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Artist or Maker: Leonora Carrington (English B. 1917)
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Provenance: Acquired from the artist.
Anon. sale, Sotheby's, New York, Latin American Paintings, Drawings, Sculpture and Prints, 19 May 1993, lot 211. (illustrated in color).
Private collection, Miami.
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Exhibited: New York, Arnold Herstand Gallery, Surrealism: From Paris to New York, May - July 1990.
London, Serpentine Gallery, Leonora Carrington. Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures, 1940-1990, 1991, no. 57.
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Literature: J. Baron, Antologie plastique du surréalisme, Paris, 1980, p. 59 (illustrated in color).
Exhibition catalogue, Leonora Carrington. Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures, London, Serpentine Gallery, 1991, p. 86, no. 57 (illustrated in color).
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Notes: Evidence that Leonora Carrington was a budding Feminist in childhood is found in resentful recollections of how she was not allowed to fight back like a boy: "in the sense that there were things I wasn't supposed to do because I was a girl: biting, kicking, scratching my brothers, screaming - fighting in general." In one of her school notebooks, the young Leonora explores a way in which women have asserted themselves. Her subjects are the witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, or "the three weird sisters," as other characters in the play refer to them. Not only did they own their personal power but also, by understanding the weakness of others, played upon them.
Not until 1946, however, while reading Robert Graves' recently published The White Goddess, that many questions she had arrived at on her own about the struggle of women over time were answered, and also much specific information clarified her thinking. Graves' thesis is that the language of poetic myth in Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language related to religious ceremonies honoring the Moon-Goddess dating back to the Old Stone Age. But in late Minoan times invaders of Central Asia began to tamper with this language by altering or substituting matrilinear for patrilinear institutions to justify social changes. Thereafter, patriarchal societies developed and women were gradually subjugated more and more. It is likely that a synergism between Carrington's first pregnancy, which took place that same year, combined with the reading of The White Goddess, triggered what continues until today, an endless flow of works, both in her writing, painting, and sculpture that refers directly to the roles women have played over time.
It would be only a matter of time before the Women's Movement would come upon her contribution and use it as the voice of a kindred soul. A Warning to Mother (1973) was painted the year following Leonora Carrington's poster MUJERES CONCIENCIA, created specifically for the Women's Movement, and distributed around the world, even in China, in Chinese. The image is of the New Eve (the liberated woman) giving back the fruit of knowledge to the Old Eve, and in doing this, rejecting the patriarchal myth of her sinful nature as cause for the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It is to remind women everywhere to be conscious and to have conscience to restore the original goddess vision and avoid further destruction of the planet. A Warning to Mother reflects one of the realities of women afraid to rebel against the tyranny of men. Running into the kitchen, the husband is demanding to know what is for dinner. The frightened wife has heard him come in and hidden in a cabinet above the stove. There is nothing prepared, she has been taking care of the children, one of them is ill to his stomach, and she has not had time to cook. She is deathly afraid: above the lit pilot, and below her hidden head, hang a parody of a skull and bones, with the bones replaced by a knife and fork. They are a warning of what will happen to her if she remains a prisoner in the kitchen: she will be reduced to live out her life in the feminine space expected only to cook, feed the family, and care for the household. Or else...!
Salomon Grimberg
Dallas, August 2005
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