.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
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” (intro. to Leonora Carrington: A Retrospective Exhibition, exh. cat., Center for Inter-American Relations, New York, 1976, p. 11, 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 and her subsequent flight to Spain, and the nervous breakdown that followed. A syncretic energy permeates Carrington’s work in Mexico, and the enchanted beings in Bird Seizes Jewel act out a fabulist, universal trope that indulges in escapism and, no less, contemplates the nature of sight and self.
Variations of the “bird seizes jewel” motif have appeared over time and across cultures, notably in the Panchatantra (India), the Arabian Nights (Middle East), the Ingoldsby Legends (England), and in Hebrew lore. “Frequently the theft results in the accusation of some innocent person, who is eventually pardoned when the truth is revealed,” according to the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. “Or the loser of the jewel follows the bird and is led to distant lands, undergoing many adventures before the jewel is at last brought to light and the story to a happy ending” (M. Leach, ed., Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, vol. 1, New York, 1949, p. 143). In Carrington’s interpretation of this tale, the enhaloed thief holds a cerulean-blue orb aloft, the seizure carried out under suggestively divine auspices, illuminated by an arcing, prismatic rainbow. Yet the fate of the purloined jewel and its new, golden-feathered possessor remains untold and perhaps unknowable. “Hers are not literary paintings,” James insisted. “Rather they are pictures distilled in the underground caves of libido, vertiginously sublimated. Above all (or below), they belong to the Universal subconscious” (op. cit., p. 14).
Bird Seizes Jewel reflects on the collective unconscious—its archetypes and folklore—as well as on the vagaries of Carrington’s own vision and experience. “It is significant that Carrington often painted faces with unmatched eyes,” explains art historian Marina Warner, noting the piebald figure in Bird Seizes Jewel as well as the spectral subject of The Ancestor (1968). “‘The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope,’ she declares in Down Below [the memoir of her descent into madness following Ernst’s arrest and her confinement in a sanatorium in 1940]. Her experiences of relations between herself and the world—animals, rocks, other people—share distortions of perspective along these lines, microcosms magnified, details projected into far horizons, occult meanings encrypted in random patterns.” Framing the central transaction is a collection of surreal and anthropomorphic beings: a snake and a donkey take tea, a fish dangling between them; a snail with a human head presides over the scene from above. The gilded protagonist, regal and audacious, may allude to the avian alter ego of Carrington’s erstwhile partner. “Ernst was Loplop, Prince of Birds, the surrealist movement’s ‘Bird Superior,’” Warner notes, “eclipsing all others in fame and prestige with his effortless gaiety and cruelty of invention, his unstinting ability to replenish the store of fantasies and improvise new media, new methods” (intro. to L. Carrington, Down Below, New York, 2017, pp. viii, xxvi-xxviii). In its intermingling of age-old mythmaking and psychic, telescoping vision, Bird Seizes Jewel gestures both to the cosmos and to Carrington’s innermost self (or selves), meditating on narratives of transgression, trauma, and perception.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
Variations of the “bird seizes jewel” motif have appeared over time and across cultures, notably in the Panchatantra (India), the Arabian Nights (Middle East), the Ingoldsby Legends (England), and in Hebrew lore. “Frequently the theft results in the accusation of some innocent person, who is eventually pardoned when the truth is revealed,” according to the Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend. “Or the loser of the jewel follows the bird and is led to distant lands, undergoing many adventures before the jewel is at last brought to light and the story to a happy ending” (M. Leach, ed., Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology, and Legend, vol. 1, New York, 1949, p. 143). In Carrington’s interpretation of this tale, the enhaloed thief holds a cerulean-blue orb aloft, the seizure carried out under suggestively divine auspices, illuminated by an arcing, prismatic rainbow. Yet the fate of the purloined jewel and its new, golden-feathered possessor remains untold and perhaps unknowable. “Hers are not literary paintings,” James insisted. “Rather they are pictures distilled in the underground caves of libido, vertiginously sublimated. Above all (or below), they belong to the Universal subconscious” (op. cit., p. 14).
Bird Seizes Jewel reflects on the collective unconscious—its archetypes and folklore—as well as on the vagaries of Carrington’s own vision and experience. “It is significant that Carrington often painted faces with unmatched eyes,” explains art historian Marina Warner, noting the piebald figure in Bird Seizes Jewel as well as the spectral subject of The Ancestor (1968). “‘The task of the right eye is to peer into the telescope, while the left eye peers into the microscope,’ she declares in Down Below [the memoir of her descent into madness following Ernst’s arrest and her confinement in a sanatorium in 1940]. Her experiences of relations between herself and the world—animals, rocks, other people—share distortions of perspective along these lines, microcosms magnified, details projected into far horizons, occult meanings encrypted in random patterns.” Framing the central transaction is a collection of surreal and anthropomorphic beings: a snake and a donkey take tea, a fish dangling between them; a snail with a human head presides over the scene from above. The gilded protagonist, regal and audacious, may allude to the avian alter ego of Carrington’s erstwhile partner. “Ernst was Loplop, Prince of Birds, the surrealist movement’s ‘Bird Superior,’” Warner notes, “eclipsing all others in fame and prestige with his effortless gaiety and cruelty of invention, his unstinting ability to replenish the store of fantasies and improvise new media, new methods” (intro. to L. Carrington, Down Below, New York, 2017, pp. viii, xxvi-xxviii). In its intermingling of age-old mythmaking and psychic, telescoping vision, Bird Seizes Jewel gestures both to the cosmos and to Carrington’s innermost self (or selves), meditating on narratives of transgression, trauma, and perception.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park