Mary Leonora Carrington (6 April 191725 May 2011) was a British and Mexican surrealist painter and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.
Early life Carrington was born on 6 April 1917 at Westwood House in Clayton-le-Woods, Chorley, Lancashire,See Carrington's "El Mundo Magico de Los Mayas" England, into a Roman Catholic family. Her father, Harold Wylde Carrington, was a wealthy textile manufacturer,Robinson, Michael. Surrealism (Fulham: Star Fire, 2006), p. 312 and her mother, Marie (née Moorhead), was from Ireland.Leo Carrington & Sons website She had three brothers: Patrick, Gerald, and Arthur. From 1920 until 1927 she lived at Crookhey Hall, a Gothic Revival mansion in Cockerham, which exerted a great influence on her imagination.
Educated by governesses, tutors, and nuns, she was expelled from two schools, including New Hall School in ChelmsfordNew Hall School website. Retrieved 27 May 2011 for her rebellious behaviour, until her family sent her to Florence, where she attended Mrs Penrose's Academy of Art. She also, briefly, attended St Mary's convent school in Ascot. In 1927, at the age of ten, she saw her first Surrealist painting in a Left Bank gallery in Paris and later met many Surrealists, including Paul Éluard. Her father opposed her career as an artist, but her mother encouraged her. She returned to England and was presented at Court, but, according to her, because she had no intention of being "sold to the highest bidder" she brought a copy of Aldous Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza (1936) to read instead. In 1935, she attended the Chelsea School of Art in London for one year, and with the help of her father's friend Serge Chermayeff, she was able to transfer to the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts established by the French modernist Amédée Ozenfant in London (1936–38). She was one of the first students at the Academy, the others being Stella Snead and Ursula Goldfinger, under the instruction of Sari Dienes, who co-directed the school. She remained friends with Dienes throughout her life.
She became familiar with Surrealism from a copy of Herbert Read's book, Surrealism (1936), given to her by her mother, but she received little encouragement from her family to forge an artistic career. The Surrealist poet and patron Edward James was the champion of her work in Britain; James bought many of her paintings and arranged a show in 1947 for her work at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. Some works are still hanging at James' former family home, currently West Dean College in West Dean, West Sussex.Leonora and me (accessed online 4 April 2008)
Association with Max Ernst In 1936 Carrington saw the work of the German Surrealist Max Ernst at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London and was attracted to him before she even met him. In 1937 Carrington met Ernst at a party at the Goldfingers' in London with Sari Dienes, who was a friend of Ernst.Bird, M., The St Ives Artists: A Biography of Place and Time (Farnham: Lund Humphries, 2008), p. 44. The artists bonded and returned together to Paris, where Ernst promptly separated from his wife. In 1938 they left Paris and settled in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche in southern France. The new couple collaborated and supported each other's artistic development. The two artists created sculptures of guardian animals (Carrington created a plaster horse head, while Ernst created birds) to decorate their home in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche. In 1939 Carrington and Ernst painted portraits of each other. Both capture the ambivalence in their relationship, but whereas Ernst's The Triumph of Love features both artists in the composition,Francesca Bonazzoli and Michele Robecchi, Portraits Unmasked: The Story Behind the Faces, Prestel, London, 2020, pp. 30–33. Carrington's Portrait of Max Ernst focused solely on Ernst and is laced with heavy symbolism. The portrait was not her first Surrealist work; between 1937 and 1938 Carrington painted Self-Portrait, also called The Inn of the Dawn Horse, now exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sporting white jodhpurs and a wild mane of hair, Carrington is perched on the edge of a chair in this curious, dreamlike scene, her hand outstretched toward a prancing hyena and her back to a tailless rocking horse flying behind her.
With the outbreak of World War II Ernst, who was German, was arrested by the French authorities for being a "hostile alien." With the intercession of Paul Éluard, and other friends, including the American journalist Varian Fry, he was released a few weeks later. Soon after the Nazis invaded France, Ernst was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo, because his art was considered by the Nazis to be "degenerate." He managed to escape and flee to the United States with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, who was a sponsor of the arts.Max Ernst profile. Retrieved 21 July 2007
After Ernst's arrest Carrington was devastated and agreed to go to Spain with a friend, Catherine Yarrow.McConnell, Reed. "Surrealism's Beating Heart". The Baffler, 18 February 2021 She stayed with family friends in Madrid, and soon experienced two traumatic events. First, while she was alone in a cafe, Spanish soldiers took her to a hotel where they gang-raped her. Second, after a psychotic break caused by her paralyzing anxiety and delusions, she was admitted into an asylum in Santander. She was treated with Cardiazol shock therapy and Luminal (a barbiturate).Martin-Dominguez, J., "A British painter's nightmare in post-Civil War Spain", El País, 22 August 2017 She was released from the asylum into the care of a keeper, and was told that her parents had decided to send her to a sanatorium in South Africa. En route to South Africa, she stopped in Portugal, where she made her escape. She went to the Mexican diplomatic mission to find Renato Leduc, a poet and the Mexican diplomat. They had been introduced in Paris by their common acquaintance Pablo Picasso (the men knew each other from bull fights) and he agreed to a marriage of convenience with Carrington so that she would be accorded the immunity given to a diplomat's wife. She took Mexican nationality in 1942. The pair divorced in 1943. Meanwhile, Ernst had married Peggy Guggenheim in New York in 1941. That marriage ended a few years later. Ernst and Carrington never resumed their relationship.
