Dark Eros & Gothic Dreams

Untitled painting, detail, 1960, Leonora Carrington. (Click to enlarge)
The full image can be found below the jump-break....

(From) Spirits of the Dead by Edgar Allen Poe

"Thy soul shall find itself alone

'Mid dark thoughts of the grey tombstone;

Not one, of all the crowd, to pry

Into thine hour of secrecy.

Be silent in that solitude,

Which is not loneliness - for then

The spirits of the dead, who stood

In life before thee, are again..."

(From) Speak, God Of Visions by Emily Brontë

"So, with a ready heart I swore

To seek their altar-stone no more;

And gave my spirit to adore

Thee, ever-present, phantom thing—

My slave, my comrade, and my king.

A slave, because I rule thee still,

Incline thee to my changeful will,

And make thy influence good or ill;

A comrade, for by day and night

Thou art my intimate delight..."

(From) Elm by Sylvia Plath

"I am inhabited by a cry.   

Nightly it flaps out

Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing   

That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.

Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?   

Is it for such I agitate my heart?"

(From) Letter to Sainte-Beuve and a prose poem by Charles Baudelaire

"Poet, is it an insult, or a well-turned compliment?

For regarding you I’m like a lover, to all intent,

faced with a ghost whose gestures are caresses,

with hand, eye of unknown charms, who blesses,

in order to drain one’s strength. – All loved beings

are cups of venom one drinks with eyes unseeing,

and the heart that’s once transfixed, seduced by pain,

finds death, while still blessing the arrow, every day."

"Dreams! Always dreams! And the more aspiring and fastidious the soul, the more its dreams exceed the possible. Every man has within him his dose of natural opium, endlessly secreted and renewed, and how many hours do we count, from birth to death, that are filled with positive pleasure, by successful deliberate action? Shall we ever truly live, ever enter this picture my mind has painted, this picture that resembles you?"

***

No tricks, just treats. Have a great holiday... with hidden pleasures... and mysterious treasures.

(Below:  Apocalypse by Cigarettes After Sex with some clips from Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride.)

(continued below...)

Samhain, 2022; Leonora Carrington and the Philosophic Egg

The Chair, Daghda Tuatha de Danaan, 1955, Leonora Carrington.
Incidentally, the Internet Archive link presented here is a great source for
Carrington images, starting with this page.

"The “Ovum Philosophicum,” which can be translated as the Philosophical or Alchemical Egg, is the principal vessel used in alchemical operations. During the alchemical process, the material, Hermetically sealed in the Egg, is put through a symbolic death and rebirth. When the Egg is cracked, a new mystical substance emerges capable of improving any substance with which it comes in contact."

- An explanation of the Philosophic Egg found here.

"Rather than trying to use this painting to psychoanalyze the artist, it is more productive to see how many symbolic elements are combined within. There are alchemical elements including the large egg on the table, which represents the “Philosophic Egg,” or alchemical vessel. While this term is often used in alchemical texts, visual representations in alchemical texts of a large egg are less frequent. One exception is an engraving that first appeared in Michael Maier’s Atalanta fugiens of a soldier, representing the planet Mars, standing by a furnace about to attack a large egg on a square table with his sword. This illustration was reprinted in Seligmann’s History of Magic, as were two images of the alchemical rose, which in Carrington’s painting floats above, dripping milky white drops to the table below.  Throughout the painting Carrington incorporated the colors of black, white and red, which relate to the three major stages of the alchemical work. Grillot de Givry had included a color plate representing these three colors on hybrid creatures - black eagle/serpents and white eagle/lions or griffins - placed in a landscape below a small hill that contains a tree with red fruit."

"Many of these symbols lent their traditional esoteric meanings to her paintings, but the freedom with which she transformed and blended these symbols in her paintings reveal her very personal adaptations and combinations of found imagery. In her complex combinations of esoteric symbolism, her paintings reflect the structure of esoteric publications during the mid-twentieth century, which likewise presented a multitude of esoteric traditions, while pointing to deeper spiritual powers that could be unlocked through their contemplation. Her use of these symbols stemmed from her own ritual practices and reveal the power she infused into her work to activate the unconscious."

"Many things contributed to the changes in her work from the late 1940s and into the 1960s... Many new publications on esoteric subjects became available in those years. Earlier in Paris, she would have known E. A. Grillot de Givry’s Le Musée des sorciers, mages & alchimistes, a text that inspired many surrealists and was one of the first publications to reproduce images drawn from a myriad of occult paths, including scenes of monstrous devils, demons, witchcraft, alchemy, astrology, physiognomy, tarot, chiromancy or palmistry, divining rods and diagrams of talismans and magic circles."

- Three separate quotes from M. E. Warlick's excellent article: Leonora Carrington’s Esoteric Symbols and their Sources. the first quote cites Carrington's painting with the golden egg, Ab Eo Quod (1956) - inset right - but, thematically, the observations can also apply to The Chair... with the silver egg. Both feature a large egg on a table, a symbolic rose and a color palette of predominately white, black and red.

Inset left above is the enigmatic set of symbols - Carrington's E=MC2, 1969, found on this page. Directly below is Carrington's take on standard alchemical imagery; found at the afore-mentioned Internet Archive.

Black sun/ Sol Niger, 1975, Leonora Carrington.

