Leonora Carrington refused to be a Surrealist muse and painted instead
Presented at court as a debutante, Leonora Carrington brought an Aldous Huxley novel rather than be sold, as she put it, to the highest bidder. She ran off to France with Max Ernst, escaped wartime Europe through a marriage of convenience, and spent seven decades making strange, alchemical art in Mexico.
Westwood House, near Chorley in Lancashire, was her birthplace on 6 April 1917; she was the daughter of a rich textile manufacturer and an Irish mother. Crookhey Hall, the Gothic Revival mansion where she spent part of her childhood, fed her imagination. Expelled from two schools for rebelliousness, she saw her first Surrealist painting in Paris at ten. Her father opposed an art career; her mother backed it and gave her Herbert Read's book on Surrealism. She studied at the Chelsea School of Art and then the Ozenfant Academy in London.
At the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London she was drawn to Max Ernst's work, and she met him the following year. They settled together in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche in 1938, decorating the house with guardian animal sculptures; she made a plaster horse's head. In The Inn of the Dawn Horse, an early self-portrait, she painted her reaching toward a hyena with a rocking horse flying behind, animals that recur through her work. When war came, Ernst was interned and later fled to America with Peggy Guggenheim's help.
Carrington suffered a breakdown in Spain and was confined to an asylum in Santander. Escaping in Portugal while being sent to South Africa, she found the Mexican diplomat and poet Renato Leduc, whom she knew through Picasso, and married him for diplomatic protection. She took Mexican nationality in 1942 and moved to Mexico, where she stayed on and off for life, later marrying the Hungarian photographer Emerico Weisz and raising two sons.
She ignored Freud, unlike many Surrealists, and turned to alchemy, magic and her own experience, painting in fine layered brushstrokes. In 1963 she made the mural El Mundo Magico de los Mayas, now in Mexico City's national anthropology museum, and in 1973 designed a poster of a new Eve for the women's liberation movement she helped found. She insisted she had no time to be anyone's muse. She died in Mexico City on 25 May 2011, aged 94.
Source: Leonora Carrington
