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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 mystifying 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 permeated Carrington’s work in Mexico over the ensuing decades, and her studies of the occult—frequently in the company of close friends Remedios Varo and Kati Horna—became inseparable from her practice of painting, as manifest in Animus Tractatus.
“Carrington often used her artistic practice hand-in-hand with her various magical practices, and thus her paintings can be construed at times as actual magical workings,” art historians Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq explain. “The artist executed a number of drawings later in life depicting groups of people and animals seated at her legendary round kitchen table engaged in a number of otherworldly activities, from séances to tarot readings.” In Animus Tractatus, Carrington conjures a magical ritual that recalls the proceedings earlier portrayed in Litany of the Philosophers (1959). In both works, a dwarf presides over a strange summoning before a rapt and otherworldly audience, perhaps here a commingling of the living and the dead. A group of grim-faced men circle around a disembodied face, elevated on a plinth and emitting a spectral vapor that envelops each of the acolytes within the dim, claustrophobic space. The strange, humanoid figure standing at the right resurfaces in Animus Maquina (1962) and Avium (1963) and may be a proxy for the Magician, who appears on the first card of the Major Arcana; his hands point in opposite directions (“as above, so below”), symbolically mediating between heaven and earth (“As in a Mirror with Multiple Facets: Leonora Carrington and the Tarot,” in The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, Somerset, 2020, p. 65).
In 1962, Kati Horna published a series of photographs titled Oda a la Necrofilia, which probes the erotics of death and mourning through the figure of a woman—Carrington, in progressive stages of undress—who interacts with a white mask, an umbrella, a candle, and an unmade bed. Carrington cradles and holds the mask; in one image, the mask rests on a pillow, drawing an uncanny likeness to the face at the center of Animus Tractatus.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“Carrington often used her artistic practice hand-in-hand with her various magical practices, and thus her paintings can be construed at times as actual magical workings,” art historians Susan Aberth and Tere Arcq explain. “The artist executed a number of drawings later in life depicting groups of people and animals seated at her legendary round kitchen table engaged in a number of otherworldly activities, from séances to tarot readings.” In Animus Tractatus, Carrington conjures a magical ritual that recalls the proceedings earlier portrayed in Litany of the Philosophers (1959). In both works, a dwarf presides over a strange summoning before a rapt and otherworldly audience, perhaps here a commingling of the living and the dead. A group of grim-faced men circle around a disembodied face, elevated on a plinth and emitting a spectral vapor that envelops each of the acolytes within the dim, claustrophobic space. The strange, humanoid figure standing at the right resurfaces in Animus Maquina (1962) and Avium (1963) and may be a proxy for the Magician, who appears on the first card of the Major Arcana; his hands point in opposite directions (“as above, so below”), symbolically mediating between heaven and earth (“As in a Mirror with Multiple Facets: Leonora Carrington and the Tarot,” in The Tarot of Leonora Carrington, Somerset, 2020, p. 65).
In 1962, Kati Horna published a series of photographs titled Oda a la Necrofilia, which probes the erotics of death and mourning through the figure of a woman—Carrington, in progressive stages of undress—who interacts with a white mask, an umbrella, a candle, and an unmade bed. Carrington cradles and holds the mask; in one image, the mask rests on a pillow, drawing an uncanny likeness to the face at the center of Animus Tractatus.
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park