Pablo Weisz with the tarot painted by his mother Leonora Carrington. Hector Guerrero
Leonora Carrington painted her own tarot. On 22 tables measuring 14 by 16 centimeters, one for each major arcana, he poured out his bestiary of horses and hyenas, dogs and birds. As if the characters were jumping out of their paintings, he placed them on the cards that would summarize their passions, their desires and their predictions.
To La Estrella’s letter, which is usually about gifts and sacrifices, he gave her a crazy head of hair that embodied his own demand for freedom. For “The Magician”, the card of beginnings, of the apprentices, he placed a deep black background, the nigredo of alchemy, which speaks of decay, of the purification necessary to begin the process of exploration. For the card of the Moon, the card of the poets, the cosmic mother, the dark night of the soul, which in all tarot cards is usually guarded by two animals, he painted a dog and a hyena. The hyena that has obsessed her since childhood. “Some medieval stories say that the hyena has two stones in her eyes and if someone kills her, takes out the stones and puts them under her tongue, she can predict the future,” recalls the Mexican writer Elena in hers Book about Leonora Carrington. Poniatowska.
Leonora, the bewitched sorceress by Octavio Paz, the Sorcière (the witch) by André Breton, the mythical figure, “incarnation of the most violent surrealism” by Alejandro Jodorowsky, recorded everything she learned since childhood about the Irish Druid religion, about alchemy and the magic in his painted tarot. “My mother became interested in tarot through the conversations she had with her Hungarian friend Dr. Desiderio Lang, who had arrived in Mexico as a political refugee, led the group. “He was a very arrogant man, he said things without fear, he had a great knowledge of alchemy and Kabbalah and through stories he told you what your fate was,” recalls Pablo Weisz Carrington, one of the painter’s two sons z When these conversations took place and these letters were painted (1955), I was eight years old. Weisz, together with the Leonora Carrington Council, decided to breathe new life into the cards painted by her mother and stack them in the style of a modern tarot deck in a limited edition.
These other knowledges, these symbolic and magical universes, were not foreign to artists at that time. Surrealism had placed particular emphasis on hypnosis, spiritualism, dreams, astrology and fortune telling. “Secrets of Magical Art” is how André Breton, a friend of Carrington, titled the first Surrealist manifesto. Hermeticism thus became a fundamental component of artistic creation.
“The Surrealists recovered the original meaning of the word alchemy to show that the transformation of metals was only the metaphor of a much deeper process relating to the matter of creation…Alchemy, then, is poetry in the strongest sense of the word. And surrealism is really an alchemical transmutation,” can be read in the doctoral thesis of María José González Madrid, from the University of Barcelona, on surrealism and the magical knowledge of Remedios Varo, the artist, unconditional friend of Leonora and companion of his magical explorations .
Of all the knowledge, the Tarot had attracted the particular attention of the Surrealists, who had analyzed the Marseille version and transformed it to create a new deck of artistic creation, and although Leonora Carrington never properly recognized herself as part of this movement, identified herself In this opening she moves towards the less obvious.
His challenges to the world of British royalty from which he came and the proper Mexican bourgeoisie to which he ended up included not only transgressive actions such as taking off his shoes during a dinner with well-known personalities and smearing mustard on his feet or painted the walls of filmmaker Luis Buñuel’s apartment with her hands stained with menstrual blood in response to a romantic invitation to go out. His challenges also included the forms of the subtle, the symbolic, in order to give the magical a full place in his body and in his life. Leonora saw this as a form of individual resistance.
“She wanted to have her own cards, so she painted them. The tarot was like a document. Each image was a synthesis of human actions. The death card was not death, it was change, transformation, which is very different from the concept we have. Every card had its power, every image was reminiscent of human conditions and ideas, archetypes,” explains Weisz Carrington.
“A transversal element of Leonora Carrington is this extensive symbolic world in which she lived. He doesn’t just paint it, he builds it based on his way of being in the world. This tarot is a reflection of that. It is a tarot that has its own imprint, which has to do with its own fauna and flora, with its own alchemy. His use of colors has a meaning all of its own. The Priestess card, which is usually blue or purple, is red in this tarot, and red is knowledge made wisdom and flesh. It also shows the place he gives to women in his vision,” explains, for her part, the Bolivian poet and Tarot expert Micaela Mendoza, who was entrusted with the book that accompanies this limited edition of Leonora’s Tarot.
Pablo Weisz, son of Leonora Carrington, poses for a portrait in Mexico City.Hector Guerrero
The artist’s 22 small paintings, delivered as cards in this edition, are not only a way to further explain her work, but also the opportunity to travel with them to her most symbolic moments, always accompanied by the tarot cards. “Two days before the birth, a golden chariot – taken from one of the tarot cards – announces the new life,” recalls Elena Poniatowska in her book Leonora, on the eve of the birth of her first child Pablo. “The two painters (Leonora and Remedios) read alchemy books, which have always fascinated Leonora, and they interpret tarot. The story that connects them is summarized in the arcana,” adds the writer as a witness to the meaning that the letters had for the painter.
The first time it became publicly known that the artist had her own tarot was in 2017 at the Leonora Carrington exhibition “Cuentos Mágicos,” which took place at the Museum of Modern Art in Mexico on the occasion of her 100th birthday. The original gold and silver leaf images were in a private collection and were exhibited for the first time.
Pablo Weisz Carrington doesn’t know how an item so precious to his mother left their home in the Roma Norte neighborhood of Mexico City – where the artist lived for 70 years and whose will was left to him, her eldest son. and ended up in a private collection. But he knows that beyond the fact that these images are recorded in books, the obligation to revive his tarot, to transform his cards into a real deck that can be used, is a commitment to his artistic and magical legacy, his Rebellion, realized, transcends every day in the lives of many lovers of his work.
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