"Sol niger (black sun) can refer to the first stage of the alchemical magnum opus, the nigredo (blackening). In a text ascribed to Marsilio Ficino three suns are described: black, white, and red, corresponding to the three most used alchemical color stages. Of the sol niger he writes:

The body must be dissolved in the subtlest middle air: The body is also dissolved by its own heat and humidity; where the soul, the middle nature holds the principality in the colour of blackness all in the glass: which blackness of Nature the ancient Philosophers called the crows head, or the black sun."

- Marsilius Ficinus, Liber de Arte Chemica

"Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington painted narrative scenes inhabited by mysterious people and spirits participating in curious rituals. Samhain Skin references the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, held on October 31 to celebrate summer’s end. Painting on an actual animal skin, Carrington presents animals, human hybrids, and reverse-handwritten references to tribes and deities from Gaelic history. The imagery also alludes to the Sidhe, fairy people from whom Carrington’s grandmother claimed their family had descended."

- Leonora Carrington created several Samhain paintings. The one cited - Samhain Skin (inset right)- can be found in the NMWA collection.

You'll note the central motif of a mermaid figure in the painting... the mermaid (or siren) appearing often in Carrington's work. An excellent example is this stunning triptych found here, which I have never seen before. Speaking of Carrington objects not-seen-before, here's an another outstanding collection.

***

Yes, the witching hours are almost upon us and who better to accompany us to the Land of the Dead then a true expert in the field, surrealist artist, Leonora Carrington, whom I have called on before... on just such a day as this.

This Halloween, however, a tricky time to be sure, we're closing in on one of the most life-affirming shapes there are in this world: the egg. Ah, yes... but, then - and, wouldn't you know it - Leonora Carrington was there before us.

Well, sort of... let us explore...

Qualifying Feminism: Empowerment and the Arts (Part IV)

The late, great sculptress Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) and her sculpture Fillette in
a 1982 portrait by the brilliant (and often-censored) photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.
(Click-on post images for actual sizes.)

(Update as of August 3, 2019: Originally this article was referred to as "Part 3b" of what I had intended to be a 3 part series. This has changed. It is now Part 4 of a 7 part series. My apologies for any confusion - DS.)

“'I am lucky to have been brought up by a mother who was a feminist and fortunate enough to have married a husband who was a feminist, and I have raised sons who are feminists,' Germaine Greer quoted her as saying in The Guardian, not long after Bourgeois’ death in 2010. The artist, famous for her mammoth sculptures of spiders, pointedly leaves herself out of the list, insinuating not a rejection of the -ism, necessarily, but perhaps a bit of condescension toward critics eager to associate her with the term, no matter her opinions.

Bourgeois does owe a lot to the feminist movement. Born in Paris in 1911, she spent many of her early years known merely as the wife of Robert Goldwater, the American art historian with whom she moved to New York in the late 1930s. Though she drew, painted, sculpted and printed throughout the 1940s and ‘50s, Bourgeois didn’t receive real art world attention until her 50s. She had to wait more than a few years before she moved from the periphery of art critics’ minds to somewhere closer to the center. During that time, the feminist movement was blooming."

- Excerpt from a December 25 (Bourgeois' birthday), 2017 Huffington Post article by Katherine Brooks entitled A Love Letter To Louise Bourgeois, A Feminist Icon Whether She Likes It Or Not. Inset right is one of Bourgeois' "mammoth spiders."

"O'Keeffe, whose comfort with her sexuality is evident in the nude photographs taken of her by her husband Alfred Stieglitz, was not comfortable with the way that the paintings were interpreted as erotic images. This may have more to do with the degrading ways that the paintings were discussed. Stieglitz marketed her flower paintings in sexual terms, including quotes from men who were influenced by Stieglitz's viewpoints. She asked her friend, Mabel Dodge Luhan, to write of her work from a feminine perspective to counter interpretations by men.

Judy Chicago gave O'Keeffe a prominent place in her The Dinner Party (1979) in recognition of what many prominent feminist artists considered groundbreaking introduction of sensual and feminist imagery in her works of art, seeing it as a sign of female empowerment."

- From the Wiki entry for Flower Paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe. Inset left is an O'Keeffe orchid found there. Inset right is an element from Judy Chicago's tribute to O'Keeffe: a dinner plate from her ground-breaking, 1979 feminist art installation, The Dinner Party.

"I thought you could write something about me that men can't – What I want written – I do not know – I have no definite idea of what it should be. – but a woman who has lived many things and who sees lines and colors as an expression of living – might say something that a man can't – I feel there is something unexplored about woman that only a woman can explore – Men have done all they can do about it. Does that mean anything to you – or doesn't it?"

- American artist, Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986), from a 1925 letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan found in the Wiki entry (linked above). Inset left is a photograph of O'Keefe by her husband, Alfred Stieglitz.

"Louise Nevelson has been a fundamental key in the feminist art movement. Credited with triggering the examination of femininity in art, Nevelson challenged the vision of what type of art women would be creating with her dark, monumental, masculine and totem-like artworks. Nevelson believed that art reflected the individual, not "masculine-feminine labels", and chose to take on her role as an artist, not specifically a female artist. Reviews of Nevelson's works in the 1940s wrote her off as just a woman artist. A reviewer of her 1941 exhibition at Nierendorf Gallery stated: "We learned the artist is a woman, in time to check our enthusiasm. Had it been otherwise, we might have hailed these sculptural expressions as by surely a great figure among moderns." Another review was similar in its sexism: "Nevelson is a sculptor; she comes from Portland, Maine. You'll deny both these facts and you might even insist Nevelson is a man, when you see her Portraits in Paint, showing this month at the Nierendorf Gallery."

