Curator, Anne Umland: There are so many wonderful things to observe in this picture.
My name is Anne Umland. I'm a Senior Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at MoMA.
Leonora Carrington loved fairy tales, folktales, and fantasy literature. She read a book called The White Goddess that Robert Graves wrote about the history of women with powers. That was something that informed her work and that she liked to paint. So this is just her thinking through, “Oh, what might the white goddess have looked like?”
But at the same time, this is a family portrait.
Carrington was married to a photographer named Emerico, or Chiki, Weisz, and perhaps we might think of him as the seated minotaur. And they had two young boys, whose names were Gabriel and Pablo. They were born in ‘46 and ‘47. This picture dates from the early fifties, so that's just around the right age. So, perhaps on some level, that mysterious, large female figure is Leonora Carrington in her position as mother at the table with her husband and two children.
Leonora Carrington was a wonderful storyteller and I think that the title of this work, And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, is an invitation to everyone who looks at this picture to think of what preceded that excerpt of a sentence and what happened afterwards.