Carrington x Capurro plus The Guardian
Lo que van a leer es un informe sobre Leonora Carrington.
Estrella del Oriente considera a Leonora una de sus integrantes. Murió hace poco en México, donde
se exilió cuando los nazis acordaron con la burguesía francesa la repartición
de su territorio (esto explica, en parte y de paso, porque existe el Frente
Nacional). Leonora nunca más volvió a
vivir en Europa. Dotada de un talento y agudeza jamás vistos, fue escritora
brillante e innovadora, así como una artista visual (pintura, esculturas,
objetos) exquisita y subversiva. De una humildad verdadera, hizo toda su obra
silenciosamente. México la cobijó sin molestarla, recibiendo su legado con
generosidad. Nunca dejó de ser surrealista. El secreto: ella sabía que ser
surrealista no es un problema de forma sino de fondo; es decir, era
revolucionaria, bregaba por cambiar el mundo y lo hacía con su cuerpo y su
obra.
Nacida en una familia de la aristocracia inglesa, rompió con
ese mundo a un precio muy alto: su padre la hizo recluir en un manicomio, en
España, bajo Franco, de donde pudo escapar, gracias al auxilio del empleado que
debía mantenerla encarcelada. El también se había enamorado de Leonora. En
México, gracias a la amistad y la ayuda de Remedios Varo, y de su compañero el
poeta Benjamin Peret (también exiliados ante el nazismo), pudo dedicarse a
crear sin interferencias. Su obra no es conocida por el gran público mundial. No era mujer de mercado, no
iba a mendigar al marchand ni a los
políticos de turno para salir en los diarios. Callada, tenaz, bella como una
aguja en el fondo de la copa de agua, sigue estando entre nosotros.
Invitamos a mirar su obra, en los extractos que siguen. El
informe que agregamos está en inglés. No hace falta entenderlo por palabras.
Baste decir que The Guardian le rinde un homenaje, bien que un poco
"nacional", tratando de demostrar que Leonora basa su obra en la
profundidad de Inglaterra, en sus ancestros célticos, y otras liviandades que
no resisten ningún análisis profundo. Carrington era, es y será universal,
porque se tomó del primer negro que comenzó
a caminar desde el centro de África, para luego mezclarse con los neandertales
y se abrazó, dulcemente, en miles de pirámides y piedras sagradas a lo largo de
los siglos.
Juan Carlos Capurro
From high society to surrealism: in praise of Leonora Carrington – 100 years on
With her paintings and tales based on dreams, animals and the occult, Carrington was an uncanny original. Marina Warner salutes the artist on her centenerary
In the
mid-1980s, Leonora Carrington was living for a while in New York, in a small
single room in a basement in the Gramercy Park area; she worked at a table
between her bed and the kitchenette, clearing away the crucibles of tempera,
brushes and palette to cook for herself and, sometimes, for guests who had
tracked her down as I had. She had chosen to live below street level because
that is where she felt safe, and she was very content with her modest setting.
Among the many animals in her paintings and writings are badgers and raccoons
and other builders of lairs and burrows; like them, she preferred to keep her
feet firmly on solid ground, as if needing an anchorage while her mind spun off
on its wild flights.
The
surrealist artist of words and images was then in her 70s, small and thin, with
very dark round eyes that still radiated the feral beauty of her youth, and a
smoky voice filled with energy and humour. Here was a celebrated, indeed
notorious figure; she could have been a monstre sacré. Yet she was
exceptionally free from vanity and envy, from craving wealth or flattery or any
other signs of worldly status (it’s significant, I think, that in one of those
surrealist questionnaires that André Breton loved devising, Narcissus came last
among her favourite myths).
Every week
or so she would go to her gallery and deliver one of her dream paintings in
return for the small stipend they gave her, and then she would drop in on one
of the Korean delis that had sprung up around that time and buy her dinner from
the salad bar. We spent many days together wandering around the city: we once
crossed Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum, where she wanted to look at
the Egyptian collections; she was strongly attracted to wrapped and swaddled
and swathed bodies, because they too made her feel held fast by reality. She
was always tapping her powers of fantasy, by numerous techniques – including,
especially, daydreaming on that threshold between sleep and waking where “hypnagogic
visions” appear.