Even with her influence upon future generations of feminist artists, Nevelson's opinion of discrimination within the art world bordered on the belief that artists who were not gaining success based on gender suffered from a lack of confidence. When asked by Feminist Art Journal if she suffered from sexism within the art world, Nevelson replied "I am a woman's liberation."

- Sourced from the Wikiwand entry for Louise Nevelson. Inset right above is a portrait of Nevelson by Richard Avedon. Inset left is her 1985 piece, Mirror-Shadow VIII.

"The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem."

"Patriarchy both creates the rage in boys and then contains it for later use, making it a resource to exploit later on as boys become men. As a national product, this rage can be garnered to further imperialism, hatred and oppression of women and men globally. This rage is needed if boys are to become men willing to travel around the world to fight wars without ever demanding that other ways of solving conflict can be found.”

- A quote from feminist (and wise woman), bell hooks, (found here). Her photograph was sourced here. And, here's her blog (last updated September 29, 2016.)

(Update, April 8, 2019: I've just added a quote from a Vietnam vet that supports hooks' insight. It can be found in a footnote at the end of the post. I've also added another quote by hooks.)

____________________________________________________

The Newer Woman

Well, I guess the operative question is: what became of the New Woman? Did she simply morph into a Newer Woman?

No, not exactly. Two world wars got in the way. And, by the end of the second one, patriarchal society reasserted itself once again. The upshot is (in as few words as possible), after the disastrous effects of toxic-masculinity-in-action (i.e., war and genocide) depleted the world's population by millions (upon millions) of humans; the world's "little ladies" were obligated to return to the confines of the home, and dedicate their lives to what nature (and the state) intended: motherhood. In reality, the war machine needed new blood (literally) and more human fodder, the bloated corporate sector needed fresh regiments of gullible consumers, and the government needed its tax revenue which, in the form of new taxpayers (requiring new Social Security numbers) it was a patriotic citizen's "duty" to provide. Women were expected to push more and more babies out of their wombs (and purchase the latest soap-powder) while men were obliged to finance the whole deal (or die trying).*

Needless to say, the New Woman movement lost much of its momentum during the post-war years of the mid-1900s. But, then, in (almost) Karmic retaliation, the Baby Boomer generation was spawned. And, the Baby Boomers, in turn, beget the 60s... a time when pretty much all the best-laid plans of white mice and white men went straight to hell. Well, at least, for a decade or two. It was as if, suddenly, all the King's horses, vassals and concubines no longer gave a hoot about putting Humpty Dumpty back together again, but, instead, decided to make an omelet (with his remains) which all might share... regardless of race, religion, nationality, gene-pools or gender. And, it was from this mighty upheaval that second-wave feminism was born.

This is not to say that all females of artistic persuasion were driven underground during the post-war period. No, the feminist spirit was kept alive by a number of female artists who had been born later in the time-frame, at the very end of the 19th century. Many of these women also gravitated to Paris, and it is their artwork which illuminates this section.

First in line: the 1939 painting, Rhythm Colour no. 1076,  by Ukrainian-born French artist Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979)  - above, inset left - who co-founded Orphism (a form of cubism) with her more celebrated husband, French artist, Robert Delauney. Wiki tells us that "she was the first living female artist to have a retrospective exhibition at the Louvre in 1964."

As it was, she was one of four female artists initially considered Cubists and one of three who survived the wars to witness the next wave of feminism in bloom. The one Cubist who tragically missed the new resurgence was Spanish artist María Blanchard (1881-1939), whose 1916 painting Composición cubista appears next (above, inset right). Above, inset left, is Composition cubiste by Polish painter Alice (or Alicja) Halicka (1894-1975), while (directly) inset right is a portrait of artist Diego Rivera by Russian-born (Cubist-turned-pointillist) Marie Bronislava Vorobyeva-Stebelska (1892-1984)... also known as Marevna. Of note: in 1919 Marevna gave birth to a daughter fathered by Rivera who, as we know, later married (Patron Saint) Frida Kahlo. More of Marevna's work can be found here.

Speaking of Patron Saints, there was another, German-American visionary and Transcendentalist artist, Agnes Pelton (1881–1961), who can be counted among the women who appear here. Her Patron Saint article is here. Her 1939 painting below, Sea Change, was sourced from a Whitney Museum of American art page. As it was, Pelton was one of two female artists asked to join the Transcendentalist Painting Goup, the other was Florence Miller Pierce (1918-2007). You can find her work here.

And, then, in the latter years of the 19th century, something marvelous occurred... and the 19th century dealt us one of its last cards: an American pioneer, an artist who, living for almost 100 years (1887-1986), would take us into the 20th century and beyond, finally setting the record straight for all female artists while inspiring countless others (myself included). That is, yes, women could be innovators in the art world, and yes, women could be masters at their craft, and, most definitely, women could contribute to the human footprint sans the obligatory "baby-bump." Her name was Georgia Totto O'Keeffe and she broke every rule in the book, besting the men at their own game without batting an eyelash. She is, in fact, Trans-D's missing Patron Saint #12... but, if I never get to her, know that I meant to. Of all her prolific work she is best known for her massive flower paintings (Inset left is Red Canna (1924); another painting is below the jump); organic marvels of which she said: “When you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it's your world for the moment. I want to give that world to someone else.” 

