IV. Coda

And so we arrive at the end, as Leonora Carrington arrived at her self as an end. Upon further examination of the critical literature on Leonora Carrington, I have come to the conclusion that the theme which unifies all these articles, and which is the characteristic most evident in her works, is self-determination. All these authors, whether looking through the critical lens of feminism, wishing to align Leonora Carrington’s work philosophically with Surrealism, or trying to make sense of plots and characters in her stories, on some level discuss Carrington’s concern with the construction of her own identity. They all seem to include the notion that the independence and sense of self that Carrington has gained is due to her vocation as an artist, that is, painting and writing have helped her shape the self she is today, near the end of her life. (Grimberg 83).

All these authors all write in a tone which suggests that in painting these works, in engaging in the sort of therapy that art afforded her, she worked toward identity of Self as a goal or aim. The Self for her was a process with an end product which only she could define or determine, but which might not necessarily be finite, unified or explainable due to often conflicting experiences and stages of development that make up the experienced, established, and self-assured woman who is Leonora Carrington in 1999.

In researching for this project, it was apparent to me that theories of self-portraiture might make possible an explanation of Carrington’s intention which drew together the opinions of these authors outside the discourse of gender in a more holistically humanist critical framework. Certainly Marsha Meskimmon’s book offers up a plausible explanation for multiplication of self-images as a way for Women to gain subjectivity. However, it seems to me more apt to consider Carrington not just as a woman, but as a human being, and therefore I need a theory of personal development to lend me the vocabulary necessary to explain the contents of these later self-portraits which went beyond Meskimmon’s definition of self-portrait toward a theory of human nature. According to Meskimmon’s arguments, because Leonora Carrington is a woman, I can aptly characterize these works as self-portraits. In order to offer an explanation of the artists’s intention, however, I need a non-gendered language of the Self, uncluttered by femininst dogma.

Because an historical connection exists between Carrington and Jung, who was not only a clinical psychologist but also offered up a theory of human nature through an explication of personality development, a combination of Marsha Meskimmon’s and Claudia Schaefer’s ideas combined with the Jungian language of personality development would provide an appropriate interpretive scheme. In addition to being able to place her in a group of exiled Surrealist artists who consciously rejected Freud’s theory during the Second World War, (see page 5 of this essay), we know that Carrington read Jung in the 1960s, and she attests to the fact that his writings inspired her. In an interview with Paul de Angelis in 1991, when asked about religion and her spiritual life, she said,

Nunca me ha convencido ninguna secta y ninguna religión. La vez que he estado más cerce de sentirme convencida por algo fue con el budismo tibetano. Me parecía que en esa religión se seguían unas prácticas intelectualmente satisfactorias y, por otra parte, sus creencias son extraordinarias. Pero siempre me he movido en las fronteras de todo tipo de cosas, siempre he estado intentando descubrir algo que se correspondiese con mi propia experiencia, eso es lo que estaba haciendo realmente, intentar dar con algo que se asemejase a lo que yo sabía que tenía dentro. También estuve muy interesada en Jung. Supe de su existencia ya antes de la guerra; era alguien que llamaba la atención a los surrealistas (Chadwick, Realidad 154).

As far back as her first solo exhibition, critics have classified Carrington’s works as personal. In his 1948 review of this exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, Alfonso Lansford described the paintings he saw there as a form of “the artist’s personal escapism” (Lansford 17). On the occasion of Carrington’s major retrospective at the New York Center for Inter-American Relations, Suzi Gablik wrote of Carrington’s esoteric works, “It is a mythical cosmogony which harks back to the origins of the universe, a (sometimes monotonous) tumult of Cabalistic, Tantric and alchemical symbols, of Jungian archetypes, whirling dervishes and the mysteries of the Tarot” (Gablik 111).

Therefore Carrington might have, based upon her study of Jung’s theory which involves a great emphasis on taking responsibility for one’s own destiny (Hall 83), adopted Jung’s language as a way of describing herself. Thus the application of Jungian theory to Carrington’s later self-representations would be a more focused way to interpret them, because it provides names not only for the stages of development evident in the paintings, but also for the Self for which each painting is a metaphor, a fully realized, or as Jung would say, individuated self (Hall 83). After completing nearly a year’s worth of research on Leonora Carrington, it is clear that the next logical step in researching and re-contextualizing Carrington is a close Jungian reading of Carrington’s paintings in general. Tracing the appearance of the individuating archetypes chronologically might give more insight not only into what is happening to the characters in the painting, but also into how Carrington accepted responsibility for her own radical self-determinism.