Leonora Carrington’s Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection. She painted it in London/Paris in 1937-38.
The painting shows Carrington seated, looking directly at the viewer. A white rocking horse is behind her and a white horse running can be seen outside the window. Next to her seated figure is a hyena, also looking directly at the viewer. Hyenas (and animals in general) feature in Carrington’s work throughout her career.
Self-portraits reflect artists’ identities, specifically their view of that identity. Here, Carrington associates herself with the animals in the space. She is inside, but her hair is wild, like the horse’s mane outside the window. The hyena is a direct reflection of her - a wild animal trapped inside. Meanwhile, the white horse outside is
The gaze
There is a lot of scholarship around the concept of “the gaze” in art history. It refers to an individual’s perception of others - at the most basic level, where their eyes are pointing. (E.g., think about Mona Lisa staring at you). Art historians have broken the gaze into male vs. female, with men traditionally as the watcher and women as objects to be looked at.
Carrington and the hyena are looking directly back at you. She is confronting the viewer, confronting your objectification of her, confronting her sexuality head-on. By asserting her sexuality as a female artist, she is challenging the male-dominated Surrealist movement.
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Laura Mulvey’s 1972 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema