A male figure – the Fool – floats almost in space, etched in white on to a shimmering blue background, a dog pawing at his leg. In a second painting, Death strides across a field wielding his scythe, two heads sitting on the ground.
The images, both extraordinary and vivid, are part of a set of tarot cards, painted by the British-born Mexican surrealist painter Leonora Carrington.
First publicly displayed in Mexico City in 2018 after being discovered only a year before, Carrington’s Major Arcana – as the core deck is known – will at last be placed in the context of her other art in a publication reproducing the cards for the first time along with other paintings, some of which drew inspiration from themes in the tarot deck.
While the circumstances of who owns the deck, and even when they were painted by Carrington, remain shrouded in mystery, the emergence of the set of cards has opened the way for new insights into the artist’s work and life.
This week, a widely expanded edition of The Tarot of Leonora Carrington will be published that will place her tarot in the context of her wider career.
Another book by Carrington’s biographer, Joanna Moorhead, examining the places Carrington was most strongly associated with, is due out next spring, amid growing interest in the artist’s work and her ideas as a pioneering feminist figure with an interest in ecology.
“They were completely unknown and in a private collection,” says Susan Aberth, one of the authors of the book examining the tarot deck. “When we found them we nearly fainted at such a discovery.”
While those images were included in an earlier edition, publication in the midst of the Covid pandemic meant key archives of Carrington’s work were closed to the authors and unavailable for that book, copies of which now change secondhand for hundreds of pounds. “The fact is she never showed anyone the cards. They were private to her,” adds Aberth. “I have spent 30 years studying her art, so I was shocked.”
Aberth believes the opportunity to study Carrington’s tarot finally has made sense of elements in her wider art that have long perplexed those who have tended to place her fantastic figures in the context of surrealism alone.
The well known 1939 Portrait of Max Ernst – a lover of the young Carrington – showing the artist in a frozen landscape and carrying a lamp-like object is linked to the traditional figure of the Hermit in tarot.
“When you see the cards, you realise they were central to her entire production, including the question of what is the nature of the esoteric. What makes the cards so unique is that they were her own tools for exploring her own personal consciousness.”
Among the very few who were aware of the deck was her son, Gabriel Weisz Carrington, who in the book describes their genesis, recalling a long-ago conversation with his mother: “From one of the bookshelves in her room she pulls out Le tarot des imagiers du Moyen Age by the Swiss occultist Oswald Wirth. Leonora dreamily enumerates the cards or tarots: “The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Hierophant, The Lovers …”
“You know, I might design my own deck’ [she says] … The following morning, we walk to a nearby artist’s supply shop, we purchase a couple of thick paperboard sheets.”
Carrington’s artistic interest in the esoteric and the occult was not unique. The Irish poet WB Yeats and abstract artists Wassily Kandinsky and Hilma af Klint had been similarly inspired.
A key figure in the surrealist movement, and a noted writer as well as a painter, Carrington was highly regarded by peers such as André Breton, although long overlooked by the art establishment.
Born in Lancashire in 1917 into a family of wealthy mill owners, Carrington rebelled at school, later attending art school. Meeting Ernst in the late 1930s, who left his wife for Carrington, the couple moved to France where Carrington became part of the surrealist circle around Breton. Ernst, a German citizen, was interned twice after the outbreak of the second world war, prompting Carrington to suffer a breakdown in Spain – where she had fled – and she was admitted to hospital.
Escape from Europe was offered by a marriage of convenience to a Mexican diplomat and poet, and she moved first to New York and then Mexico City, where she settled, marrying Emerico Weisz, a Hungarian photographer.
It has only been in recent decades that she has been recognised as an equal to her male peers in the surrealist movement, with her painting The Juggler (1954)fetching the highest price ($713,000) for a living surrealist painter in 2005, while more recently her The Temptation of St Anthony (1945), inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of the same subject from 1500, reached $2,629,000 in 2014.
Although she grew up in a traditional Catholic household in the north of England, it was the examination of other spiritual traditions including magic and later Buddhism which most informed her art.
For the former, she took inspiration from Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, the poet’s 1948 study of poetic myth-making and divinity, a subject to which she was drawn throughout her adult life.
A feminist and environmentalist, Carrington was less interested in Freudianism as a door to the unconscious than other surrealists were, instead leaning on her own ideas around other worlds and magical transformation. All of which are present in her tarot deck. “They were meant for divination, as a meditative device for changes in consciousness,” says Aberth. “I think she associated the very act of art-making as a kind of practical magic which has the ability to inform people and transform. The interesting thing about her tarot cards is that they are a personal statement. She borrows canonical imagery but makes personal choices.”
Moorhead is a relative of the artist who became close to her at the end of her life. “She was a very spiritual person. We’d both been raised in the Catholic tradition but she became very critical of it and she had broken away from formal Catholicism although it still imbued her thinking,” she says.
“Spirituality was very fundamental to her. She was a seeker all her life and Leonora was always searching, always going out of her comfort zone, looking for where mystery of life might be revealed. She went through periods of intense interest in Buddhism, the Kabbalah, tarot. All these worlds around that felt closer when she took you with her, including the worlds of plants and insects.
“I think she was way ahead of her time in terms of her interests. If you look back to her paintings in the 1940s she is very, very tuned in to ecological issues.”
Moorhead sees Carrington’s tarot deck less as a tool of divination than as a compass. Only a handful of the cards bear the date of their painting in 1955, and there is evidence that suggests she may have been working on the project for decades. “There’s a suggestion that she finished the deck in the 1990s with the intention to make 15 decks, a project she never realised.”
Like Gabriel Weisz Carrington, who also describes the deck as a “compass”, Moorhead sees the cards as something else than traditionally conceived. “She didn’t see it as a game, or for divination, but as a model of the universe.”
The Tarot of Leonora Carrington is published by RM Verlag on 29 November. Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead will be published by Thames and Hudson next year