Carrington
never bothered about her archive or her intellectual property, and her writings
are more like a jazz musician’s basement tapes than a major creative writer’s
archives. The Debutante and Other Stories, the first book from Silver Press, a
new feminist publisher, is a major step in gathering her tales together for the
first time – including the earliest ones from the 1930s and the material
published in New York during the war, while many surrealists were in exile
there, as well as later entertainments and fantasies she created, sometimes for
performance, after she settled in Mexico.
At first
she wrote in French – the language she shared with Max Ernst and with many of
their friends when she was living in Paris and then in St-Martin-d’Ardèche in
Provence before the war broke out in 1939. A few tales – among them the
magnificent, terse detonations of “The House of Fear” and “The Debutante” –
were published in tiny editions, but many more were scattered when the fall of
France drove Carrington and Ernst, as well as many French nationals among the
surrealists – Breton, Benjamin Péret, Marcel Duchamp – to flee. Some
typescripts of stories she had forgotten about only surfaced among the papers
of Jimmy Ernst, Max’s son, after his death in New York in 1984.
Asked about
the relation between her writing and painting, Carrington offered an oblique
clue: “I haven’t been able to reconcile image world and word world in my own
mind. I know the Bible says sound came first – I’m not sure. Perhaps [they
happened] simultaneously, but how did it all get solid?” In her tales, the
image world and the word world do take on solid form. The story “As They Rode
along the Edge” finds Carrington at her most witchy and comic: the heroine,
Virginia Fur, lives in a forest and travels at the head of a procession of a
hundred cats, “riding a wheel”. She has a huge mane and “long and enormous
hands with dirty nails”, and “one couldn’t really be altogether sure that she
was a human being. Her smell alone threw doubt on it – a mixture of spices and
game, the stables, fur and grasses.”
Carrington
realigns, or turns upside down, the usual hierarchy of beings: humans emerge as
only a single, lesser aspect of a polymorphously organic universe, and people
in Carrington’s paintings gain in stature and, by implication, in wisdom the
closer they come to the creaturely. While Circe cast Odysseus’s men under an
evil spell when she turned them into beasts, Carrington, on the whole,
considers animal transformation a blessing, a deliverance, a site of
transcendence. In everybody, she said, there is “an inner bestiary”. She was
“born loving animals”, and was taken out by her mother (a rare treat) to the
local zoo in Blackpool to celebrate her first communion. In her own case, when
she was young and a shape-shifter, her chosen avatar was the horse.
Born on 6
April 1917, Leonora had a childhood where the paddock on the one hand and the
nursery on the other featured vividly as zones of thrill and transgression. The
rituals and privileges of her background provided her with a heaped storehouse
to raid. Her paintings, first shown by Breton in Paris in 1937, have titles
that disclose how she was plundering what was marvellous from the banalities of
a propertied family’s daily round: The Meal of Lord Candlestick and What Shall
We Do Tomorrow, Aunt Amelia? reveal the interweaving of autobiography,
invention, playfulness and mystery, the comic and the gruesome, also present in
the stories she was beginning to write at the time, winning the admiration of
Ernst and his circle.
She liked
puncturing pomp and pretension of all sorts. A squib such as “The Three
Hunters” satirises the pursuits of her class, most particularly her father and
brothers, who were keen sportsmen; a story like “The Neutral Man” the stifling
social round. But irony also streaks through her uses of Celtic enchantments,
passed on by her Irish mother and nanny, which meshed with the surrealist web
of erotic games, occult divination and perverse dream scenarios. Yet,
throughout the fanciful, delinquent and transgressive scenes she imagines,
Carrington sustains a dry inconsequent tone and well-bred, often naive English
manners with a dash of faerie whimsy. Her magical egalitarianism means a
cooking pot can do very well for an alchemist’s alembic, and the knitting of a
jumper stand in for the weaving of the soul from “cosmic wool”.
