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Leonora Carrington

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Ranked #9,680 in Arts & Design, #175,315 overall

Name:
Leonora Carrington

Born:
6 April 1917, Lancaster
Lancashire, England

Died:
25 May 2011 (aged 94)
Mexico City, Mexico

Occupation:
Surrealist painter

Leonora Carrington (April 6, 1917 - May 25, 2011) was a British-born Mexican artist, a surrealist painter and a novelist. She lived most of her life in Mexico City.

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Biography

Early life

Carrington was born in Clayton Green, South Lancaster, Lancashire, England. Her father was a wealthy textile manufacturer. She had an Irish nanny, Mary Cavanaugh, who told her Gaelic tales. Leonora had three brothers. Places she lived as a child included a house called Crookhey Hall.

Educated by governesses, tutors and nuns, she was expelled from two schools for her rebellious behaviour until her family sent her to Florence where she attended Mrs. Penrose's Academy of Art. Her father was opposed to an artist's career for her, but her mother encouraged her. She returned to England and was presented at Court, but according to her, she brought a book to read by Aldous Huxley Eyeless in Gaza (1936), instead.

In London she attended the Chelsea School of Art and joined the Academy of Amédée Ozenfant.

She saw her first Surrealist painting in a Left Bank gallery in 1927 (when she was ten years old), and met many surrealists, including Paul Éluard. She was already familiar with surrealism from Herbert Read's book.

Leonora Carrington found little encouragement from her family to forge an artistic career. Matthew Gale, curator at Tate Modern, singled out Surrealist poet and patron Edward James as the only champion of her work in Britain. James bought many of her paintings, and in 1947 arranged a show for her work at Pierre Matisse's Gallery in New York. Some works are still hanging at his former family home now West Dean College in West Dean, West Sussex.

Max Ernst

Carrington saw Max Ernst's work in the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London where she was immediately attracted to the Surrealist artist before actually meeting him.

She met Max Ernst at a party in London in 1937. The artists bonded and returned to Paris together where Ernst promptly separated from his wife. In 1938 they left Paris and settled in Saint Martin d'Ardèche in the Provence region, of the south of France. The new couple collaborated and supported each other's artistic development. With the outbreak of World War II, Max Ernst was arrested by French authorities for being a "hostile alien".

Thanks to the intercession of Paul Éluard, and other friends including the American journalist Varian Fry he was discharged a few weeks later.

Soon after the Nazi occupation of France, Ernst was arrested again, this time by the Gestapo. He managed to escape and flee to America with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, a sponsor of the arts. After Ernst's arrest, a devastated Carrington fled to Spain. Paralysing anxiety and growing delusions culminated in a final breakdown at the British embassy in Madrid. Her parents intervened and had her institutionalized. She was given cardiazol, a powerful GABA stimulator that was eventually banned by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other authorities. After being released into the care of a nurse who took her to Lisbon, Carrington ran away and sought refuge in the Mexican Embassy. Meanwhile, Ernst had been extricated from Europe with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, but Ernst and Carrington had experienced so much misery that they were unable to reconnect.

Leonora Carrington México City: by alecemusic | video info

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Mexico

Following the escape to Lisbon, Carrington arranged passage out of Europe with a Mexican diplomat (Renato Leduc), who was a friend of Picasso and who had agreed to marry Carrington as part of the travel arrangements to help her. Events from that period would inform her work perhaps forever. She lived and worked in Mexico after spending part of the 1960s in New York City.

"I didn't have time to be anyone's muse... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist." --Leonora Carrington, 1983
In Mexico she later married Emericko Weisz. They had two sons: Gabriel Weisz, an intellectual and a poet, and Pablo Weisz, a surrealist artist and doctor.

Leonora Carrington died in Mexico City on Wednesday May 25, 2011 while hospitalized due to complications from pneumonia.

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Quote

"I didn't have time to be anyone's muse...

I was too busy rebelling against my family
and learning to be an artist."

--Leonora Carrington, 1983

Work

The first important exhibition of her work appeared in 1947 at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York City. Leonora Carrington was invited to show her work in an international exhibition of Surrealism where she was the only female English professional painter.

She became a celebrity almost overnight. In Mexico she authored and has successfully published several books.

The first major exhibition of her work in the UK for twenty years took place at Chichester's Pallant House Gallery, West Sussex from 17 June to 12 September 2010 as part of a season of major international exhibitions called Surreal Friends, celebrating the place of women in the Surrealist movement.

