La dame ovale

First edition, one of 35 numbered copies on vélin bleu, most limited deluxe issue (tirage de tête). Spine and boards marginally faded as usual, otherwise a handsome copy.

Illustrated with 8 black-and-white photolithographs after collages by Max Ernst.

A rare copy of this collection of surrealist tales by Leonora Carrington, which “recall, through their very ‘English’ humour, certain adventures of Alice in Wonderland, blended with a more macabre imagination that at times brings to mind the cruel irony of Maldoror” (Susan Rubin Suleiman).

Illustrated with collages by Max Ernst, with whom she shared her life, this collection of tales “was one of their last collaborations before the rise of the Nazi regime led them to find a new artistic haven in Mexico” (The Art Insitute of Chicago).

The title story follows Lucrecia, whose fate becomes entwined with a rocking horse that comes to life, possesses her (or is possessed by her), before being destroyed by her father. This association runs throughout Carrington’s work; she identified deeply with the horse as a totemic animal. Unlike the beautiful princesses of traditional fairy tales, Carrington’s turning the heroine into a horse inverts the logic of the classic tale and confounds all its promises of normalisation. Carrington writes directly in French which lends her prose an additional layer of strangeness.

Among the other tales in the collection, “The Debutante” is deemed “unforgettable” by Suleiman: to escape a society evening organised by her mother, the heroine arranges to be replaced by a hyena, whom she dresses in the face of her maid. The unfortunate woman has to be eaten to enable the disguise. All of Carrington’s preferred artistic themes are included in a single episode: social convention, transgression, violence concealed within humour, and an implacable logic within the absurd.

The tales take on some staples of the Ernstian imagery he developed since the 1920s:

“The octopus and snakes in the frontispiece collage, for instance, refer directly to a collage from La Femme 100 têtes which, in turn, invites the viewer back to the eighth collage of La Dame ovale, notably on account of the moustache on the male face appearing in both collages” (Doris G. Eibl).

At times, however, collage, narrative, and even Carrington’s own paintings coalesce: “One striking example is found by comparing Carrington’s painting ‘Femme et Oiseau’, c. 1937-38 and a collage illustration by Ernst for La Dame ovale. Carrington’s painting shows a long-necked horse with a flowing mane and human face that somewhat resembles Carrington herself. The horse’s lower right contour is shared by a small magpie, which relates loosely to a passage in La Dame ovale where a magpie named Matilda flies in through a broken window to perch on the head of a hobbyhorse named Tartar. In Ernst’s collage, the magpie is joined to the horse’s forelock. Considering Ernst’s extensive use of birds as personal symbols and Carrington’s more recent self-identification with horses, it is plain that both images use symbolic animals to reflect the relationship of their creators, and that their physical fusion recreated an Androgyne, symbolic of the creative connections between the two artists”. (M. E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy. A Magician in Search of Myth).

“Approaching La Dame ovale is to venture into the orbit of a genuine myth — that of the Carrington-Ernst couple, the surrealist ménage par excellence, a total living work of art, or very nearly so, in which the boundaries between art and life seem suspended within a bubble of radical strangeness shattered by Second World War.” (Doris G. Eibl, Se répondre ou ne pas répondre : du dialogisme dans La Dame ovale de Leonora Carrington et Max Ernst).