Because she
left England – for good, as it turned out – and has been published in French
far more consistently than in English, Carrington has been identified with the
surrealist movement abroad. So it’s easy to overlook her closeness to a
thoroughly Anglo-Saxon tradition on the one hand and to Irish legends and lore
on the other. The stance she adopts often reminds the reader of one of Hilaire
Belloc’s wicked children, although she takes the delinquents’ side, not the
admonishing grownups’. The stories of this early period also reflect the
pleasure – even the intense pleasure – Carrington found in her changed
surroundings. Her stories vibrate with warmth and colour, abundant and
delicious herbs and foods, spectacular and unbridled self-expression; they show
her revelling in wildness, in scents and textures – cinnamon and musk, in the
release of passion and imagination, and the discovery of physical sensation.
She also fantasticates about food, and her Catholicism surfaces in her
lingering on the cannibalism at the heart of the eucharist. The necessary
killing and trimming and dressing of animals for the table fascinate her: the
passage from the kitchen to the table, from the pot to the dish, recurs as an
obsessive motif. She denounces, with all a young woman’s vehemence, the waste
and greed she perceives in her paternal home: The Meal of Lord Candlestick
shows grotesque female orgiasts, in maiden-aunt society hats, impaling a baby
and gorging on a fowl-cum-dragon flambé.
Food is
powerful magic – it poisons, as in her comic masterpiece, the novel The Hearing
Trumpet, written in the early 60s and published in the 70s, but it also
represents a female sphere, and its dangers can be redeemed by wise husbandry
and care. Carrington always perceived a connection between traditional women’s
work and art, and disliked grandiose male assertions of heroic status.
“Painting is like making strawberry jam, really carefully and well,” she once
told me. She valued what she called “dailiness”: the common cabbage is her rosa
mystica. It appears in the 1975 portrait of her friend, the historian and
religious thinker Anne Fremantle, as well as proudly on its own.
The era of
new age spirituality makes it hard to find the right language to describe the
journeys of the mind Carrington undertook, and her odd mingling of tone: she
was serious about the inner dream worlds she explored but punctured them with
black comedy. The commercialised hokum of US west coast mysticism since the
1960s – the crystals and amulets and synthetic quoting from the world’s adepts
– and the widespread decadence of mythological borrowing (mostly from Jung and
Joseph Campbell) make it difficult to find a vocabulary for Carrington’s
questing that does not sound like a circular from the Personal Growth Movement.
Jane Miller commented on this difficulty in a review of Carrington’s first
novel, The Stone Door. “In spite of all its waywardness and intimations of
profundity,” she wrote, “the novel is finally a good deal more like a prettily
embroidered sampler than some gravely worked cabbalistic banner, for its
eclectic, not to say magpie, snatching at bright detail and unexplained
incident is controlled by a tastefulness and sense of design which are
old-fashioned and charming rather than portentous.”
Edward
James, the surrealist patron who collected her work during the many lean years,
wrote of Leonora’s images that they were “not merely painted, they are brewed”.
It is an apt choice of word, and describes her writings too: these small and concentrated
potions in which the oddest elements from metaphysics and fantasy, daily
routine and material life are simmered together and mischievously served up.
Her witchcraft, which had so enchanted the surrealists, entered another phase
in the surroundings of lo real maravilloso americano, in the phrase of the
Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier: the marvellous (Latin) American reality.
Alongside
her friends, the painters Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo, Carrington came to
seem the voice of that Latin imagination, in many media: in Mexico City, she
wrote plays and designed masks and costumes; and she was commissioned to
celebrate the people of Chiapas, descendants of the Aztecs, in a vast mural for
the Regional Museum of Anthropology and History of Chiapas. She continued to
defy convention, too, opening her house to meetings during the student action
of the 1960s and participating in the beginnings of the women’s movement.
In many
changes of shape, Carrington fulfilled, over nearly a century of work, the task
of art as defined by Paul Klee: to make visible the invisible. She conveyed her
consciousness, its complex of memory, fantasy, desire and fear, reaching for
the apt metaphors to hand from a rich deposit of learning. “The matter of our
bodies,” she said, “like everything we call matter, should be thought of as
thinking substance.” As Doris Lessing, one of Carrington’s favourite authors,
wrote: “The longest journey is in.”
Extraído de The Guardian 6 de abril 2017
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