English painter and writer who fled a debutante's future for Surrealist Paris at twenty, survived the war's wreckage of that life — internment for her lover Max Ernst, an asylum in Spain for her — and rebuilt herself in Mexico into one of the century's great painters of the uncanny.
Leonora Carrington was presented at the court of George V as a debutante, and ran. Born in 1917 into a Lancashire textile fortune, expelled from two convent schools, she was twenty and an art student in London when she met Max Ernst at a dinner party in 1937 — forty-six, famous, and married. She left with him for Paris within the year.
The Paris that followed — the flat she shared with Ernst on the rue Jacob, the Surrealist circle, the farmhouse at Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche they covered with cement beasts — made her a painter and then broke: Ernst was interned as an enemy alien in 1939, Carrington collapsed, fled to Spain, and was committed by her family to an asylum in Santander whose treatments she recorded in the memoir Down Below. She escaped through Lisbon into a protective marriage, reached Mexico, and stayed seventy years — painting, writing The Hearing Trumpet, and telling interviewers late in life: 'I didn't have time to be anyone's muse.'
Carrington was born on 6 April 1917 at Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire, to a textile magnate and an Irish mother whose folk tales — and whose gift of a book on Surrealism — took early root. Expelled from two convent schools for unteachability, she was sent to a finishing school in Florence, presented at court as a debutante, and enrolled, over her father's objection, at art school in London: Chelsea, then the academy of the purist painter Amédée Ozenfant.[1]
At a London dinner party in 1937 she met Max Ernst, the German Surrealist twenty-six years her senior, whose work she already knew from the 1936 London International Surrealist Exhibition. He left his wife; her father disowned her; the two settled in Paris, then at a farmhouse in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche in the south, which they covered inside and out with cement and painted guardian creatures — a two-person mythology built into a building.[1]
In the Paris years she painted her Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) — white jodhpurs, wild hair, a lactating hyena at her side — and showed with the Surrealists at their 1938 International Exposition. The group prized her as a femme-enfant — the 'woman-child', Surrealism's ideal of the instinctive young muse — a category she later shredded: she had not had time to be anyone's muse, she said; she was too busy rebelling against her family and learning to be an artist.[2]
In 1939 France interned Ernst as an enemy alien, and the world Carrington had run away to dissolved. Alone at Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche as the Germans advanced in 1940, she broke down, gave the farmhouse away for a bottle of brandy, and fled to Spain, where her family had her committed to an asylum in Santander. The treatment included Cardiazol, a convulsant — chemical shock therapy. Down Below, the memoir she reconstructed in 1943, records the descent and the asylum with a clinical exactness that has made it a classic of the literature of madness.[3]
Released into a chaperone's custody for transfer to another institution in South Africa, she slipped her keepers — through a Madrid café door, by her own account — and made her way to Lisbon and the Mexican embassy there, where the poet-diplomat Renato Leduc, an acquaintance from Paris, married her to give her papers. They sailed for New York in 1941 and reached Mexico in 1942; the marriage of convenience dissolved amicably in 1943. Ernst, escaping to America with the collector Peggy Guggenheim, whom he would soon marry, met Carrington once more in Lisbon; the two never lived together again.[3]
Mexico City gave her the rest of her life. She married the Hungarian photographer Emerico 'Chiki' Weisz in 1946 and raised two sons; painted the egg-tempera dreamworlds — kitchens, alchemical animals, white geese, the Celtic and the Mayan cross-bred — that made her reputation; wrote the novel The Hearing Trumpet, in which a ninety-two-year-old heroine with a hearing aid brings down an institution for old women; and formed with the Spanish painter Remedios Varo one of Surrealism's great working friendships, two women painting magic in adjacent kitchens.[4]
In the 1970s she designed the poster Mujeres conciencia for Mexico's women's liberation movement, whose founding she supported. The revaluation of the Surrealist women late in the century found its centre in her: retrospectives, the 2022 Venice Biennale titled after her children's book The Milk of Dreams, and prices no living British woman painter had reached. She died in Mexico City on 25 May 2011, aged ninety-four — the last of the Surrealists.
Carrington wrote all her life, and the stories are not sidelines to the painting. They are the same world in a different medium.
The Debutante, written in 1937 or 1938, has a girl send a hyena to her coming-out ball in her place; the hyena eats the maid and wears her face, and is exposed by its smell. The House of Fear, published in 1938 with a collage preface by Max Ernst, is her first book.[3]
The Hearing Trumpet, written in the 1950s and published in the 1970s, is her novel. A ninety-two-year-old woman is put in a home by her family, is given an ear trumpet by a friend, and discovers a conspiracy involving a winking abbess, the Holy Grail and the end of the world. It is very funny, and it is the book of hers most read now.[2]
In Mexico City Carrington found the closest thing she ever had to a working group, and it was made up of other exiles.
Remedios Varo, a Spanish painter who had also fled occupied France for Mexico, became her closest friend. The two worked in parallel for twenty years, on the same alchemical interiors and tall attenuated figures, and with the same seriousness about magic as a system rather than a decoration. The Hungarian photographer Kati Horna was the third.[2]
They were not exhibited together as a group until 2010, when Pallant House Gallery in Chichester mounted Surreal Friends, the first show to put the three of them in one room.[1]
In 1963 the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City commissioned Carrington to paint a mural for the Chiapas room. El mundo mágico de los mayas is about four and a half metres long, based on Maya sources she went to Chiapas to study, and it is one of the few pieces of her work made for a public building.[4]
She turned to sculpture seriously in her seventies and eighties, casting in bronze the creatures that had been walking through the paintings for sixty years. A group of them was installed along the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City in 2008.
She was still working at ninety. Leonora Carrington died in Mexico City on 25 May 2011, aged ninety-four, having outlived every other member of the Surrealist group she joined in 1937.[1]
Born on 6 April at Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire, to a textile fortune.
Presented at court as a debutante; enrolls at Chelsea School of Art over her father's objection, then under Amédée Ozenfant.
Meets Max Ernst at a London dinner party, aged twenty, and leaves with him for Paris.
Shows at the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris; she and Ernst settle at Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche and cover the farmhouse with cement beasts. Paints Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) around this time.
Publishes her first book, The House of Fear, with a collage preface by Max Ernst.
With Ernst interned as an enemy alien, she breaks down, flees to Spain, and is committed by her family to an asylum in Santander, where she is treated with the convulsant Cardiazol.
Escapes her keepers in Madrid to the Mexican embassy in Lisbon; the diplomat Renato Leduc marries her for papers and they sail for the Americas.
Reconstructs the asylum months in the memoir Down Below; the Leduc marriage dissolves amicably.
Marries the photographer Emerico 'Chiki' Weisz in Mexico City; two sons follow, and the Mexican decades of painting and writing begin.
Writes The Hearing Trumpet, her novel, which is not published until the 1970s.
Works in parallel with Remedios Varo and Kati Horna, the closest thing to a working group she ever had.
Paints the mural El mundo mágico de los mayas for the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.
Publishes The Hearing Trumpet; designs the poster Mujeres conciencia for Mexico's women's movement in the same decade.
A group of her bronze creatures is installed along the Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City.
Pallant House Gallery mounts Surreal Friends, the first exhibition to put Carrington, Varo and Horna in one room.
Dies in Mexico City on 25 May, aged ninety-four — the last painter of the first Surrealist generation.
Painting
A bull-headed figure in an orange robe sits at a draped yellow table strewn with glass spheres, facing a figure built of pale green leaves. Two cloaked children stand to one side and two hounds wait at the right. Leonora Carrington painted it in Mexico City in 1953. The Museum of Modern Art bought it in 2019 and shows it on Floor 5.
Painting
A figure stands wrapped from shoulders to ankles in a white cloth blotched with black, a spiked crown on her head, inside a ring drawn on the grass. Around her is a formal park of clipped hedges and topiary; along the bottom edge the ground is cut away to show what is under it. Leonora Carrington painted it in 1942, her first year in Mexico. The Museum of Modern Art bought it in 2019.
Painting
A figure in a floor-length coat of dark red fur walks to the right across a frozen plain, carrying a green glass lantern with a small white horse standing inside it. One leg shows a stocking striped yellow and dark green. Leonora Carrington painted it about 1939 at the farmhouse she and Max Ernst kept in the Ardèche. The National Galleries of Scotland bought it in 2018.
Painting
A young woman sits on the edge of a blue chair in a grey room, one hand out towards a striped animal that faces her. A rocking horse hangs on the wall behind, and a white horse gallops through a curtained window. Leonora Carrington painted it around 1937 and 1938, in her early twenties, during the Paris years. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has owned it since 2002.
Painting
A woman stands taller than the trees, her head a small pale face inside a wide disc of wheat-coloured gold, a white cape spread from her shoulders and geese flying out of it. Two small hands hold a dark speckled egg against the red robe beneath. Leonora Carrington painted it in Mexico around 1947. Edward James bought it, and it has been in private hands ever since.
Partner of · 1937–1940
Met at a London dinner party in 1937 - she twenty, he forty-six and married - and lived together in Paris and at Saint-Martin-d'Ardeche, whose farmhouse they covered with cement beasts. The war ended it: his internment as an enemy alien, her breakdown and committal in Spain. They met again in Lisbon in 1941 and never lived together after.