Her work was exhibited alongside pieces by her close friends the Spanish painter Remedios Varo (1908-1963) and the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna (1912-2000).

Carrington was one of the last living Surrealist painters of her era. In 2005, Christie's auctioned Carrington's "Juggler". The realized price was $713,000, which set a new record for the highest price paid at auction for a living surrealist painter.

Books By Carrington

La Maison de la Peur (1938) - with illustrations by Max Ernst
Une chemise de nuit de flanelle (1951)
El Mundo Magico de Los Mayas (Museo Nacional de Antropología, 1964) - illustrated by Leonora Carrington.
The Oval Lady: Surreal Stories (Capra Press, 1975)
The Hearing Trumpet (Routledge, 1976)
The Stone Door (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1977)
The Seventh Horse and Other Tales (Dutton, 1988)
The House of Fear (Trans. K. Talbot and M. Warner. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988)
Down Below ( Chicago,Black Swan Press, 1972; renewed edition 1988)
Featuring Carrington
Jodorowsky, Alejandro. The Spiritual Journey Of Alejandro Jodorowsky (2008).
Elena Poniatowska. Leonora (2011)

Video

quote

"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."

- Leonora Carrington (The Hearing Trumpet)

Bibliography

Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (Thames and Hudson, New York, 1985).
Sills, Leslie & Whitman. A. "Visions: stories of women artists (Morton Grove, Illinois, 1993).
Aberth, Susan L. Leonora Carrington - Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (Lund Humphries, 2004).
Moorhead, Joanna. Another world (article about Carrington from the Daily Telegraph magazine, 24 Apr 2010).
Raay, Stefan van; Moorhead, Joanna; Arcq, Teresa. "Surreal Friends: Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati
Horna" (Lund Humphries in association with Pallant House Gallery, 2010).

Links

Dos surrealistas en Mexico: Alejandro Jodorowsky y Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington Online: Leonora Carrington [British-born Mexican Surrealist Painter and Writer, born in 1917] Guide to pictures of works by Leonora Carrington in art museum sites and image archives worldwide.
Leonora and me | Art and design | The Guardian: Leonora Carrington ran off with Max Ernst, hung out with Picasso, fled the Nazis and escaped from a psychiatric hospital. Joanna Moorhead travels to Mexico to track down her long-lost cousin, one of Britain's…
FREY NORRIS | Leonora Carrington: Frey Norris Gallery | Leonora Carrington
Surrealism, Surrealist Art by Leonora Carrington: surrealistic art by surrealist Leonora Carrington, links includes a Surrealist Gallery of work by Pablo Weisz-Carrington as well as Storiesby the artist and collaborators. Many Links on Surreal;ism and Surrealist art as well as linksfor artists can be found here.
http://www.surrealfriends.com/

dvd

THE FLOWERING OF THE CRONE: Leonora Carrington, Another Reality

Amazon Price: $125.00 (as of 05/30/2012)
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"I am armed with madness for a long voyage," states British born, prolific painter, sculptor, writer and visionary Leonora Carrington. Perhaps the last surviving artist of the original Surrealist artist movement, as well as the famously former lover of Max Ernst, Carrington's life and work is arguably not "surreal" at all, nor is it classifiable in any sense of the word.

Indebted to Surrealism, Carrington is nonetheless possessed of unique personal visions born from a fantastical interior life, one based in Celtic legend, alchemy, fairy tales, Tibetan Buddhism, Tarot, Kabbala, astrology, Mexican healing traditions and other mystical practices.

This portrait, the first such documentary of her life and work produced in the United States, covers Carrington's entire oeuvre, with footage from the 1940's through 2006, and includes a fanciful dramatization of her famous 1939 short story, "The Debutante."

Avant Garde - Experimental Cinema of the 1920s & 1930s

Amazon Price: $15.59 (as of 05/30/2012)
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In the latter half of the 20th century, Raymond Rohauer was one of the nation's foremost proponents of experimental cinema. Programming diverse films at the Coronet Theatre in Los Angeles, and making the films in his personal archive available for commercial distribution, he helped preserve and promote avant-garde cinema. This two-DVD collection assembles some of the most influential and eclectic short films in the Rohauer Collection, including works by Man Ray, Hans Richter, Marcel Duchamp, Watson & Webber, Fernand Leger, Joris Ivens, Dimitri Kirsanoff, Jean Epstein, and Orson Welles.