The Feminine Surrealism of Leonora Carrington
Works influenced by mysticism, the occult and Celtic lore and brought to vivid life under the meticulous brush of a rebel
In today’s gif, we look at some of the painting and sculpture done by surrealist Leonora Carrington, an artist of unique and independent vision. Her works meld dreamy, otherworldly scenes and highly personal symbolism, often incorporating figures, animals and creatures in stages of transformation. Magic and the occult are often themes in her whimsical, captivating pieces.
Leonora Carrington was born in 1917 into a well-off English family. Her father was a self-made textiles magnate and her mother of Irish birth. It was at the family estate in Lancashire that she would develop an affinity for the animals on the grounds, being particularly fond of horses, and would also be exposed to the stories of Celtic lore thanks to tales told by her Irish nanny. Young Leonora would sketch drawings of the creatures, demons and fairies that inspired her imagination.
Leonora’s rebellious spirit frustrated her parents and the parade of tutors that they employed. She was expelled from two different convent schools for unruly behavior. Although he had not been particularly keen on Leonora’s pursuit of artistic endeavors, her exasperated father eventually relented; at age 15, Leonora was permitted to study art in Florence, Italy. The nine months there were formative, exposing the young Leonora to works of masters like Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci, and it was there that she started to develop the skills to give form to her imaginings.
On her return to England, Leonora was presented to court at the insistence of her parents. But she herself had no desire to be part of the spectacle of “being sold to the highest bidder” and rebelled against further participation. She was allowed to continue art school attendance in London, eventually enrolling when she was 19 years old at a school run by French modernist Amédée Ozenfant. It was in this time that her mother presented her with Surrealism, a book written by Sir Herbert Reed with cover illustration by Max Ernst, which began Leonora’s fascination with this artistic and philosophical movement—the exploration of the illogical, unconscious mind and resolving the contradictory states between dreams and reality. The transformative themes within the Surrealist movement particularly appealed to a young woman feeling herself stifled by the rigidity and class prejudices of English aristocracy.
The following year (1937), Carrington met Max Ernst at a party. The two were immediately romantically drawn to each other, Ernst leaving his wife soon after to move to France with Leonora. During their collaborative period, the two explored surrealist activities, creating and supporting each others’ work, decorating their home in southern France with surrealist sculptures and practicing automatic writing. But the second world war would intrude on their surrealist utopia: Ernst, a German, was first arrested and briefly detained by French authorities in 1939 as a “hostile alien” and again by the Nazis after the Germans invaded France. The Nazis viewed the otherworldly strangeness within Surrealism and the abstract symbolism within it and other modernist art movements as an affront and they labeled Ernst a creator of “degenerate art;” however by this time he had secured the aid of friends, including wealthy art collector, Peggy Guggenheim, who helped him escape to America. Ernst and Guggenheim would marry in 1941, although it was a short-lived union.
Finding herself abandoned and in financial uncertainty, Carrington left the cottage in France and moved to a friend’s house in Spain, narrowing escaping the Nazis herself. The stress and sadness of her situation deeply affected Leonora who suffered crippling anxiety attacks and delusions, leading to a psychotic breakdown that required hospitalization in a Madrid asylum. The institutionalized Leonora was heavily drugged and subjected to shock therapy, an experience that traumatized her. Although her parents orchestrated her release from the Spanish facility in order to move her to a South African sanatorium, Leonora escaped her caregiver during a stop-over in Portugal and fled to the Mexican embassy in Portugal. Her friend, poet Renato Leduc was ambassador there and agreed to a marriage of convenience, which world give Leonora the privileges and immunity granted to a diplomat’s wife. The pair moved to New York City and thereafter to Mexico in 1942. They amicably divorced in 1943.
It was in Mexico, where she lived on and off for the remainder of her life, that Carrington truly blossomed as an artist. Attracted to a culture with a traditional folklore replete with magic and superstition, her artistic exploration of the occult, mythology and transitional themes took flight. She developed an intensively personal style, fusing the mythologies from her upbringing with these new influences. Drawing from her own experiences with mental illness, she explored darker themes, exercising her own catharsis through art and writing. Many of her surrealist contemporaries took refuge in Mexico as she did and while she collaborated within a society made up primarily of men, her female artistic voice is unique. In her works, rather than being the objects of male desire, women become the focal subjects: exploring their own transitional movements, sharing bonds of friendship, maternal lineages, and goddess energies. Carrington participated in her first international exhibition of Surrealism in 1947 in New York. Her work was well-received and she was celebrated for her unique and feminine voice.
And along with the maturing of her artistic vision, a new, more stable, deeper love developed: in Mexico City she met and married Hungarian photographer Emerico Weisz. The relationship conferred on Carrington a new feminine power, that of motherhood: the couple had two sons together.
In the successive years, Carrington became involved in the Woman’s Liberation movement in Mexico. In 1973 she created a poser celebrating a “new Eve.” Her belief in the legendary powers of woman prompted her insistence that women had to reclaim the rights that belonged to them. She felt that within her surrealistic exploration of psychic freedom, there had to also be political freedom, and therefore the two were necessarily intertwined.
Active well past her 80’s, Carrington eventually succumbed to complications related to pneumonia at a hospital in Mexico City in 1994. She was 94 years old. A trailblazer and inspiration for modernist feminist artists, Louise Burgeois and Kiki Smith are counted among the artists that name her as an influence. Still, in the larger art world Carrington’s work was often overshadowed by her brief relationship with Ernst, just as the female artists in the Surrealist movement have overall enjoyed less exposure than their male counterparts. However, interest in Carrington has been heating up over the last decade, an interest that has come to a head fairly recently. In May of 2024, Carrington’s Les Distractions de Dagobert sold at auction for more than 22.5 million British pounds (about 28.5 million dollars): a price that makes Carrington’s work the highest-earning artwork of any UK-born female painter.
To get a closer look at the images used in the gif in places where you can more fully appreciate the colors and details, here’s a list of what was used (links go to WikiArt pages unless otherwise specified):
Semaine (1956)
Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) (1937-1938)
Cockrow (1950) - ArtNexus
The Lovers (1987)
Portrait of Max Ernst (1939)
The Giantess (1950)
How Doth the Little Crocodile (2000) - Wikipedia
Tamborilera (circa 1995) - Wikipedia
Ing (1994) - ArtNexus
A Hug (circa 1995) - Foursquare
Two Dogs Howling at the Moon (1961) - Princeton University Art Museum
La Maja del Tarot (1965) - artnet
Tarot cards: La Empress (III), The Wheel of Fortune (X), Lovers (VI), The Fool (all circa 1955) - Hyperallergic
Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) - Sotheby’s
Bird Bath (1978) - Princeton University Art Museum
I encourage those that are interested to check out some of the links for more scholarly explorations of Carrington’s symbolism and the themes and influences in her oeuvre.
The Art Story: Leonora Carrington
ArtNexus: "Leonora Carrington" by Salomon Grimberg, 10/1/1997
Hyperallergic: "The Tarotic Roots of Leonora Carrington’s Art" by AX Mina, 9/25/23
Atlas Obscura: "Cocodrilo de Leonora Carrington" by Monsieur Mictlan, 9/20/19
BBC: “Degenerate art: Why Hitler hated modernism” by Lucy Burns, 6/11/14
I had never heard of her before...thank you! I will definitely look more deeply into her works.
An amazing survivor and a fascinatingly self-realized artist. Mexico has sheltered and nurtured more than a few foreign artists like Leonora Carrington. Eisenstein, for example.