Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington was born in 1917 in Lancashire, England, the beautiful black-haired daughter of an Irish mother and a British millionaire. Brought up in European convents and finishing schools, she dutifully learned ladylike deportment. But she painted in a very un-lady-like manner: her first surrealist pictures were heavy with sex and horror.

In 1936 she enrolled at the Amedee Ozenfant Academy in London, and was impressed by the First International Surrealist Exhibition. The next year she met Max Ernst, who was lecturing in England and returned with him to France, where they lived and worked together for the next three years, eventually settling in the South to avoid the social conflicts within the Surrealist circle in Paris. In 1940 she fled to Spain to escape the Nazis but she suddenly went mad and spent agonizing months in a Spanish asylum. She made her way in 1942 to Mexico, where she lived out the rest of her life.

Carrington struggled back over that precipice and still struggled to paint the visions that haunted her private void. Except for those visions, her life was a model of domesticity. She lived with her two children and second husband, a news photographer, in Mexico City.

Carrington’s work has always reflected a strong personal vision of a hallucinatory world in which myth, nightmare and the occult merge with the history of art to create a visual symbolic language of considerable power. Like other Surrealists, she sought pictorial avenues to gain access to the unconscious, the irrational and the instinctual. There are many layers of meaning in Carrington’s work.

Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.

Sources include:
Time Magazine, March 22, 1948
National Museum of Women in the Arts Catalogue