The EconomistDecember 21st 2019 Leonora Carrington 1052
1and plants...[and] painted with cobweb delicacy.”
Few give Mexico, her adopted home, credit for influencing this
fantastical, half-feral dreamscape. Though her art flourished
there, it was the place inside her mind, shaped by childhood fan-
tasies and fears, mental illness, womanhood and motherhood,
where she found inspiration. Nor did Mexico initially cherish her
in the way it celebrated its best-known home-grown artists, such
as Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, who created a brand of mexicani-
dad(Mexicanness) that was integral to the creation of national
identity after the revolution in 1910-17.
But Carrington tapped into a deeper layer of Mexico’s psyche.
And, increasingly, she is appreciated not just by the country’s con-
noisseurs—“The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg)”, (pictured
overleaf ) sold for $1.5m a decade ago, and is now in a private collec-
tion—but by ordinary Mexicans. More than 300,000 people
flocked to a retrospective of Carrington’s work in Mexico City’s
Modern Art Museum in 2018, more than the numbers who queued
to see “Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up” at the v&ain London that
same year.
The publicity-shy Carrington would have found the adulation
bemusing. “She didn’t care the fuck about museums,” her eldest
son, Gabriel Weisz, says. Yet she did care about deeper, more spiri-tual matters, and in many ways Carrington and these
aspects of the country naturally blend into each other.
To find the congruence requires a long, and at times
frustrating, journey, to what some call Mexico pro-
fundo—the country’s ancient roots.
Carrington’s own route to Mexico, and to intellectu-
al and artistic freedom, was fraught with difficulties.
She met Max Ernst, a German Surrealist painter, in
London when he was 46 and she was 20, a dazzling but
reluctant debutante from Lancashire in northern Eng-
land. After living in Paris together, they moved to
southern France where, under his love and tutelage,
her painting and writing flourished. Her cousin, Joan-
na Moorhead, describes the awakening in “The Surreal
Life of Leonora Carrington” (2017).
They were still living in bliss when the French ar-
rested Ernst as an enemy alien in 1939. Fearing for him,
and facing potential internment herself, Carrington
fled to Franco’s Spain. There she had a nervous break-
down and was hospitalised in an asylum for four
months. Salvation, of sorts, came in the form of a mar-
riage of convenience to a Mexican diplomat who led
her to safety first in New York then in Mexico City.
President Lázaro Cárdenas had opened up Mexico
to those fleeing the Spanish civil war and fascism in
Europe. Carrington shared a house with some of them
in Calle Gabino Barreda, in a scruffier neighbourhood
closer to the city centre than her later home in Roma.
The group included Remedios Varo and Kati Horna,
two fellow female Surrealists with whom she struck up
lifelong friendships. On the walls they hung artworks
by Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. But decades ago the
house was replaced by a clinic. There is no memory of
its inhabitants or the pictures they hung on its walls,
just queues of people struggling with aches and pains.
“Famous artists?” says a man hawking sweets and ciga-
rettes from a blue trolley outside. “Not here. Only fam-
ous physiotherapists, I’m afraid.”
Carrington divorced the diplomat, married another
immigrant, Emerico “Chiki” Weisz, and was soon ma-
rooned in her first house in Roma with no money, a
new husband and two small boys, juggling mother-
hood with painting. “Dalí is very lucky to be able to
knock them off as he does,” she wrote sardonically to
James, who had been one of Dalí’s biggest backers.
Carrington and James were made for each other.
Their friendship was deep, funny, occasionally fraught
and, it seems, platonic. They had much in common.
Carrington, the daughter of a textile tycoon and his
Irish wife, spent much of her childhood in Crookhey
Hall near Morecambe Bay with ten servants, a chauf-
feur and a nanny. In her paintings she portrays the hall
as a prison of the mind. James, heir to several large for-
tunes, grew up in West Dean, a baronial pile in Sussex,
where he was starved of both playmates and his moth-
er’s affection.
James also had a chequered love life. In the 1930s he
married an Austrian ballerina, but the relationship
dissolved into a divorce case that was covered in lurid
detail in the press.
Both James and Carrington venerated animals. Her
short stories such as “The Debutante” brought forth
from her psyche the hyenas, horses and other crea-
tures that would populate her art for the rest of her life.
As Mr Weisz puts it, James had “a special communica-
tion with Leonora’s inner animal”.