Ms. Ashton

A modern-day Renaissance woman, Carrington grew up in the waning years of Britain’s Occult Revival, which had stirred interest in esoterica across a long nineteenth century from the Romantics through the fin-de-siècle. Nurtured on fairy tales and Celtic lore as a child by her Irish mother and nanny, she explored themes of enchantment and transformation across a venerable career, her paintings inculcating a reality at once mystifying and miraculous. Carrington 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’s close-knit émigré community as she explored subjects encompassing nature, mythology, feminism, and world religion. Carrington decamped to New York in the wake of the devastating earthquake that hit Mexico City in 1985. “She settled in New York, in a single basement room (she has a fear of heights and prefers to live grounded) where she began painting the sequence of nineteen major canvases or panels”— Ms. Ashton among them—“which were exhibited recently at the Brewster Gallery in New York,” notes art historian Marina Warner. “New York in the late 80s has provided her with only the latest of her changing resting places, though resting place is hardly the word, for Carrington alights, rather than rests” (“New York, Leonora Carrington,” The Burlington Magazine 130, no. 1027, October 1988, p. 796).

“Ireland was viewed by the Surrealists as quintessentially Surrealist, not unlike Mexico,” explains art historian Alyce Mahon. “In keeping with the group’s fascination with Ireland, Carrington embraced her Irish roots, and the stories of Celtic myths, with passion” (“She Who Revealed: The Celtic Goddess in the Art of Leonora Carrington,” in Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist, exh. cat., Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2013, p. 133). An ominous folktale about cockerels, a version of which appeared in a compendium of folklore recorded by the antiquary John Aubrey in the late seventeenth century, served as source material for Ms. Ashton:

So at the same instant, that Mr. Ashton was goeing out of the house, when he was goeing to France, the Cock happened to crow: at which his wife was much troubled, and her mind gave her, that it boded ill luck. He was taken at sea & after tryed and executed” (Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaisme, 1686-87, London, 1881, p. 196).

Carrington had earlier explored this iconography in Cockcrow (1950), but in Ms. Ashton she centers the experience of the widow, dressed in mourning as she stands before her house, surrounded by a telltale murder of crows. “In old age, Carrington seeks to capture in her art other wisdom besides eros, perhaps even beyond eros, and her personages have, like ascetic saints, passed through sexuality to another place, often a desert or a rocky wilderness, painted in the burnt sienna, raw umber and cinnabar pigments Carrington learned from the Trecento predella panel painters who have influenced her so profoundly,” notes Warner. “With cracked faces like walnuts, veiled bodies, sometimes shaggy with fur, or swaddled in cloth, these variations on the medieval anchorite have become in some sense bodiless.” The diminutive protagonist of Ms. Ashton appears at once sapient and inscrutable, her prescience seemingly ill rewarded but no less extraordinary. “Her paintings often resemble koans,” Warner concludes, “in their absurdity, their irresistible light-hearted and mysterious dramas, their sense of enchantment and ordinariness mixed together” (M. Warner, op. cit., p. 797).

Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park