Mexico
After spending a year in New York, in 1942 Leduc and Carrington went to Mexico—where many European artists fled in search of asylum—which she grew to love and where she lived, on and off, for the rest of her life.
When Carrington first came to Mexico she was preceded by the success of Surrealist exhibitions which allowed her to create many connections within the movement. Her connections within these Surrealist circles were influential in opening artistic doors that had long been closed to Mexican artists. After living in Mexico for seven years, Carrington held her first solo exhibition at the Galeria Clardecor. Much of the initial response from the public was very encouraging, and for months afterwards the press published positive and approving reviews.
After spending part of the 1960s in New York City, Carrington lived and worked in Mexico once again. While in Mexico she was asked, in 1963, to create a mural which she named El Mundo Magico de los Mayas, and which was influenced by folk stories from the region. The mural is now located in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City.
In 1973 Carrington designed Mujeres conciencia, a poster for the Women's Liberation movement in Mexico, depicting a 'new Eve.' In the 1970s, female artists of previous waves and generations responded to the more liberal climate and movement of the array of feminist waves. Many pushed the issues of women's liberation and consciousness within their work while others spoke out on issues instead of making art. Carrington frequently spoke about women's "legendary powers" and the need for women to take back "the rights that belonged to them." Many artists involved in surrealism regarded women to be useful as muses but not as artists in their own right. Carrington was adopted as a femme-enfant by the Surrealists because of her rebelliousness against her upper-class upbringing.
Carrington primarily focused on psychic freedom in the belief that such freedom cannot be achieved until political freedom is also accomplished. Through these beliefs Carrington understood that "greater cooperation and sharing of knowledge between politically active women in Mexico and North America" was important for emancipation. Carrington's political commitment led to her winning the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Women's Caucus for Art convention in New York in 1986. Throughout the decade women identified and defined an array of relationships to feminist and mainstream concepts and concerns. Continuing through the decade, women continued to question the meaning of existence through form and material.
Second marriage and children She later married Emerico Weisz (nicknamed "Chiki"), born in Hungary in 1911, a photographer and the darkroom manager for Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War. Together they had two sons: Gabriel, an intellectual and poet, and Pablo, a doctor and Surrealist artist. Chiki Weisz died on 17 January 2007, at home. He was 95 years old.
Death Leonora Carrington died on 25 May 2011, aged 94, in a hospital in Mexico City as a result of complications arising from pneumonia. Her remains were buried at Panteón Inglés (English Cemetery) in Mexico City.
Themes and major works
Carrington stated that: "I painted for myself...I never believed anyone would exhibit or buy my work." 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. 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.
Carrington's work is identified and compared with the Surrealist movement. Within the movement, there was a strong exploration of the woman's body combined with the mysterious forces of nature. During this time, female artists correlated the feminine figure with creative nature while using ironic stances.
When painting, she used small-brushstroke techniques, building up layers in a meticulous manner, creating rich imagery.
In Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) (1937–38), Carrington reflects on her own identity, associating herself with both the horse and hyena. She offers her own interpretation of female sexuality by looking toward her own sexual reality rather than theorizing on the subject, as was custom by other Surrealists in the movement. Carrington's move away from the characterization of female sexuality subverted the traditional male role of the Surrealist movement. Self-Portrait (1937–38) also offers insight into Carrington's interest in the "alchemical transformation of matter and her response to the Surrealist cult of desire as a source of creative inspiration." Self Portrait further explores the duality that comes with being a woman. This concept of duality is explored by Carrington using a mirror to assert duality of the self and the self being an observer with being observed. The hyena depicted in Self-Portrait (1937–38) joins both male and female into a whole, metaphoric of the worlds of the night and the dream. The symbol of the hyena is present in many of Carrington's later works, including "La Debutante" in her book of short stories The Oval Lady.