Leonora Carrington English-Mexican, 1917-2011

If discussing Surrealism, both in the European and Mexican context, Leonora Carrington is of the most central artists of the movement. She created paintings, sculptures, etchings, textiles and jewellery. She also wrote novels, plays and short stories. 

Carrington was born on April 6, 1917 in Clayton Green, Lancashire, England, and raised in a wealthy Roman Catholic family in Crookhey Hall. Carrington’s Irish mother and Irish nanny introduced her to Celtic mythology and Irish folklore, images of which later appeared in her art. From an early age Carrington rebelled against both her family and her religious upbringing. She was expelled from at least two convent schools before being sent to boarding school in Florence at about age 14. There she began to study painting and had access to some of the world’s best art museums. Reluctantly, Carrington’s parents let her move to London to pursue art at Amédée Ozenfant’s academy. There she encountered Surrealism for the first time after starting a relationship with Max Ernst in 1937. Carrington shortly after would run away with Ernst to Paris, beginning her immersion into the movement. [2] 

In Paris, Carrington met the wider Surrealist circle: André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Léonor Fini, among others. After a year, the couple moved to the south of France, but World War II brought a violent end to their time there. Ernst was imprisoned, resulting in a traumatic end to the relationship as Carrington fled to Spain with friends, where she experienced abuse at a mental hospital that she describes in her memoir, Down Below. [3] She was able to escape and met Renato Leduc, a diplomat and poet at the Mexican Embassy who married her to help her on her journey west.

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They spent a year in New York, where she reunited with the surrealists and was honored with her first one-woman exhibition at New York’s Pierre Matisse Gallery in 1948, followed by solo and group shows around the world. [4] Shortly after, however, she moved south of the border. She arrived in Mexico in 1942, and she soon divorced Leduc, though they remained friends. In México, she met other exiled European artists, such as Wolfgang Paalen, Alice Rahon, José and Kati Horna, Benjamin Péret and Remedios Varo. She also befriended Mexican artists and writers, such as Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Monsiváis and Juan Rulfo. 

Carrington had been affiliated with the surrealist movement since the 1930s, but developed her matured style and pictorial language after moving to Mexico. Her interest in animal imagery, myth and occult symbolism deepened and entered into a creative partnership with the émigré Spanish artist Remedios Varo. Together the two studied alchemy, the kabbalah and the mytho-historical writings of Popol Vuh from what is now Guatemala. [3]  Her works are defined by their satirizing and protest of a patriarchal system with central female subjects. In her paintings from the 50s, Carrington was more inspired by subjects derived from alchemy and ancient magic, with many works depicting the female subject as a priestess presiding over transformation rituals. [5]

Her art was well-received in Mexico, and in 1963 Carrington received a government commission to create a mural for the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, which she titled El mundo mágico de los mayas (The Magical World of the Maya). In the 1960s and 1970s, Carrington became a political activist, hosting student meetings at her home and co-founding the Mexican women's liberation movement in 1972. In the 1980s, the renowned mural was moved to the Regional Museum of Anthropology and History of Chiapas in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, and in 1986 Carrington's political involvement earned her the Lifetime Achievement Award at the United Nations Women's Caucus for Art convention in New York. In 2005, Leonora Carrington received Mexico's National Prize of Sciences and Arts.

Carrington's work has been acquired by museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Tate, London, United Kingdom; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands; Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum (Cambridge, MA); Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX); Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City, Mexico), among others.