Leonora Carrington, the last of the Surrealists

“He was not a poet but a poem that walks, that smiles, that by opening its lips becomes a bird, then a fish, then disappears”. With these words the Mexican intellectual Octavio Paz describes his friend Leonora Carringtonpainter, sculptor, illustrator but also writer and playwright with an unmistakable style, whose research anticipated the most important contemporary artistic trends. Master of the alchemical transmutations and metamorphoses between humans and animals that populate her mysterious paintings, the artist, who died at the age of 94 in 2011, traveled the world during her long life, first moving to the capitals of art in Europe, then to New York and finally to Mexico Cityplace where he will settle and spend the longest part of his life.

Carrington also chronologically spanned the entire twentieth century, with its dramatic events on a global scale, arriving “down to the bottom”, on a personal level, as the title of the story of the hallucinatory journey into madness that took place in 1937 states. It was in fact in that year that she was locked up in a Spanish psychiatric institution for six months, overwhelmed not only by her same terrible imaginations, but also by the sadistic doctor who followed her. The artist, while remaining marked for life by that terrible experience, nevertheless managed to overcome it by keeping her creativity unscathed, despite the heavy drugs administered there, and this thanks to a great inner strength that fueled her firm conviction that to confine her first in a convent and then in an asylum had not been her real psychic pathology, but her political ideas which, in that now Francoist Spain, must have induced the authorities to lock her up, with the authorization of the British consul and the consent of her father. Often her extra-ordinary biographical events have obscured the power of her art, however later re-evaluated, having several scholars investigated, since her disappearance, the real revolutionary scope of her work which anticipated many of the most urgent intellectual trends today .

The topicality of Leonora Carrington’s work is perhaps the “answer to the increasingly pressing need for spirituality in contemporary society”, says the scholar Giulia Ingarao in the note to the second edition, released this year, of her pioneering study in Italy published in 2014, entitled Leonora Carrington – un viaggio nel Novecento. From the surrealist dream to the magic of Mexico (Mimesis). “In recent years, her production has been the object of study and of growing international interest. Above all, a line of research closely linked to the relationship between art and magic has developed, a dominant theme in the syncretic figures and landscapes painted by Carrington”.

Reading Giulia Ingarao’s book, following the traces that lead to identifying the intensity of Leonora Carrington’s artistic charge, is like going through the last century along the story of life and art – in this case closely connected – of a woman who, embodying the essence of the free spirit, followed his most authentic inclinations and made his fantastic visions concrete.

Ingarao’s work succeeds in outlining, in many of its multiple and by no means easy facets, the human and artistic profile of an emblematic figure who already in the 1950s had anticipated one of the most important revolutions that characterized 20th century art: that of female self-awareness and the consequent construction of an alternative, magical and ecological imaginary, today we would say eco-feminist.

An artist mistakenly considered, for a long time in Europe, simply “the muse” of the Surrealists or better known through the exceptional events of her adventurous life that begins in her native England – where her irregular beauty is immortalized by Cecil Beaton’s shots in 1934 , before the debutante ball at the Hotel Ritz in Piccadilly – and continues with the move to Paris fleeing a patriarchal and suffocating family environment, after meeting Max Ernst at an exhibition on Surrealism: “I fell in love with the paintings of Max before I fell in love with him,” Leonora would later say. Despite the scandal that the age difference and the painter’s sentimental situation aroused among the right-thinking people of the time (Carrington was 19, Ernst 46 and was still married to his third wife), the two live their “amor-fou ”, at the end of the thirties, in the capital of world art in rue Jacob, a stone’s throw from the house of his friend Picasso. Ernst called her his “bride in the wind” or “femme-enfant”, but their irregular union was so opposed by Carrington’s father that he came to disown his daughter “who had chosen an “elderly pornography painter” as a companion” and tried to boycott both their love affair and Ernst’s career in every way. The couple therefore decides to move to the South of France, where she is often joined by Surrealist friends. It is the works of the two artists that decorate their home in Provence and – as documented by the images in Giulia Ingarao’s book – “doors, windows and furniture come alive with metamorphic creatures created by the fresh imagination of the young Englishwoman”. A period of great creativity, immortalized in the famous photographs of Lee Miller and traces of which remain in the paintings of both authors, now preserved in the most important museums in the world. The idyll is abruptly interrupted by the outbreak of the Second World War and, having declared Germany war on France, the German Ernest, despite being an anti-Nazi, is considered a foreign enemy and interned in a prison camp. From here begins a negative whirlwind of events, culminating in a psychotic crisis of Carrington, from her escape from occupied France to the hellish experience of the asylum in Spain. She manages to escape from that nightmare place and finds asylum in the Mexican embassy in Lisbon where she asks for help from the journalist Renato Leduc, whom she had previously met in Paris with Picasso. Leduc will become her first husband and it is with him that, in 1941, Carrington reaches the other side of the Atlantic. “The journey from Europe to America coincides with the epochal transformation that was taking place in the history of art at the beginning of the 1940s, with the move of the creative center from Paris to New York, where European exiles gather and where Peggy Guggenheim provides a fundamental contribution to building the art of the future”.

In the period of about a year that Leonora spends in New York, she finds all the artists exiled from Nazi-fascist Europe, including Max Ernst, who in the meantime had become the companion of the billionaire and collector Peggy Guggenheim, who had helped many of them to flee to the US. “Leonora often meets Breton and Buñuel (…) then also Masson, Chagall, Duchamp, Léger and Mondrian” and “she participates in the 31 Women exhibition, organized by Peggy Guggenheim, an event of fundamental importance which, for the first time, gives female artists visibility within the contemporary scenario”.

In the evening auction “Art of the 20th century” at Sotheby’s in New York, last November 15th, the work by Leonora Carrington, Preliminary sketches for the Opus Siniestrus (Cannibal Party), oil on canvas from 1965, was sold for nearly two million dollars. A figure that confirms the auction records achieved in the last decade, since the attention of the critics, and consequently also of the market, has focused on the extraordinary and prolific work of this visionary artist. “The last surrealist”, wrote the New York Times on the occasion of her death, because with her ended a generation of artists and intellectuals who had shared the artistic path with personalities such as Joan Mirò and Salvador Dalì. Although the influence of this extraordinary milieu of intellectuals can be traced above all in Leonora Carrington’s early works, she has often rejected the Surrealist label, claiming the autonomous development of her artistic and literary path. An attitude that unites her to the other great Mexican artist, Frida Kahlo: the latter too has always claimed to “never have been a surrealist”, because she said she had always painted her reality, not her dreams . In Mexico, reality is a “surreality”. Speaking of dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale also closes tomorrow, curated by Cecilia Alemani, whose evocative title, The milk of dreams, is taken from a book (published posthumously in 2013) with the fairy tales written and illustrated by Carrington on the walls of her children’s bedrooms in the 1950s. Here the artist describes a magical world populated by hybrid beings, capable of incredible metamorphoses, in which life is constantly reinvented through the imagination and where it is allowed to change, transform, become something else. A perfect theme to tell the attempt of today’s artists to represent the complexity of our existence defined as “post-human”.

It is in Mexico that Carrington produces most of her works and here she forges strong ties with exiled artists, from the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna to the painter Remedios Varo, her inseparable friend and companion with whom she forms an “eccentric and attractive, which represents an unusual female model, especially for Mexico at the time”, surrounded by cats, like the witches in fairy tales. She later becomes the mentor of Alejandro Jodorowski, initiating him into the mystery of the Tarot and participates in the birth of the Mexican feminist movement. Ingarao’s text presents several color plates that show us how “from this adopted land the Celtic myths of her childhood are reborn, like ghosts: magic, witchcraft and the cult of death return to being daily reality. The coexistence so felt between profoundly different cultures but the impossibility of a total fusion, an aspect that distinguishes Mexican civilization, intrigues it and stimulates its creativity… it deepens its studies of alchemy and esotericism, approaches Tibetan Buddhism, hermeticism and to the Jewish Kabbalah”.

Examples of this imaginary original are two works from 1946-1947, which also refer to the “shocking” experience of motherhood: The Giantess (also known as The Guardian of the Egg), where “a woman of immense proportions imposes herself on a population of Lilliputians at war” and L’amore che move il sole e l’altre stelle, in which “a procession of women and young girls accompanies the sacred transit of a chariot of the firmament filled with stardust… pulled by a celestial horse”. The syncretism typical of the artist’s work blends different cultures and eras, the myth of The White Goddess by Robert Graves (a crucial book for the artist, an avid reader) and Dante’s Divine Comedy, an author loved and studied from the beginning during his studies in Florence, along with his discovery of the pre-Renaissance Florentine and Sienese painters and their anti-naturalistic use of colour.

Guide animals have always populated Carrington’s imagination because they “act in a much more reasonable and brilliant way than human beings”. In fact, in the artist’s works “a deep bond is created between women and the animal world, establishing an archetypal partnership whose strength is rooted in the primordial power of nature”. Visions that often, by inflecting the English nonsense of literature read in childhood (Lewis Carroll and Jonathan Swift) with the macabre humor of Mexican culture, question Western patriarchal notions of what reality should be. It can be said that the protagonists of Carrington’s work are animals, often combined with women, considered forms of life of equal importance. Iconographies that also return in the rich production of tapestries, to which she dedicates herself together with her second husband, the Hungarian Jewish exile Csiki Weisz, collaborator of Robert Capa, in which the influence and collaboration of local artisans is evident. Troubled by deforestation, the artist – close to the indigenous world even after a period spent in the forests of Chiapas – finds correspondences between the fauna that populates her pictorial universe and that respectful cult of the animal world practiced daily by the Maya, in the common utopia of an interspecies world.