Story by Ruth Skilbeck
“I painted for myself… I never believed
anyone would buy or exhibit my work” Leonora Carrington *
Surrealist artist and novelist
Leonora Carrington born today, 6 April 1917, passed away aged 94 in 2011.
Her father was British, wealthy new money industrialist, her mother was Irish.
She was branded as a rebel at an early age expelled from Catholic schools, and
just out of her teens eloped with the leading Surrealist Max Ernst, a move that
permanently severed contact with her family, and began her independent life as
an artist.
In Paris she was part of the Surrealist
group. When war broke out after Ernst (who was German) was interned by the
Nazis for his art, she fled to Spain where she had a breakdown and was “treated” by convulsive drugs including
Cordiazol an anxiogenic (causes anxiety and seizures) now banned by the US Food
and Drug Administration and Luminal a barbiturate to counter effects of former
(predecessors to electro-convulsive shock treatment, adding further trauma to the
anxious and ill) which had a very damaging effect on her, which she wrote about
in her novella now out of print Down
Below.
Her parents sent her Irish nanny
on a submarine to take her to another psychiatric hospital in South Africa, as she
was waiting in Lisbon for the boat with her nanny, she excused herself to go to the
lavatory in a cafe and escaped out of another door in the cafe, she caught a
taxi to the Mexican Embassy where she knew a diplomat whom she met in Paris
with the surrealists, after a few drinks and telling him her story he suggested
a solution, that she marry him and move to Mexico.
She married the Mexican diplomat,
and escaped by boat to New York with him, as Ernst who had been freed from
internment also escaped by marrying Peggy Guggenheim, but Leonora left her marriage
after a few months; not long afterwards she married a Hungarian
exile artist Imre Weisz, and lived in Mexico City for the rest of her life, working as an artist and
bringing up their two sons in her house surrounded by animals, and with the tree she planted in her garden. She was cut off from all her family, her inheritance
had been disallowed, but she followed her beliefs and inner drive to be an
artist, and produced some of surrealism’s most interesting and valuable
dreamscapes of the inner world. She supported left wing causes and was a co-founder
of the Women's Liberation Movement in Mexico in the 70s.
It is only in the last five
years, after her death in 2011 that she has become widely known in Britain and Ireland, through
major retrospectives of her work since her death, in Dublin’s Irish Museum of
Modern Art “Leonora Carrington: The Celtic Surrealist” 2013, and currently at the Tate in
England. She was regarded as a leading artist in Mexico for decades, but
ironically, and as is the case with so many significant women, in the twentieth
century, she remained relatively little known outside Mexico during her
lifetime.
An essay by Joanna Moorehead her
cousin, who spent five years tracing the journeys of her long lost cousin who
at an early age rebelled against her aristocratic family and eloped with Max
Ernst, was recently published in the Independent newspaper.
http://www.amazon.com/Australian-Fugue-The-Antipode-Room/dp/0992277922.
* Chadwick, Whitney, 1986, “Leonora
Carrington: Evolution of a Feminist Consciousness”, Women’s Art Journal,
Spring-Summer, 37-42
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