Leonora Carrington

Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City 
Private Collection, Mexico City
Sale: Christie's, New York, November 24, 1992, lot 34
Acquired at the above sale

The paint layer has developed some cracking throughout, as is typical due to the artist's technique. There is no instability. Carrington often scraped her paint layers, and scraped areas can be seen throughout the painting. The paint layer is varnished. There are no retouches. The work could be hung as is. (This condition report has been provided courtesy of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc.)
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

Born in England to an Irish Catholic mother and a British father, Leonora Carrington experienced a privileged upbringing. Surrounded by nannies and with access to higher education, Carrington’s youth was lush with inspirational elements that would eventually manifest themselves in her paintings. The three Irish women in her life—her grandmother, mother and nanny—introduced her imagination to mystical Celtic tales and their traditional magical practices while Carrington’s schooling exposed her to the dramatic plays of William Shakespeare. In 1942, once she permanently settled in Mexico (after studying at London’s Chelsea School of Art and having a brief albeit intense romantic relationship with Max Ernst), Carrington’s work began to flourish and mature. This new country was not only fraught with surroundings of excitement and exotica; it also revealed a new complex source of inspiration: its rich Mesoamerican/Pre-Hispanic culture, which to her surprise bore many similarities to that of the Celts. Carrington dove into studying Benjamin Péret’s book Anthologies des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d'Amérique and the French translation of the Code of the Chilam Balam of Chumayel (one of the nine books of Mayan spiritual beliefs), among other texts on ancient religious and magic practices. Painted in 1976, The Dark Night of Aranoë is representative of Carrington’s fully matured artistic output. We are presented here with a twinkling theatrical scene that reveals itself out of a dark, black background, or rather, a moment in the night as suggested by the title—evoking Carrington’s early childhood exposure to theatrical productions. Hybrid and otherworldly creatures appear in various areas of the composition along with a master of ceremony in the upper left, that seem to gather for a ceremonial transformation. In this mystical scene, Carrington employs the natural world as the framework for this mesmerizing visual narrative and as a backdrop for the life force of transformation—a catalytic and powerful theme which was critical to the Surrealists, particularly for women Surrealist artists. Carrington, along with her counterparts (including Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, and Remedios Varo), took this association and role seriously: the natural world embodied at once an ominous and powerful force as well as the origin of life, fertility and access to immortality. More specifically, her animals “identify the instinctual life with the forces of nature… As symbolic intermediaries between the unconscious and the natural world, they replace male Surrealists’ reliance on the image of woman as the mediating link between ‘man’ and the marvelous” (Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement, New York, 1985, p. 79). Central to the composition is a suspended arachnid-like figure wrapped in a cocoon of threads. In typical Carrington fashion, her ironic and wry humor is pervasive in the title as it is in this depiction of the central figure. Playing with the word aranea, she transforms the latin-root word for female spider (and also a mass of web-like threads) to name a goddess-like creature—the Aranoë—while also evoking the spider goddesses of Celtic and Mesoamerican myth alike (the mother being and great protector, the heroine, the seductress).



We are grateful to Dr. Harold Gabriel Weisz Carrington for confirming the authenticity of this work.