Daughter of the minotaur : Leonora Carrington and the surrealist image
Date
1984
Authors
Helland, Janice Valerie
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Abstract
Surrealism glorified the irrational part of the mind that was best portrayed by images of dream and myth. When Leonora Carrington, a British Surrealist artist, painted And then we saw the Daughter of the Minotaur in 1953, she visually described her career which began with Surrealism, as well as the development of her ideas about art which veered away from Surrealism. In this painting she replaced the minotaur, a recurring Surrealist image for the irrational, with a "Daughter of the Minotaur," her personal symbol for the occult, esoterism and feminism.
Carrington's imaginative use of symbols, dreamlike vistas and hybrid creatures, insured that her paintings were included in international Surrealist exhibitions. She has also had a number of one person exhibitions and published two novels in addition to short stories and plays but, to date, her work has not been treated in an academic study. Because her paintings and writings often complement each other, we can better understand the one by exploring the other. For this reason, I have supplemented an iconographic analysis of selected paintings with an analysis of her literary work. As we examine her life, her art, her writings and the influences upon her of other artists and art movements, two phases of development emerge: first, the rebellious phase (1937-1950) which shows the influence of Surrealism (Chapter II) and earlier European fantastic traditions (Chapter III); second, the esoteric feminist phase from 1950 to the present (Chapter IV). Such a division allows us to follow a progression in her work that merges in the late 1960s with a renewed interest in the occult shared by many contemporary feminists. Carrington drew mythic images and oneiric worlds from the basic concepts of Surrealism but she altered both the source and the direction as she embarked upon her search for a feminine identity in her works.