An André Breton Kind of Day

A portrait of André Breton by Victor Brauner.
(Click-on images to enlarge.)

"I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality."

- Quote by André Breton found here.

"Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.' I must admit that this last word is misleading,tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, more inescapable, more disturbing than I intended. Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am. Hardly distorted in this sense, the word suggests that what I regard as the objective, more or less de liberate manifestations of my existence are merely the premises, within the limits of this existence, of an activity whose true extent is quite unknown to me."

- The first paragraph from Nadja, 1928, André Breton sourced here.

From left to right: Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington, Marcel Duchamp
and André Breton, New York 1942. (Source). The painting in the background:
Ernst's Le Surréalisme et la peinture (Surrealism and Painting), 1942.

"Always for the first time
Hardly do I know you by sight
You return at some hour of the night to a house at an angle to my window
A wholly imaginary house
It is there that from one second to the next
In the inviolate darkness
I anticipate once more the fascinating rift occuring
The one and only rift
In the facade and in my heart
The closer I come to you
In reality
The more the key sings at the door of the unknown room
Where you appear alone before me
At first you coalesce entirely with the brightness
The elusive angle of a curtain
It’s a field of jasmine I gazed upon at dawn on a road in the vicinity of Grasse
With the diagonal slant of its girls picking
Behind them the dark falling wing of the plants stripped bare
Before them a T-square of dazzling light
The curtain invisibly raised
In a frenzy all the flowers swarm back in
It is you at grips with that too long hour never dim enough until sleep
You as though you could be
The same except that I shall perhaps never meet you
You pretend not to know I am watching you
Marvelously I am no longer sure you know
You idleness brings tears to my eyes
A swarm of interpretations surrounds each of your gestures
It’s a honeydew hunt
There are rocking chairs on a deck there are branches that may well scratch you in the forest
There are in a shop window in the rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette
Two lovely crossed legs caught in long stockings
Flaring out in the center of a great white clover
There is a silken ladder rolled out over the ivy
There is
By my leaning over the precipice
Of your presence and your absense in hopeless fusion
My finding the secret
Of loving you
Always for the first time"

- A poem by André Breton found here

André Breton by Marcel Duchamp, 1945.

"...Breton began to believe that our everyday encounters and chance findings are actually psychologically pre-ordained by our subconscious.

As such, found objects were direct, already existing embodiments of our inner desires, that just need to be found, in a privileged chance encounters.

To trigger these encounters, the Surrealists would visit flea markets in the hope of being ‘called’ by certain items. Because of this, and also due to the group’s interest in primitive art (which they believed was art straight from the psyche, devoid of social interpretations of norms), the Surrealists are known for having been avid collectors of all sorts of objects.
However, the concept that Dali came up with is slightly different from that of chance objects. Dali’s aim when creating Surrealist Objects was to bring objects from dreams into the real world, whereas Breton understood objects as entities which reveal one’s inner desires. We therefore see two categories of objects used by Surrealists: on the one hand, those created from dream-material, which eventually become symbolically functioning objects – as most of them are twisted enough to not really be functional anymore; and on the other hand, objects revealed through chance encounters, which eventually help the Surrealist to fulfil an existing unconscious obsession, or to complete a piece which was missing a little something."

- From Objective Chance and the Surrealist Object. The Surrealists and their relationships to found objects bring to mind Louise Nevelson and her psychic posse (via this post):

"These helpers of Louise Nevelson would get up very early in the morning. She lived in a town house in Manhattan, I believe; and they would go up and down the alleys, looking for discards. They were all kinds of individuals who were perhaps misfits in the outer world, but she believed them to be tremendously psychic. They all worked for her as her technicians, her helpers, in finding objects and wrapping them up in newspapers and paper bags, bringing them home; and then when they had all these treasures before them, they would let the objects tell them where to use them. And this came from a kind of psychic dialogue with the found object – which, I might add, was very similar to what Carl Jung taught many of his patients, to engage in with many natural things in their own experience."

Breton and some found objects... found here.

"About four o'clock that same day a very tall man was crossing the bridge that joins the separate islands. The bells, or perhaps it was the trees, struck the hour. He thought he heard the voices of his friends speaking: “The office of lazy trips is to the right,” they called to him, “and on Saturday the painter will write to you.”  The neighbors of solitude leaned forward and through the night was heard the whistling of streetlamps. The capricious house loses blood. Everybody loves a fire; when the color of the sky changes it's somebody dying. What can we hope for that would be better?"

- From Les Champs magnétiques (The Magnetic Fields), 1920, André Breton, found here. As for the other Magnetic Fields, try here.

***

What's an André Breton kind of day? Well, let me put it this way, don't drive large vehicles or operate heavy machinery.

The Starman and the Swan People (Part III): The Second Dream

The lid of a second (smaller) music box... (virtually) composed
of mother-of-pearl fragments inlaid into black stone, 2017, DS.

