Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), ‘El Nigromante’ (The Necromancer), 1950“Even before her

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), ‘El Nigromante’ (The Necromancer), 1950“Even before her departure from Europe, André Breton had borrowed terms from Michelet’s La Sorcière to describe Carrington’s unique feminine magical gifts, from “the illuminism (belief in a special personal enlightenment) of lucid madness” and “the sublime power of solitary conception” to going so far as to credit her with breaking the stereotype of witches as “ugly and old.” “Who today,” wrote Breton, “could answer the whole of this description as well as Leonora Carrington?” Her biographer Marie Blancard has shown that Breton, like other surrealists, was awed by Carrington’s ability to return from the mental breakdown for which she was hospitalized in Spain in 1940 (as related in her harrowing book En bas), equipped to navigate between both realms.Although she had studied the principles of alchemy as early as her art student days in London, Carrington’s move to Mexico in 1943 offered the fullest opportunity to move away from the stereotypes attached by male surrealists and to truly explore magic in her art. In Mexico, she befriended Pierre Mabille, a member of the surrealist group and author of Le Miroir du Merveilleux (The Mirror of the Marvelous). In the years that followed, Carrington also maintained correspondence with Kurt Seligmann, whom she had known for many years, and also read his Mirror of Magic after it appeared in 1948. Carrington combined these influences with a study of Mayan and Aztec myth and ritual and the hybridization of Mexican religion between Catholicism and indigenous spirituality. These rich sources lent her works of the 1950s a unique brand of magical iconography.El nigromante shows a sorcerer figure with mouth open in incantation, who gestures toward a table on which several objects are found. The eggs and the pyramid both have esoteric associations, the eggs with the Philosophical Egg (the primary vessel used in alchemy) and the pyramid or triangle with the Kabbalah. The butterflies above the sorcerer’s head are associated with rebirth or resurrection. The painting also offers a connection to Carrington’s alchemically themed 1956 painting AB EO QUOD, which features a Latin inscription from the Asensus Nigrum, an obscure alchemical text from 1351 that reads, “Keep away from any with a black tail, indeed, this is the beauty of the earth.” AB EO QUOD shows a black tail snaking around the fire screen on which this quote is written. Here, the black furry creature that seems to be the sorcerer’s familiar has a similar black tail that twines about his arm.“ (Source) -- source link

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