Carrington, Leonora | Colección

20th-21st Century British

In Mexico and indeed worldwide, Leonora Carrington is considered the foremost woman artist of the Surrealism movement. Her painting, graphic art and sculpture are perhaps best-known today, but she also created mural works, drawings, masks and stage designs, rugs, furniture and tarot cards, not forgetting a surprising literary oeuvre, full of black humour and unbridled fantasy, consisting of short stories (La casa del miedo, 1938; La dama oval, 1939; La trompetilla acústica, 1976), memoires (Memorias de abajo, 1940) and plays (La invención del mole, 1960; Opus siniestrus, 1968). Her cinema collaborations included roles in movies (Los olvidados, Luis Buñuel, 1950; En este pueblo no hay ladrones, Alberto Isaac, 1964; Un alma pura, Juan Ibáñez, 1968) and art direction (La mansión de la locura, Juan López Moctezuma, 1971). As a painter, writer and avid reader, Carrington’s oeuvre drew from the most diverse sources.

An extremely beautiful woman with an eccentric personality, undisciplined and prone to infatuations, who suffered from bouts of insanity, Carrington led a peripatetic life and always remembered her European origins in her country of adoption.

Her own life is worthy of a fast-paced novel. Growing up in a castle in Lancashire, in Northern England, her wealthy family prepared her for an aristocratic life of leisure at the court of King George V (1865-1936). But Leonora’s desire for freedom was boundless: expelled from convent-run schools, she left for London to study at the Cubist school of Amédée Ozenfant (1886-1966). She fell in love with the surrealist artist Max Ernst (1891-1976), twice her age, and moved with him to Paris and later to the idyllic town of Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, in southern France. In 1940, following the Nazi occupation, Ernst was arrested, after which Leonora suffered a nervous breakdown and fled to Spain. Her family confined her in a psychiatric hospital in Santander (an experience she would describe in her harrowing memoir Down Below). Eventually released from hospital, she travelled to Madrid. There, at the Prado she discovered the paintings by Hieronymus Bosch (ca.1450-1516). From Madrid she escaped to New York with the Mexican poet Renato Leduc. In 1942 the couple settled in Mexico, where they were well received among the circle of European artists, exiles like herself: Remedios Varo (1908-1963), Benjamin Péret, José Horna (1909-1963) and his wife Kati (1912-2000), Wolfgang Paalen (1905-1959), Alice Rahon (1904-1987) and Luis Buñuel. She found an unconditional patron in Edward James, an English collector specialising in surrealist art. In 1946, by now divorced from Leduc, she married the Hungarian photographer Imre “Chiki” Weisz (1911-2007) with whom she had two sons.

Her career as an artist took off in the late-1940s. In 1948 she had her first solo exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. In Mexico, Carrington exhibited at Galería de Arte Mexicano. Her career progressed until eventually reaching resounding success in her old age.

Several exhibitions contributed to consolidate her growing fame. The show Cuentos mágicos, organised by the Museo de Arte Moderno and later touring to MARCO, in Monterrey, and supported by Fundación BBVA, commemorated the hundred anniversary of her birth. It studied the ensemble of visual, literary, philosophical and social interests of this extraordinary artist, from her privileged childhood in England and her early steps as a promising painter and artist in Paris and New York, to her prolific career in exile in Mexico. Active till the end of her life, Leonora Carrington died at the age of 92.