(Click to enlarge)

"I was visiting a strange city... and although I can't recollect having been there before, it wasn't totally unfamiliar to me. I was looking out a hotel window at the city lights and making plans to go out a bit later. David Bowie would be performing at a venue nearby and I planned on being there. The thing is, I was aware he had died the previous year, but somehow seeing him "live" in the present didn't seem unusual to me... it's as if it wasn't merely possible in this place I had come, but, to be expected.

The next thing I remember is that I was at an airport again... walking down a long sort of corridor from which passengers either board a plane or disembark. Suddenly, I thought I saw someone who looked like David Bowie moving towards me, but, he wasn't alone. Although I have no recollection of his companions, they seemed to be walking on either side of him and supporting him as he walked. He seemed unsteady and appeared to be in pain. His face - which was red as if sunburnt  - seemed somewhat distorted. In fact, my impression now is that he may possibly have been in the process shape-shifting, but, this didn't occur to me then, and, by the time we came face to face, he looked younger - in his thirties (?) - but perfectly normal.

We had a conversation then. I don't remember what it was about but DB was very charming and endearing, He came across as a kindred spirit but, ultimately, I felt somewhat sad and remorseful. I impulsively kissed and embraced him, saying "I'm so sorry I never met you while you were still alive."

At which point he looked at me and said: 'There are other lives.'

This so astounded me I woke up."

- The second dream recollection, February 10, 2017, DS. The lovely man with sax (inset left) can be found here.

“Being imbued with a vividly active imagination still, I have brilliantly Technicolor dreams. They’re very, very strong. The ‘what if?’ approach to life has always been such a part of my personal mythology, and it’s always been easy for me to fantasise a parallel existence with whatever’s going on. I suspect that dreams are an integral part of existence, with far more use for us than we’ve made of them, really. I’m quite Jungian about that. The dream state is a strong, active, potent force in our lives.

The fine line between the dream state and reality is at times, for me, quite grey. Combining the two, the place where the two worlds come together, has been important in some of the things I’ve written, yes.

That other life, that doppelganger life, is actually a dark thing for me. I don’t find a sense of freedom in dreams; they’re not an escape mechanism. In there, I’m usually, ‘Oh, I gotta get outta this place!’ The darker place. So that’s why I much, much prefer to stay awake.”

- David Bowie, from a 4-part 2013 interview: "I'm Hungry for Reality".
Inset left is Leonora Carrington's And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, 1953. Note: All Carrington paintings used in the body of this post can be found on this page.

"Another dream-determinent that deserves mention is telepathy. The authenticity of this phenomenon can no longer be disputed today. It is of course, very simple to deny its existence without examining the evidence, but that is an unscientific procedure which is unworthy of notice. I have found by experience that telepathy does in fact influence dreams, as has been asserted since ancient times. Certain people are particularly sensitive in this respect and often have telepathically influenced dreams."

- Carl Jung from his 1974 publication: Dreams.

"The Chinese also developed interesting theories regarding how mental and psychic functioning depends upon different energy forms. They considered the dreamer's soul to be one of the principle agencies of dream production but made a distinction between the material soul or p'o, which regulated body functioning and ceased with its death, and the spiritual soul or hun, which left the body at death and carried the appearance of the body with it. It was the hun that was involved in dreams, because it could separate temporarily from the body for nighttime excursions to the land of the dead. There it would communicate with spirits or souls of the dead and return to the body with impressions from these visits."

- Excerpt from Our Dreaming Mind by Robert L. Van de Castle, Ph.D. (1927-2014). Inset right is the painting Dervault by Leonora Carrington.

"Reveal thyself to me

and let me behold a favorable dream.

May the dream that I dream be favorable;

may the dream that I dream be true.

May Makhir, the goddess of dreams, stand at my head;

let me enter the temple of the gods and the house of life."

- Prayer of a Mesopotamian "incubant" or dream-seeker.* Note: Dream incubation is the ancient ritual of going to sleep in a sacred place in anticipation of receiving a helpful or precognitive dream from a divine benefactor. It was common in ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, Rome and amongst the earliest Christians.

***

Well, finally, after stalling for so long, I decided to cut-to-the-chase and post both the second dream and the new music box lid right at the beginning of Part III (the last part) of this series. I can only hope they were worth waiting for.

It's funny, but when I read over my dream recollection above, a track from Bowie's Low - A New Career in a New Town - started going through my head. Which was kind of appropriate. One (unmentioned) element of Bowie's performance in the strange city of my dream is that it was to take place in a small, intimate venue. And, you might say, that for Bowie to be performing in small, intimate venues would (indeed) be a "new career"...

Leonora Carrington...

Untitled, Leonora Carrington painting found here.
(6/14/24: New - replaced the previous, inferior digital reproduction again!)

... on PBS's "Antiques Roadshow"!

Caught this show on the tube a couple of weeks ago... and just had to post about it. (Click to enlarge.)

Here's a transcript from the show (found here):


"GUEST:
I know there's an artist by the name of Leonora Carrington and that she lived in Mexico. Originally she came from Europe, but she came to Mexico after the Second World War. Much more than that I don't know, except I know that she was a surrealist.

APPRAISER:
Surrealism is understood most prominently by the work of Salvador DalÌ, someone like that, these images of the imagination and dreams and in some cases nightmares, which may apply to what we have here. Do you know about her background at all?

