Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington (born April 6, 1917, Clayton Green, Lancashire, England—died May 25, 2011, Mexico City, Mexico) was an English-born Mexican Surrealist artist and writer known for her haunting, autobiographical, somewhat inscrutable paintings that incorporate images of sorcery, metamorphosis, alchemy, and the occult.

Carrington was raised in a wealthy Roman Catholic family on a large estate called Crookhey Hall. Carrington’s Irish mother and Irish nanny introduced her to Celtic mythology and Irish folklore, images of which later appeared in her art. From an early age Carrington rebelled against both her family and her religious upbringing. She was expelled from at least two convent schools before being sent to boarding school in Florence at about age 14. There she began to study painting and had access to some of the world’s best art museums. Reluctantly, Carrington’s parents let her move to London to pursue art at Amédée Ozenfant’s academy. There she encountered Surrealism for the first time. She met Max Ernst in 1937 and soon became romantically involved with him. When Carrington, just 20 years old, ran off to Paris to live with 46-year-old Ernst, her father was shocked and subsequently disowned her.

In Paris, Carrington met the wider Surrealist circle: André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Léonor Fini, and others. She created her earliest Surrealist works in the next two years, including her well-known Self-Portrait: The Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937–38), which shows her with a wild mane of hair in a room with a rocking horse floating behind her, a hyena at her feet, and a white horse galloping away outside the window. Images of the horse and the hyena, which continued to figure prominently in her work, reveal a lifelong love of animals.

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In 1938 Carrington participated in both the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris and a Surrealism exhibition in Amsterdam. That year she and Ernst moved to the south of France, to a villa in the town of Saint-Martin d’Ardèche. She not only painted but also wrote prolifically while they lived there, authoring Surrealist short stories like The House of Fear (1938), illustrated by Ernst and first published as a chapbook, “The Debutante” (first published in 1940 in Breton’s Anthology of Black Humour), and “The Oval Lady” (1938). As in her paintings from that period, such as Self-Portrait, horses and hyenas appear in the stories. Carrington and Ernst also hosted a long roster of art world personalities, Fini, Lee Miller, Roland Penrose, and Peggy Guggenheim among them.

The couple lived in Saint-Martin d’Ardèche until 1940, when Ernst was interned as an enemy alien in a Nazi prison camp. Utterly distraught, Carrington left France for Spain and suffered a mental breakdown in 1940. As a result, she was hospitalized against her will in a mental institution in Santander, Spain. She wrote of the harsh treatment she endured there in her book Down Below (1944). She managed to escape further psychiatric treatment and, through a marriage of convenience with Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc, secured passage to New York in 1941. She stayed in New York City about a year, and in that time she continued to write and paint and reunited with other exiled Surrealists. She left New York City for Mexico in 1942, divorced Leduc, became a Mexican citizen, and settled in Mexico City, where she lived the rest of her life.

Carrington connected with a vibrant and creative group of European artists who had also fled to Mexico City in search of asylum. She forged a close friendship and working relationship with Spanish artist Remedios Varo, a Surrealist who had also been an acquaintance of Carrington’s in Paris before the war. Some of Carrington’s works from the 1940s and ’50s contain groupings of three women, such as Three Women Around the Table (1951); they are presumed to be paintings of herself, Varo, and Kati Horna, another friend. Carrington flourished in Mexico and painted fantastical compositions that portrayed metamorphoses. In 1946 she married Hungarian photographer Emerico Weisz and bore two children (1946 and 1947). Images of domesticity and motherhood—tinged with magic and sorcery—began to appear in her work at this time, as in The House Opposite (1945) and The Giantess (c. 1947).

Carrington maintained ties to the art world in the United States, and in 1947 the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York City hosted a large solo exhibition of her work. Well-recognized in her adopted country, she received a government commission to create a large mural for the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, which she titled El Mundo Mágico de los Mayas (completed 1963; “The Magical World of the Maya”). (The mural was moved to the Regional Museum of Anthropology and History of Chiapas in Tuxtla Gutiérrez in the 1980s.) In 1974 the artist published her best-known novel, The Hearing Trumpet—a surrealistic story of an elderly woman who learns of her family’s plan to commit her to a retirement home, which she discovers is a magical and strange place. In the 1990s Carrington began creating large bronze sculptures, a selection of which were displayed publicly in 2008 for several months on the streets of Mexico City.

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Carrington made history in 2005 when her painting Juggler (1954) sold at auction for $713,000, which was believed to be the highest price paid for a work by a living Surrealist artist. Throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, she was the subject of many exhibitions in Mexico and the United States—and after 1990 in England as well. When she died at age 94, Carrington was believed to be the last of the Surrealists.