Leonora Carrington was an English-born Mexican Surrealist artist and writer. She is known for her mysterious, autobiographical and dreamlike paintings that include themes of sorcery, alchemy, the occult and metamorphosis which make her art strikingly captivating.
Background
Mrs. Carrington was born in Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire, United Kingdom, on April 6, 1917. She was the only daughter among four children of Harold Carrington and Maurie Moorhead Carrington. Her father was an affluent textile magnet. She was brought up in the family estate, Crookhey Hall, surrounded by animals especially horses. She would listen to Celtic mythology and folktales from her Irish mother and Irish nanny Mary Cavanaugh. Many of these would later find place in her art work.
Education
Leonora Carrington was a rebellious child and educated by a string of tutors, nuns and governesses. She faced expulsion from two schools, including New Hall School, Chelmsford, following which her family enrolled her at Mrs Penrose's Academy of Art in Florence. Her study of paintings started there and during this time she had the opportunity to visit few of the best art museums of the world. She also, briefly, attended St Mary's convent school in Ascot. She got introduced to Surrealist paintings in 1927 in a gallery in Left Bank in Paris and also met several Surrealists including Pablo Picasso, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Yves Tanguy.
Though her mother inspired her to pursue a career in art, her father was against it and later reluctantly allowed her to shift to London where she joined Chelsea School of Art (later Chelsea College of Arts) in 1935. After a year Carrington took transfer to Ozenfant Academy with the aid of her father’s friend Serge Chermayeff, and attended it till 1938.
In 1936 Mrs. Carrington visited the International Surrealist Exhibition held at London and was fascinated by the work of Max Ernst, a German surrealist painter, graphic artist, poet and sculptor. Impressed by the painter, she created her own paintings, one of her most notable early works was Self-Portrait: The Inn of the Dawn Horse (1936-1937). It featured figures of hyenas and horses that dominated many of her future works. Then she took part in the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme held in Paris and also at a Surrealism exhibition in Amsterdam.
Becoming a couple, Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington supported and respected each other’s work. Her artworks during this time include The Horses of Lord Candlestick (1938), The Meal of Lord Candlestick (1938), The Inn of the Dawn Horse (Self-Portrait) in 1939 and Portrait of Max Ernst (1939). Influence of surrealism was also evident from her prolific writings during this period that include The House of Fear (1938), The Oval Lady (1938) and The Debutante first published in 1940.
During the outset of the Second World War, the French authorities arrested Ernst, but released him after a few weeks following intervention by several friends including Paul Eluard and Varian Fry. When Nazis invaded France, the Gestapo arrested Max Ernst again but he managed to escape to America with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, leaving Carrington behind.
Leonora Carrington went into a state of melancholy following Max Ernst’s arrest and she escaped to Spain where she had a mental breakdown at the British Embassy in Madrid. She had to be treated in a mental asylum in Santander by her parents and after she was released and taken to Lisbon she again escaped to seek retreat in the Mexican Embassy. To secure passage to New York she got into a marriage of convenience in 1941. She continued with her artistic works in New York and after about a year returned to Mexico. She became a citizen of Mexico and permanently settled there in 1942.
Mrs. Carrington devoted herself to her artwork in the 1940s and 1950s, developing an intensely personal Surrealist sensibility that combined autobiographical and occult symbolism. She was not interested in the writings of Sigmund Freud, as were other Surrealists in the movement. She instead focused on magical realism and alchemy and used autobiographical detail and symbolism as the subjects of her paintings. Leonora Carrington was interested in presenting female sexuality as she experienced it, rather than as that of male surrealists’ characterization of female sexuality. Carrington’s work of the 1940s is focused on the underlying theme of women’s role in the creative process.
She grew close with several other Surrealists while working in Mexico, including Remedios Varo and Benjamin Péret. She penned down her hysterical experience in the asylum in a novel Down Below (1944). Her artworks Portrait of Dr. Morales (1940) and Map of Down Below (1943) also narrate this ordeal. Many of her paintings were bought by Edward James, a Surrealist poet and patron, some of which are still presented at his former home in West Dean, West Sussex, which now stands as the West Dean College. In 1947 James organised an exhibition of her works in New York’s Pierre Matisse Gallery. The international Surrealism exhibition where she participated as the only woman professional artist turned up to be the most significant one for Leonora Carrington and gave her instant international fame.
Receiving a government commission in 1963 she created El Mundo Mágico de los Mayas a huge mural for México’s National Museum of Anthropology which is presently placed in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico. She also designed the poster of the Mexican Women's Liberation movement - Mujeres conscienscia.
From the 1990s onward, Leonora Carrington divided her time between her home in Mexico City and visits to New York and Chicago. During these late years, she began producing bronze sculptures of animals and human figures in addition to her paintings, prints, and drawings. Some of her sculptures were publicly exhibited on the streets of Mexico City for several months in 2008.
Mrs. Carrington was raised in a Roman Catholic family.
Views
Quotations:
"People under seventy and over seven are very unreliable if they are not cats."
"You may not believe in magic but something very strange is happening at this very moment. Your head has dissolved into thin air and I can see the rhododendrons through your stomach. It's not that you are dead or anything dramatic like that, it is simply that you are fading away and I can't even remember your name."
"One has to be careful what one takes when one goes away forever."
"Reason must know the heart's reasons and every other reason."
"Military people never seem to apologize for killing each other yet novelists feel ashamed for writing some nice inert paper book that is not certain to be read by anybody."
"Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and bloodstream. I am no beauty, no mirror is necessary to assure me of this absolute fact. Nevertheless I have a death grip on this haggard frame as if it were the limpid body of Venus herself."
"Everyone's had an interesting life. Unless they're interested in business or something."
"I do not know of any religion that does not declare women to be feeble-minded, unclean, generally inferior creatures to males, although most Humans assume that we are the cream of all species. Women, alas; but thank God, Homo Sapiens! Most of us, I hope, are now aware that a woman should not have to demand Rights. The Rights were there from the beginning; they must be Taken Back Again, including the Mysteries which were ours and which were violated, stolen or destroyed, leaving us with the thankless hope of pleasing a male animal, probably of one’s own species."
"The Antichrists are antichristing each other with antichristly ferocity so I must go and make peace."
"You don't decide to paint. It's like getting hungry and going to the kitchen to eat. It's a need, not a choice."
Connections
Leonora Carrington met Max Ernst first in 1937, at 20, and soon got romantically involved with the 46 year old man. As her father did not accept the relationship, he disowned her. Ernst and Carrington moved to Paris and after separating from his wife Ernst settled in Saint Martin d’Ardèche with Carrington in 1938. However, some years later he left her. In 1941 Mrs. Carrington married the Mexican poet and diplomat Renato Leduc, a friend of Pablo Picasso. In their short-lived partnership, Carrington and Leduc traveled to New York before eventually requesting an amiable divorce. She got married for a second time to photographer Emerico Weisz in 1946. The couple had two sons: Gabrial, a poet, and Pablo, a Surrealist artist and a doctor.