GUEST:
I believe she was born in England. I read somewhere that she painted in her early 20s and that she was the mistress of Max Ernst.

APPRAISER:
Right. She did run off with Max Ernst. She's a student and then ran off to France, and after the war, she suffered a nervous breakdown, and I think these pieces are very personal. I think that's part of it, is her coming to grips with the nightmares and the imagery in her life. And you look at this piece, it's all very macabre and surreal. The central piece here is this large sort of wolf-like figure with multiple arms and legs all around it. And then distributed throughout the bushes are figures. You see this wolf-like face here and bats sort of looming. And then down at the bottom, you have these creepy fellows with a spider. Overall, she had a fairly normal life, it seemed, but she was haunted by these visions. You mention she did go to Mexico, and that's where she did most of her work.

GUEST:
Not until after the war, she had her first showing down here.

APPRAISER:
She signed "Leonora Carrington" in 1961. Now, where did you get this?

GUEST:
It was originally my parents', and they had a large house, and they had a rather extensive collection of art. When they got this, I fell in love with it, and finally when they downsized, they knew that it was the one piece of all their artwork that I really adored, and so they gave it to me, and that was about 40 years ago.

APPRAISER:
That's great. Obviously, this was '61, so this is over 50 years old, and it was probably purchased around the time it was painted. Did they go to Mexico, or...?

GUEST:
I believe so. I believe they had friends in Mexico City who knew collectors. They were able to go to people's homes who had more paintings than they needed, literally warehousing them, from Mexican artists. And this came out, and my father dug deep and he bought it.

APPRAISER:
Right, well, it's a fabulous example of her work, and really relates that personal angst that she had. Now, she painted in a variety of different mediums. This is a piece on canvas, so it looks like it's primarily oil. Recently, her value has come up a bit because she has passed away. She died in 2011. She lived to be 94, I believe. Her works are sold mainly in Latin American sales. There's a lot of interest in those. Have you had it appraised?

GUEST:
I have not. I do know what my parents paid for it. I believe they said they bought it somewhere around $7,000 to $10,000, which was a big price to pay for a painting. I'm sure my father had to think twice about it when he did it.

APPRAISER:
Right now, I would expect an auction estimate of $200,000 to $300,000 these days.

GUEST:
They bought well. Amazing."

***

To view this portion of the show, go to this PBS page.

What a fabulous painting!

The Magic of Art & The Art of Magic

"Personaje Astral" - oil on board - 1961 - Remedios Varo

"Behind the veil of all the hieratic and mystical allegories of ancient doctrines, behind the shadows and the strange ordeals of all initiations, under the seal of all sacred writings, in the ruins of Nineveh or Thebes, on the crumbling stones of the old temples, and on the blackened visage of the Assyrian or Egyptian sphinx, in the monstrous or marvelous paintings which interpret to the faithful of India the inspired pages of the Vedas, in the strange emblems of our old books of alchemy, in the ceremonies at reception practiced by all mysterious societies, traces are found of a doctrine which is everywhere the same, and everywhere carefully concealed. Occult philosophy seems to have been the nurse or god-mother of all intellectual forces, the key of all divine obscurities, and the absolute queen of society in those ages when it was reserved exclusively for the education of priests and of kings. It reigned in Persia with the magi, who at length perished, as perish all masters of the world, because they abused their power..."

- Eliphas Levi, from his introduction to Transcendental Magic: Its Doctrine and Ritual, 1856

"Actually, art and magic are pretty much synonymous. I would imagine that this all goes back to the phenomenon of representation, when, in our primordial past, some genius or other actually flirted upon the winning formula of “This means that.” Whether “this” was a voice or “that” was a mark upon a dry wall or “that” was a guttural sound, it was that moment of representation. That actually transformed us from what we were into what we would be. It gave us the possibility, all of a sudden, of language. And when you have language, you can describe pictorially or verbally the strange and mystifying world that you see around you, and it’s probably not long before you also realize that, hey, you can just make stuff up. The central art of enchantment is weaving a web of words around somebody. And we would’ve noticed very early on that the words we are listening to alter our consciousness, and using the way they can transform it, take it to places we’ve never dreamed of, places that don’t exist."

- Alan Moore via a 2013 interview found here.

“In Mexico City they somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remedios Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled “Bordando el Manto Terrestre,” were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were contained in the tapestry, and the tapestry was the world."

- excerpt from Thomas Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" (full quote)

Remedios, I told you that I am making you a spell against [the evil eye]. There it is. Last night I had a fever of 38, auto-suggestion perhaps—I do not feel well enough to go out—Come to see me if you can? Can both of you come to drink your tequila? … Leonora.

- Alleged Note from Leonora Carrington to Remedios Varo written on a drawing - found here.

***

Alan Moore, described as "the greatest graphic novel writer in history" - and, a self-professed magician - has been constellating on the web in recent weeks, beginning with the Mysterious Universe article: Artists Manipulate Minds Using Powerful Magic. Well, that's an attention grabber for sure, but, In the article, Lee Arnold is, for the most part, referring to graphic art; pulling examples from the advertising world, and the slick shlock found on television. But, then, the ways and means by which we're manipulated via the televised world is a given; it goes without saying. In reference to magic however, advertising and commercial iconography is the lowest common denominator - the bottom feeder - of the creative spectrum. It represents mere tricks of the trade, a practiced sleight of hand, and not the workings of the "Magus."

