A Surreal Life: Leonora Carrington, ten years on
“There are things that are not sayable. That’s why we have art.”
I first came across Leonora Carrington while reading Jennifer Higgie’s new book on female self-portraiture, The Mirror and the Palette. I became fascinated by the Anglo-Mexican painter’s page-turner of a tale, and how her devil may care personality meant she was able to break free from the shackles of her privileged upbringing in Lancashire to become an artistic expatriate in Mexico City. Her life story of resistance and rebellion seemed just as engrossing as her art. Next month is the tenth anniversary of her death.
Leonora Carrington was born in 1917, to Harold Carrington, an English, self-made textiles magnate and his Irish-born wife, Maurie Moorhead Carrington. Leonora spent her formative years at Crookey Hall – described as ‘grimly gothic’ by the architectural-historian John Martin Robinson – in Lancashire, England. During her childhood, she was surrounded by animals – especially horses – and would dream of the fairy tales from Celtic folklore, told to her by her Irish nanny. Memories of the dreary hall, the roaming animals and the woodland would continue to haunt Carrington’s imagination, influencing much of her written work as well as her surreal dreamscapes.
Predictably, Carrington was a disobedient child, expelled from various convent schools (for attempting to levitate and writing backwards) as well as seeing off a series of governesses, tutors and nuns. Throughout her childhood, she continued to rebel against class expectations (behaving cordially, marrying suitably, producing heirs) and decided she wanted to unlock herself from the suffocating rigidity of her class, with a bristly paintbrush as her key. As with many other Surrealist artists, she believed her background had stopped her from unleashing the creative potential of her unconscious.
Her father tried to encourage her to choose otherwise, telling her to pick any career other than artistry, suggesting “breeding fox terriers”. However, his pleas fell on deaf ears as Carrington would continue in her provocations. She read Aldous Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot Races and loudly discussed the symptoms of syphilis with a friend in the lobby of an upmarket hotel.
Finally, her exasperated parents let her study art, first in Florence, Italy, where she became inspired by medieval and Baroque sculpture and architecture. Then, upon returning to London, at the Chelsea School of Art. While studying, she found herself drawn to the mysterious milieu of the Surrealists. She marvelled over Herbert Read’s newly published book Surrealism, especially the book’s cover which was a reproduction of Max Ernst’s painting Two Children Menaced by a Nightingale (1924).
Fortuitously, 20-year old Carrington met the 46-year old (married with children) artist Max Ernst at a party – hosted by the architect Erno Goldfinger – in London in 1937. Ernst became enchanted with Carrington’s cold beauty. The two fell in love and Carrington turned her back on her upbringing and moved with Ernst to France. She was finally able to swap her rainy-days in Lancashire for twinkly-lit Paris, mixing with the likes of Andre Breton, Luis Buñel and Pablo Picasso.
It was during Ernst’s and Carrington’s short-lived affair that Leonora learnt how to immerse herself in Surrealist artwork, exploring the collaborative processes of painting and collage through dreamscapes and floor mosaics. However, their romantic cocoon soon burst at the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1940, Ernst (who was German) was interned by the French as an enemy alien – the first of three internments that he survived before finding refuge (with the help of Peggy Guggenheim) in New York in the early 1940’s.
Deserted and devastated, Carrington left France and moved to Madrid, where she suffered a psychotic breakdown. Suffering from repeated delusions and anxiety attacks, she was institutionalised in a lunatic asylum in Santander, where she was drugged, stripped naked and tied to a bed. In her memoir, Down Below (1944), she describes her total mental and physical breakdown as one which she would remember as the worst thing to ever happen to her. It continued to be a recurring theme in much of her writing and painting thereafter.
On her release, she moved back to Madrid where she ran into a man who she had met with Picasso in Paris, a Mexican poet diplomat called Renato Leduc. The pair were married at the British embassy in Lisbon in 1941, before they sailed for New York and then onto Mexico City. The marriage was short-lived.
Following her move to Mexico City in 1942, Carrington found her feet in what Andrew Breton described to her as “the surrealist place par excellence”. Her relationship with Leduc ended, but her freedom as an artist was born. Carrington then married the Hungarian-Jewish photographer, Emeric ‘Chiki’ Weisz and they had two sons, Pablo and Gabriel.
It was during the 1940s and 1950s that Carrington’s notoriety escalated. Her artworks were a combination of autobiographical symbolism, folklore and mysticism. She became well-versed on the Jungian psychology, studied the Kabbalah and Buddhism, became close to the Spanish artist Remedios Varo (who shared her fascination with alchemy) as well as the mytho-historical writings of the Popol Vuh, a foundation of sacred narratives of the K’iche’ people. All of these cultural influences – Celtic literature through to central American folk art – were synthesised and she began producing dreamscapes that were as colourful as they were dark.
Yet, Leonora loathed those who tried to over-interpret her work; she believed it to be a complete waste of time. In archive footage of Carrington in her later years, she is recorded telling her cousin, the journalist Joanna Moorhead, to stop trying to over-intellectualise her art: “You’re trying to intellectualise something, desperately, and you’re wasting your time. That’s not a way of understanding. To make a little sort of mini-logic, you’ll never understand by that road.”
The Anglo-Mexican painter was one of the last surviving members of the Surrealist movement before her death a decade ago in 2011, aged 94. She is seen as a national treasure in Mexico and here in the UK she has been described as Britain’s lost surrealist. Carrington’s story – shown best through her metamorphic books and paintings – are evocative of a talent that burnt as bright as the colours of Mexico City.