Leonora Carrington

Biography

In her “Self-Portrait”, also known as “The Inn of the Dawn Horse” (1937–1938), a young woman in white jodhpurs, with a mane of tangled hair, sits on the edge of an armchair. Her hand is stretched out towards a prancing hyena, and behind her a tailless rocking horse seems to fly. It is one of Leonora Carrington’s first Surrealist paintings and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

She was twenty. Shortly before, she had still been studying painting in London under Amédée Ozenfant.

She was born on 6 April 1917 at Westwood House in Clayton-le-Woods, near Chorley in Lancashire, into a Catholic family. Her father, Harold Wylde Carrington, was a wealthy textile manufacturer; her mother, Marie Moorhead, was Irish. The girl’s nanny was Irish too, and they often went to Ireland to visit her grandmother. From 1920 to 1927 the family lived at Crookhey Hall in Cockerham, a Gothic Revival mansion that took a strong hold on her imagination. She was taught by governesses, tutors and nuns; she was expelled from two schools, New Hall in Chelmsford among them, for disobedience, and her parents then sent her to Florence, to Mrs Penrose’s Academy of Art. Her father opposed her painting, while her mother encouraged it and gave her Herbert Read’s book “Surrealism” (1936). When she was presented at Court, by her own account, she took along Aldous Huxley’s novel “Eyeless in Gaza”. In 1935 she spent a year at the Chelsea School of Art, and then, with the help of her father’s friend, the architect Serge Chermayeff, she transferred to Ozenfant’s newly opened academy in London, where she was among the first students.

In 1936, at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, she saw the work of Max Ernst; in 1937 she met the man himself at a party and went with him to Paris. In 1938 they settled at Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche in the south of France and decorated their house with sculptures of guardian animals: she modelled a horse’s head in plaster, he made birds. That year she took part in group exhibitions of the Surrealists in Paris and Amsterdam, and in 1939 the two painted portraits of each other. Her “Portrait of Max Ernst” is built around Ernst alone and is dense with symbols.

When the war began, the French authorities arrested Ernst as an enemy alien. Friends secured his release a few weeks later, but after the German invasion he was arrested again; he escaped and, with Peggy Guggenheim’s help, left for the United States. Carrington went to Spain with her friend Catherine Yarrow and in Santander ended up in a psychiatric asylum; three years later, at André Breton’s suggestion, she described what she had been through there in the book “Down Below”. Accounts of how she got out differ. She herself said that her nanny came for her in a submarine. According to another version, she was released into the care of a keeper and was being taken through Portugal to a sanatorium in South Africa when she escaped in Lisbon. I have no way of checking the first story. In Lisbon she went to the Mexican legation to see the poet and diplomat Renato Leduc, to whom Picasso had once introduced her in Paris, and marriage to him allowed her to leave under the protection of diplomatic status. She and Ernst never came back together.

After a year in New York, in 1942 Carrington arrived in Mexico, where many European artists were seeking refuge at the time. That same year she took Mexican citizenship, and in 1943 she divorced Leduc. In Mexico City she grew close to the Spanish painter Remedios Varo; together they studied alchemy, the Kabbalah and the Maya “Popol Vuh”. She was also friends with the photographer Kati Horna, with Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes and Alejandro Jodorowsky, who staged her play “Penelope”. The English poet and patron Edward James bought up her paintings and in 1947 arranged an exhibition of her work at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. After about seven years in Mexico she had her first solo show in Mexico City, at the Galería Clardecor, and the press went on writing approvingly about it for months. In 1963 she painted the mural “The Magical World of the Maya”, based on local folk tales, for the National Museum of Anthropology. She spent part of the 1960s in New York. In 1965 Felipe Cazals made a documentary about her, with a screenplay by Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes. For Juan López Moctezuma’s horror film “The Mansion of Madness” (1973) she designed the sets and costumes together with her son Gabriel Weisz, and a white horse, her alter ego, keeps appearing on screen. The same year she drew the poster “Mujeres conciencia” for the women’s liberation movement in Mexico. She rejected the Surrealists’ habit of seeing her as a muse: “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse,” she said, being too busy rebelling against her family and learning her craft.

She painted in small brushstrokes, layer upon layer. Horses run through her work from childhood on, from “The Horses of Lord Candlestick”, where in her private code “Candlestick” stood for her family and “lord” for her father, to the story “The House of Fear”, her first published text, in which a horse guides the heroine. The hyena of the “Self-Portrait” returned in the story “The Debutante”. In “The Hearing Trumpet” the heroines are old women. Olga Neuwirth based her opera “Bählamms Fest”, to a libretto by Elfriede Jelinek and staged in 1999, on Carrington’s play “The Day of the Lamb” (1940). In 2005 Carrington received Mexico’s National Prize for Sciences and Arts.

She died in Mexico City on 25 May 2011, at the age of ninety-four, and was buried in the English Cemetery, the Panteón Inglés. In 2018 a Leonora Carrington Museum opened in San Luis Potosí, followed in the autumn of that year by a branch in Xilitla. In 2022 the Venice Biennale took the title of its main exhibition from her book “The Milk of Dreams”.