But, it got me to thinking about art and magic, and, although Moore was elucidating specifically on the written word - he is, after all, a writer - my thoughts turned to line and form... as they would, in my perennial investigation of a form language.

Patron Saint #9: Kay Sage - "I Walk Without Echo"

The Instant - Oil on canvas - Kay Sage, 1949 - Mattatuck Museum, CT

“I can’t tell you what it would mean to most people, but I do know what it means to me. It’s a sort of showing what’s inside - things half mechanical, half alive. The mountain itself can represent almost anything - a human being, life, the world, any fundamental thing.” 

- Kay Sage, Time magazine, March 13, 1950, on her painting "The Instant"

"Consider Kay Sage (1898-1963) the anti-Thomas Kinkade. She was America’s great painter of menace, dread, and the post-apocalyptic future. Her trademark was “the sulphurous light before a thunderstorm,” observed biographer Régine Tessier. Like a thunderstorm, Sage’s art could be depressing and exhilarating. A true contrarian might nominate Sage as the best of all the Western Hemisphere surrealists."

- excerpt from Kay Sage, Painter of an Odd Future - William Poundstone

via an April 30, 2012 Art Info article


"And what's in it for me my pretty young thing?
Why should I whistle, when the caged bird sings?
If you lose a wager with the king of the sea
You'll spend the rest of forever in the cage with me"

- Verse from "Soul Cages" - Sting - 1991

***

The "anti-Thomas Kinkade" is an apt description for Kay Sage, American Surrealist, who found her artistic voice in Paris in the late 1930's, at the age of 44. Counterpoint to Kincaide's illustrations of lush, kitschy cottages in idealized, antiquated country settings, we have Sage's silent and spare views of some timeless, alien stratosphere. Then again, in comparison to the veritable cottage industry (pun intended) generated by Thomas Kincade (January 19, 1958 – April 6, 2012) Sage's subliminal messages on canvas are relatively obscure.

"! Walk Without Echo" was the title of the posthumous exhibit of Sage's collection in Mattatuck Museum, Connecticut, 2007. I'm not sure if this line was taken from one of her poems, a journal entry, or the creation of the curator, but it, too, is an apt description of Sage's work, and, perhaps, an ironic illusion to her legacy as an artist. (Regarding all images which follow - click on for a larger view.)
 

In the Third Sleep - Oil on Canvas - Kay Sage,1944 - The Art Institute of Chicago

Despite having been associated with the coveted circle of artists that surrounded Andre Breton, the founder of Surrealism, in the early half of the 20th century, Sage was a peripheral figure, never to know the encouragement and acceptance afforded to male members of that regime. Of course, the Surrealist movement was famous for its inherent misogynistic stance, but Sage was especially unpopular. To begin with, she hailed from the upper-crust  bourgeoisie, and had been married previously to an Italian nobleman. Her presence in Paris was only made possible by an inheritance from her deceased father. As it so happened, she was intensely disliked as a matter of course by the other artists and their wives, especially when she married Yves Tanguy, a Surrealist illuminary. Their alliance apparently enraged Breton to such a degree that his deep friendship with Tanguy eventually evaporated in 1949. All of this, in spite of the fact, that it was, albeit indirectly, through Sage that Breton, and a number of other Surrealists, were able to flee Paris at the beginning of World War II, and relocate to New York. Apparently, even as guests to the Tanguy's eventual home in Woodbury, Connecticut, Kay Sage would not win any lasting friendships within the Surrealist cabal. As late as 1974, and more than a decade after Sage's death, Enrico Donati still found it necessary to remark:

"Tanguy was the painter. I mean, we were the friends of Tanguy because he was the painter, the master. She was his wife, but we went there, to Woodbury, to see Tanguy. She was Mrs. Tanguy so she was there, too, but he was our friend. She was the friend of nobody." * 

The journalists of the day were no better. After a Sage painting  had won 1st prize in the Eastern States Exposition - in which Tanguy had also exhibited -  in Connecticut in 1951, the Hartford Times reported the news under the headline: "Housewife Wins Art Exhibition".

Danger, Construction Ahead- Oil on canvas - Kay Sage, 194o - Yale University Art Gallery

As tragic a figure as Kay Sage was in many respects, I think in the last analysis, her work resonates more with the 21st century zeitgeist than most of her more celebrated peers. And, unlike them - with the exception of Tanguy and Matta - her paintings portray an inner reality witnessed, and masterfully documented, as opposed to a number of Surrealistic creations which were contrived primarily to shock and/or entertain. We may not be able to name the world in which Kay Sage's psyche wandered, but that she wandered there is something we immediately accept. We may not, for that matter, find her observations of this enigmatic world altogether pleasant - few have; often describing her images as dismal and devoid of life - but we never question their validity. My personal interpretation, however, is that "life", or its metaphor, is certainly apparent in her work. It is organic life which is represented by the swathes of wind-blown, or, preternaturally suspended fabric, undulating silently and phantom-like within each of her eerie linear vistas. Presented as a life-form in this way, the fabric takes on an immortal aspect - an almost sentient presence - while, at the same time, transcends the limits imposed by both gender and species. Often, Sage's vistas have the ambience of seascapes receding to a blank, ocean-like horizon. Upon closer inspection, however, the backgrounds are not comprised of water at all, but are of a static substance, engraved with geometric abstractions.  This is especially true in the painting "In the Third Sleep" (second image from the top), a strange image which brings to mind a landing strip on an almost Martian-like planet.**

  As for it, and the image "Danger, Construction Ahead" (directly above), both are examples of paintings that may have spawned half a dozen contemporary Sci-Fi illustrators, despite having been painted in the 1940's.