Collaborated with · 1942–1963
The gallery that represents Varo's estate calls Carrington her closest friend and collaborator. Both had been in Surrealist Paris in the late 1930s and both were driven out by the war to Mexico City, where the friendship became the central working relationship of each woman's life for twenty years — shared kitchens, joke recipes, plays written together, and two bodies of painting in constant conversation. It ended with Varo's death in 1963; Carrington outlived her by forty-eight years.
Art & literary movement · 1924–1966
Joined the Paris group with Ernst in 1937 and showed at the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme. She outlived every founder and kept the movement's methods alive in Mexico for seventy years; the 2022 Venice Biennale took its title from her book The Milk of Dreams.
An English-born painter and writer, born in Lancashire in 1917, who left a debutante's future at twenty for Surrealist Paris with Max Ernst, survived the war — his internment, her own committal to a Spanish asylum — and spent seventy years in Mexico City painting dreamworld canvases and writing books including Down Below and The Hearing Trumpet. She died in 2011 as the last of the first Surrealist generation.
They met at a London dinner party in 1937 — she was a twenty-year-old art student, he a married, famous Surrealist of forty-six — and lived together in Paris and then at Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche until the war destroyed the household: France interned Ernst as an enemy alien in 1939, Carrington fled and was committed in Spain, and though both eventually reached the Americas, they never lived together again. She refused for the rest of her life to be footnoted as his muse: 'I didn't have time to be anyone's muse.'
Carrington's 1940 breakdown and committal, told by the woman it happened to. After Ernst's internment she fled to Spain, collapsed, and was placed by her family in an asylum in Santander, where she was treated with Cardiazol, a seizure-inducing drug. The memoir, reconstructed in 1943, records the delusions from inside and the institution from very close up; it is one of the essential first-person accounts of madness and treatment.
Escape landed her there and the city kept her. The Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc married her in Lisbon in 1941 to give her papers out of wartime Europe; the marriage dissolved amicably in 1943 and she stayed — married the photographer Emerico Weisz, raised two sons, painted beside her closest friend Remedios Varo, and became one of Mexico's most honoured artists. She lived in Mexico City almost seventy years, until her death in 2011.
Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse), painted around 1937–38 in her Paris years, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Carrington in white jodhpurs with a mane of hair, a lactating hyena beside her, a white rocking-horse flying behind. Among the Mexican work, The Giantess and the egg-tempera kitchen scenes are the most reproduced, and her children's book The Milk of Dreams titled the 2022 Venice Biennale.
All her life, and the writing is the same world in another medium. The Debutante, from 1937 or 1938, has a girl send a hyena to her coming-out ball in her place. The House of Fear, published in 1938 with a collage preface by Max Ernst, is her first book.
Carrington's novel, written in the 1950s and published in the 1970s. A ninety-two-year-old woman is put in a home by her family, is given an ear trumpet by a friend, and uncovers a conspiracy involving a winking abbess, the Holy Grail and the end of the world. It is very funny and it is the book of hers most read now.
Remedios Varo, a Spanish painter who had also fled occupied France for Mexico, was her closest friend. The two worked in parallel for twenty years on the same alchemical interiors and tall attenuated figures. The Hungarian photographer Kati Horna was the third. They were not exhibited together as a group until 2010, when Pallant House Gallery mounted Surreal Friends.
Some. In 1963 the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City commissioned El mundo mágico de los mayas for its Chiapas room, about four and a half metres long and based on Maya sources she went to Chiapas to study. She also cast her creatures in bronze in her seventies and eighties, and a group was installed on the Paseo de la Reforma in 2008.
Associated with · 1937
Joined the Paris group with Ernst in 1937 and showed at the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme. She outlived every founder and kept the movement's methods alive in Mexico for seventy years; the 2022 Venice Biennale took its title from her book The Milk of Dreams.
Partner of · 1937–1940
Met at a London dinner party in 1937 - she twenty, he forty-six and married - and lived together in Paris and at Saint-Martin-d'Ardeche, whose farmhouse they covered with cement beasts. The war ended it: his internment as an enemy alien, her breakdown and committal in Spain. They met again in Lisbon in 1941 and never lived together after.
Collaborated with · 1942–1963
The gallery that represents Varo's estate calls Carrington her closest friend and collaborator. Both had been in Surrealist Paris in the late 1930s and both were driven out by the war to Mexico City, where the friendship became the central working relationship of each woman's life for twenty years — shared kitchens, joke recipes, plays written together, and two bodies of painting in constant conversation. It ended with Varo's death in 1963; Carrington outlived her by forty-eight years.
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