by Almost 20 years ago I traveled 5,000 miles to meet my father’s cousin, who had been estranged from our family for 70 years. Back then, Leonora Carrington – albeit in her adopted country, Mexico – was hardly known in her native Britain. She had neglected the art world in general as much as her own country and our people had.
Two decades later, the situation is very different. In April this year, one of her pictures – Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) – sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $28.5m, making her the best-selling female artist in British history. In recent years, shows of his work have been held all over the world: in Madrid and Copenhagen, Dublin and Mexico City, and at Tate Liverpool. Next month an exhibition at Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, Sussex, will celebrate her wider work, exploring her output beyond the dreamy canvases of her paintings and the surrealist fiction writing for which she is now known. Because as well as being a painter and writer, Carrington was also a sculptor, a tapestry and jewelery creator, a lithographer, a dramatist and a designer of stage sets and theater costumes. The Sussex show will include examples of these works, many of which have never been seen in the UK.
In the 1980s, the feminist art group The Guerrilla Girls produced an ironic list titled The Advantages of Being a Woman Artist. These included: “Your career may be revealed after you’re 80”; and “be included in revised editions of art history”. For Carrington, this was precisely the case. After my first visit to meet her in Mexico City in 2006, I visited her many more times over the next five years, until she died in 2011 at the age of 94. We sometimes joke, in our sitting around her kitchen table, until one day her works, like those of her old friend Frida Kahlo, one day she would spawn T-shirts and fridge magnets, tote bags and head scarves.
It was really a joke, but today I have all these items and more. Like Kahlo, who was virtually unknown when she died in 1954 (her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera, was the couple’s “famous” artist), there is little acknowledgment of her status. The reasons why some artists become fashionable and popular are a multi-layered and complex phenomenon. Carrington, like Kahlo, had an unusual life story: she fled her family and England to join her lover, Max Ernst, in Paris in 1937, the youngest member of a circle that included Picasso, Dalí, Duchamp and Miro. After 18 ideal months living with Ernst in a farmhouse in the south of France, which remains to this day, festooned with his artwork, she fled to Spain and, after a terrible spell in a psychiatric hospital, she escaped from Europe was torn by war. the US, and then Mexico.
Like Kahlo, Carrington’s work has always been intertwined with her own experiences: she once told me that everything she did, from her visual arts to her writing, was intertwined with her biography. Another reason she is keen today is that her concerns – unusual and even eccentric in her time – are now ubiquitous. Ecology, feminism, the interconnectedness of all forms of life, spirituality outside of organized religion: today we are all aware of these issues, but they were front and center for Carrington 80 years ago.
We like to joke that one day her works will be appearing on T-shirts, bags and fridge magnets. I have these items today
Joanna Moorhead
“Great” artists are always experimental; They push boundaries, try new ideas, shake up the way they do things. They are not looking for a comfort zone; they are curious, always on the lookout for challenges. All of this was true for Carrington: as her friend and patron Edward James, who was the main patron of both Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, wrote in an essay in 1975: “She never let her love be tested; the result was that she was able to diversify and explore a hundred or more techniques to express her creative powers. She continues to experiment with new media that help her give new shapes to her vital ideas.”
The new show, which I am curating, will bring together more than 70 pieces of Carrington’s work, many of which have not been seen in the UK before. These include a series of masks made for a theatrical production The Temple in the 1950s, as well as a collection of 1974 costume lithographs made for a production of S An-sky’s play The Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, in New York. The exhibition shines a spotlight on Carrington’s work as a playwright: she wrote several plays including Penelope and Judith, both with strong female leads. And to play The Story of the Last Eggwritten in 1970, is a forerunner of Margaret Atwood’s The story of Bangor (1985), predicting a world where the greedy lords have stripped the entire planet of all its resources, including its women. There is only one left – and she only has one egg.
The new exhibition underpins Carrington’s rebellious spirit: as a child she was expelled from several convent boarding schools, praised by the nuns for failing to cooperate “in work or play”, she later said. Later, when she was sent as an ambassador in the London season in 1936, her parents expected her to find a “suitable” husband: instead, she fell in love with the divorced, remarried, penniless (by standards Carrington) Ernst. When she left the family home in Lancashire to join him in Paris, her father Harold warned her that she would no longer be part of the family: she never saw him again.
As the new show explores, his rebellion continued throughout his long life: Carrington never worked in. She went against the Mexican art establishment, which was her base for 70 years; she severed her ties with the “official” surrealist movement when she left New York in 1942; she attracted the attention of art historians and journalists (if I wasn’t my cousin, I would never have been welcomed into her life). In her 50s and 60s she spent long periods living alone in New York and Chicago, sometimes so poor that she later told me she would eat ice cream because it was the cheapest way to get calories.
In the late 80s and 90s – the period I knew her – she was rebelling against old age: and since she had already written the story of her later life, through a fictional character called Marian Leatherby, in her novella . The Listening Trumpetit was a question of life imitating art. The Listening Trumpet, published 50 years ago in 1974, when Leonora was in her 50s; describes a wonderful and stereotype-breaking old people’s home, where the residents subvert all convention to hunt for the Holy Grail, and plan to escape to Lapland with a knitted tent. The Listening TrumpetThe anniversary is the starting point for another exhibition opening later this year in Colchester.
Throughout her life, Carrington never stopped working: she had a studio in her home in Mexico City, recently restored as a museum yet to be opened to the public, but she worked in every part of the house. For 10 years in the 1950s, a family of weavers lived there with her own family – Chiki’s husband, a Hungarian photographer whom she met and married after arriving in Mexico, and her sons, Gabriel and Pablo. The Newlands House Gallery exhibition will include tapestries from that period. In her later years, able to paint, she turned to sculpture, focusing on individuals from her paintings. During the time I knew her, she would add our cup of tea in the kitchen to visits to the garage, where she worked with an assistant on a sculpture of weird and wonderful creatures, many of which will be on display at Newlands House Gallery.
Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary is at Newlands House Gallery, Petworth, Sussex, 12 July – 26 October; Leonora Carrington: Avatars and Alliances, at Firstsite in Colchester, Essex, 26 October – 23 February