On the First of March, Crows Begin to Search - Oil on canvas - Kay Sage,1947 - Wellesley College, MA

That being said, most of Sage's contemporaries describe her as being introverted, distant, and somewhat chilly in comparison to Tanguy, the proverbial life of the party. And comparing the work of the two artists, one might find evidence of this. Both artists drew their inspiration from inner  - almost paranormal - dimensions (see this description of Tanguy's work), and both artists, to some degree, were influenced by the early work of de Chirico. But, whereas Tanguy's biomorphic shapes (see "Phantoms" below) are somewhat whimsical, Sage's strange figures generally are not (with the possible exception of the image above). Later in her career, she developed an attraction to a variety of latticework (see detail below), solemn structures, in which her biomorphic fabrics are trapped within... veritable "Soul Cages" looming over a murky, slack water.

(Left) Phantoms - Oil on Canvas - YvesTanguy, 1928
(Center) Photo of Kay Sage with her painting, Suspension Bridge for Swallows, 1957 
(Right) Detail of Tomorrow is Never - Oil on canvas - Kay Sage, 1955 - Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY

As it stands, had I written this post 20 years ago, Patron Saint # 9 would've probably been Kay Sage's husband, Yves Tanguy - who, incidentally, was both friend and mentor to Matta, Patron Saint #2 - the more celebrated Surrealist. I hadn't even known about Kay Sage 20 years ago. Why is this? Well, for the same reason I hadn't known about Surrealist painter, Leonora Carrington***, the lover of the Surrealist, Max Ernst, 20 years ago... nor, for that matter, Surrealist artist and designer, Dorothea Tanning, Ernst's second wife. Female artists who bonded with male artists in the 20th Century did so at the risk of anonymity, most especially in the Surrealist community, where women may have been idealized as muses and objets d'art in themselves, but thoroughly dismissed as intellectual and creative equals. Another case in point, the Surrealist, Gerrie von Pribosic Gutmann, wife of the photographer and painter, John Gutmann. Ever hear of her? I'm willing to bet you haven't. She has a handful of paintings in cyberspace and no Wiki entry. A number of links to Imogen Cunninghams's photographic portrait of Gerri Gutmann is what you're most likely to find in a search.

Photo of John and Gerri Gutmann found here

Not all Surrealists in the dual role of Surrealist wife/Surrealist artist fell into obscurity, however. Frida Kahlo (deservedly) was to eventually outshine her husband, Diego Rivera, as the world slipped into the 21st century. Then again, if it means anything, both Carrington and Tanning out-lived Max Ernst by decades - Carrington passing away in 2011 at the age of 94, and Tanning, earlier this year at the age of 101 - both artists remaining prolific and relevant till their very last dance. Sage and Gutmann, however, did not fare so well. Eight years after the death of Tanguy in 1955 (due to a cerebral hemorrhage), Kay Sage, despondent, and in ill health, fatally shot herself through the heart, January, 1963. As for Gerrie Gutmann, her suicide is currently no more than a mere caption to one of her husband's photographs online.

And, once again, referring to the "enlightenment" one is likely to find in cyberspace, we only have to look at the roster of artists included in Wiki's definitive collection: WikiPaintings, Visual Art Encyclopedia. Neither Sage, Carrington, Tanning (nor, for that matter, my previous female "Patron Saints":  Alice Pelton, Louise Nevelson, Vali Meyers, and Sakiko Ide) are included. (Note: Thomas Kincaide, on the other hand, is.)

Below is a video featuring a collection of Kay Sage's work. The video, along with a content description and short biography of Sage can be found here.

For those who might be interested, Kay Sage's posthumously published memoirs - "China Eggs" - covering the period from 1910-1935 can be found for sale in limited form on the net. Apparently this is a paperback edition published in 1996. However, I note that a mysterious hardcover edition does exist, supposedly published in 1955. Very curious.

* My major source of reference for this post, and, for which I am grateful, is Judith D. Souther's biography of Sage, A House of Her Own, Kay Sage, Solitary Surrealist.

** (Footnote added 12/10/12) Regarding Sage's "static substance, engraved with geometric abstractions", it occurs to me now that they might also appear as the detritus in the foreground of the first image "The Instant"... in this case, appearing as the dismantled platform. The word which first came to my mind, however, was "deconstructed", which has an interesting definition which may or may not be relative, but, I'll copy it here anyway: "to analyze (a text or a linguistic or conceptual system) by deconstruction, typically in order to expose its hidden internal assumptions and contradictions and subvert its apparent significance or unity."

*** Leonora Carrington - Patron Saint # 8  Note: The post linked to here has been updated with videos for both Carrington and Patron Saint #7, Remedios Varo.

Here are individual links for examples of the following artist's works: Kay Sage, Leonora Carrington, Dorothea Tanning, and Gerrie Gutmann.

For other listings of Surrealist women, try here, and here.