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Description: oil on canvas signed and dated 1961 lower left

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Dimensions: measurements 39 1/4 by 31 3/8 in. alternate measurements (99.6 by 79.7 cm)

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Provenance: Galería de Arte Mexicano, Mexico City
Sale: Christie's, New York, Important Latin American Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (Part I), May 15, 1996, lot 25, illustrated in color
Private Collection, New York

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Exhibited:

Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Dada and Surrealism in Chicago Collections , December 1, 1984-January 27, 1985, n.n.

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Published: Terry Ann R. Neff, In the Mind's Eye: Dada and Surrealism, Abbeville Press, New York, 1986, p. 127, illustrated

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Notes: Sometimes, while engaged in play as children, we accidentally stumbled upon unfathomably mysterious objects or scenarios. It seemed at these moments that a door was briefly thrown open to an unknown world that oddly, had been around us all along. Hiding behind a sofa, curtains, or some other comforting domestic barricade, we spied on this world with fascination and fear. Parents were not told, for even then we knew that these encounters were part of the uncanny privileges of childhood. Leonora Carrington?s 1961 painting Peek-a-Boo, captures such a moment, enabling us to return to a time when we did not need to explain away the marvelous. Speaking of her childhood Carrington has said, ?? I had very strange experiences with all kinds of ghosts and visions and things ?? Staring with rapt attention from beneath drapery, two children peek at a performance from fairyland. On a narrow proscenium, between panels of curtains, curious things are occurring. A slender, red-robed figure elegantly rides sidesaddle atop a spectral lion, while plucking a rustic harp and singing. Another figure stands to the right with arm outstretched and hand up and, like a vaudevillian magician, appears to be making a very large blue-green apple fly through the air. Finally, a moth-like brown bird floats towards that apple?not so much flying as levitating. The scene is made more puzzling by the fact that the two androgynous figures are uncommonly tall, bald, and pearly white. Drama has been of life-long interest to Carrington who wrote plays and designed stage sets and costumes. She was particularly active in the theater in Mexico during the 1950s and 1960s, at the same time she painted Peek-a-Boo, which perhaps explains its stage-like space and theatrical aura. As early as 1947 in her painting Night Nursery Everything, the artist sought to give us a glimpse into the secret world of children ? the imaginative realms they go to after the bedtime story is over, the lights out, the door shut. Carrington?s own sons, Gabriel (b. 1946) and Pablo (b. 1948), may be the children pictured in Peek-a-Boo. She told her sons, like her Irish grandmother had told her, about the mythical faery folk of Ireland called the Sidhe. Throughout the 1950s Carrington executed numerous works picturing these glowing, white, magical peoples? are these the figures in Peek-a-Boo? In Leonora Carrington?s highly unique brand of surrealism, anything goes. I do believe, however, that the floating apple is a mischievous wink to René Magritte. Susan L. Aberth