remedios Varo, Gunther Gerzso, and Alfredo Castañeda. She became Carrington’s primary dealer around 1956, the year of her first solo show at the Galería, and nurtured her talent over the next two decades. “All curious people who are fascinated by Leonora’s work ask, ‘What is she like?’ One can answer them with three words: beautiful, intelligent, and free,” Amor declared in 1975, describing “the image of Leonora” as “always different and always the same, enthroned by enchantment in the Hall of Mirrors. By this I mean to say that the same amazing and disquieting element of surprise in the oldest of her works, reappears, transformed, one and one hundred times in each picture of thirty some years—including the one she signed just yesterday” (“A Tribute to Leonora Carrington,” Leonora Carrington: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., Center for Inter-American Relations, New York, 1976, p. 25). Un petit déjeuner, one of the few portraits that Carrington made, pays homage to their longstanding relationship and fittingly honors the doyenne of modern Mexican art.
“The Galería was managed as a family, with Amor as the matriarch,” explains the writer Salomon Grimberg. “And like the good mother, she kept her children’s external life organized and focused so they could paint without any worries. She was unconditionally available, but should her limits be tested, she could be merciless.” Un petit déjeuner reveals “the complexity of her character,” Grimberg allows, describing the portrait as “a disturbing image of Amor sitting at the breakfast table, studying the heart she is about to eat.” Amor may have dined on the (metaphorical) hearts of her kin, but only in the name of their art and creative process. “‘Art is my quinta essentia,’ she remarked, using the medieval term that describes the substance that permeates all nature, including celestial bodies,” Grimberg recounts. “Her fascination with paintings was deciphering the process involved in making them” (“Inés Amor and the Galería de Arte Mexicano,” Woman’s Art Journal 32, no. 2, Fall/Winter 2011, p. 4, 10).
That alchemy of painting—no less, the mysterious metabolism of the art market—is rendered with wry humor and affection in Un petit déjeuner. The strangest of breakfast accoutrements greets Amor on the dining table. The splendidly hirsute head of a gorilla, its black-and-silver features strangely animate, is framed by a bright harvest wreath, its bounty a connection to the kitchen, for Carrington (often with Varo) a site of creation, experimentation, and metamorphosis. Ghastly pale and ensconced in a gossamer gown, Amor gazes intently at the spread before her as she delicately probes the gleaming heart with fork and knife. A magical menagerie bears witness to her repast: a trio of cats surrounds the table, their long tails curving in expressive judgment, and an assortment of wilder beasts emerges in the red-mahogany shadows above, their presence subtly threatening and surreal. “They are creatures that surface from that so called space-mind, in an atmosphere that belongs to them,” Carrington once reflected of the myriad animals that inhabit her work. “I don’t know really where they live or where they come from.” Fanciful (and not uncritical) dining companions, their presence here underscores the animism alive in Carrington’s world. “We have a human soul, but also that of an animal,” she considered. “Everything is cosmic. I don’t know why people think that earth is not a celestial world. You are cosmic, this table, my hand, the door, and if we see painting from a subatomic point of view, it is also a cosmos” (in M.-P. Colle, “Leonora Carrington,” Latin American Artists in their Studios, New York, 1994, p. 87, 89).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“The Galería was managed as a family, with Amor as the matriarch,” explains the writer Salomon Grimberg. “And like the good mother, she kept her children’s external life organized and focused so they could paint without any worries. She was unconditionally available, but should her limits be tested, she could be merciless.” Un petit déjeuner reveals “the complexity of her character,” Grimberg allows, describing the portrait as “a disturbing image of Amor sitting at the breakfast table, studying the heart she is about to eat.” Amor may have dined on the (metaphorical) hearts of her kin, but only in the name of their art and creative process. “‘Art is my quinta essentia,’ she remarked, using the medieval term that describes the substance that permeates all nature, including celestial bodies,” Grimberg recounts. “Her fascination with paintings was deciphering the process involved in making them” (“Inés Amor and the Galería de Arte Mexicano,” Woman’s Art Journal 32, no. 2, Fall/Winter 2011, p. 4, 10).
That alchemy of painting—no less, the mysterious metabolism of the art market—is rendered with wry humor and affection in Un petit déjeuner. The strangest of breakfast accoutrements greets Amor on the dining table. The splendidly hirsute head of a gorilla, its black-and-silver features strangely animate, is framed by a bright harvest wreath, its bounty a connection to the kitchen, for Carrington (often with Varo) a site of creation, experimentation, and metamorphosis. Ghastly pale and ensconced in a gossamer gown, Amor gazes intently at the spread before her as she delicately probes the gleaming heart with fork and knife. A magical menagerie bears witness to her repast: a trio of cats surrounds the table, their long tails curving in expressive judgment, and an assortment of wilder beasts emerges in the red-mahogany shadows above, their presence subtly threatening and surreal. “They are creatures that surface from that so called space-mind, in an atmosphere that belongs to them,” Carrington once reflected of the myriad animals that inhabit her work. “I don’t know really where they live or where they come from.” Fanciful (and not uncritical) dining companions, their presence here underscores the animism alive in Carrington’s world. “We have a human soul, but also that of an animal,” she considered. “Everything is cosmic. I don’t know why people think that earth is not a celestial world. You are cosmic, this table, my hand, the door, and if we see painting from a subatomic point of view, it is also a cosmos” (in M.-P. Colle, “Leonora Carrington,” Latin American Artists in their Studios, New York, 1994, p. 87, 89).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park