106 Leonora Carrington The EconomistDecember 21st 2019
2 In their letters, preserved at James’s family home, they both
moan about Mexico. Carrington was suspicious of aspects of the
country, says Mr Weisz, such as the sacrificial violence that she
saw simmering beneath the surface. But she also adored much
else: the markets, the variety of food, the curanderos(healers) and
their ancient witchcraft rituals. Like the Celtic myths that she was
told during her childhood, Mexico is full of stories of ancient sor-
cery, plumed serpents, jaguar gods and the like. The country that
André Breton once called “the Surrealist place par excellence”
served her well.
She did not often return the favour directly by choosing Mexico
as a subject; it was its spirit, not its fauna, flora, landscapes or peo-
ple that seeped into her work. But there are exceptions. It is easy to
while away a morning in front of her mural “El Mundo Mágico de
los Mayas” (on previous page) which depicts Mexico’s Mayan
south-east, the syncretism of indigenous and Catholic faiths, fly-
ing serpents, rainbow-coloured quetzales, Blakean visions of
heaven and hell, and the Virgin of Guadalupe, carried aloft by wor-shippers, with the face of a monkey.
If, that is, you can find it. It sits not in an art gallery
but in the city’s anthropology museum. When your
correspondent asks staff there where it is to be found,
he is told, “The mural is not here. It’s on loan.” As if it
were easy to pick up part of a wall and carry it off.
It is only through the intervention of an astute se-
curity guard that he is set right and sent up a flight of
stairs to a rarely visited corner of the museum. There it
is, luminous on a panel several metres long. No doubt
Carrington would have chuckled at the haphazard
journey to find it.
There is one place in Mexico, though, where enthu-
siasts are trying to give Carrington’s memory a home,
even if, bizarrely, it is a place that she hardly visited.
Xilitla, in the mountains of central Mexico, is the
essence of Mexico profundo. On a sunny afternoon,
young men and women practise heel-stomping dances
in the main square. Coffee farmers in pickup trucks
hold up traffic as they chat. Indigenous women hawk
lemons in the local cafés. During the regular fiestas,
men dress up in bull costumes, terrorising the young
girls as they grasp at their skirts.
Carrington first came to a house there called El Cas-
tillo(The Castle) to visit James, who stayed there when-
ever he came to Xilitla. He had first done so in 1945,
looking for somewhere to plant his collection of or-
chids. He went on to become the town’s biggest bene-
factor, building a sculpture garden into which he sunk
millions of dollars from the mid-1960s until his death
in 1985. Called Las Pozas(The Pools), it is now consid-
ered one of the strangest architectural follies in the
world. During its construction, James tried to lure Car-
rington to visit, describing the bliss of bathing in the
pools. He promised her a dose of lsdin her orange
juice. His Mexican right-hand man (some say lover),
Plutarco Gastélum, settled and married in Xilitla.
In 2018 the Leonora Carrington Museum opened
there. Alongside the museum, a jolt of modern archi-
tecture near the cobbled town square, Carrington fans
can also visit a mural standing two and a half metres
high in a corner of El Castillo. The painting, completed
in the 1960s, is of a long-necked satyr-like woman, with
spiral breasts and an aristocratic arm draped elegantly
on a ledge, her fingers long and slim, like those of Car-
rington herself. It could be a self-portrait, in human-
cum-animal drag.Female human animal
That the town now has a museum for Carrington, who
was only ever a visitor there, may seem odd, even a lit-
tle out of line. Some people resent Xilitla’s adoption of
Carrington. Gastélum’s family, who still live there, fear
the work of their beloved “Tio Eduardo” (Uncle Ed-
ward) will be overshadowed by his more talented
friend. Yet it seems fitting that these two should be re-
united there. Far from England, both Britons had a life-
long yearning for a home. They found one among the
animals and plants of the Mexican rainforest.
Kako Gastélum, Plutarco’s son, imagines a conver-
sation between “Saint Leonora and Saint Edward”, as
he calls them, looking down from on high. He would be
slumped in an armchair, as was his wont, while she
would be smoking. “He says to her: ‘Look Leonora, they
have built a museum for you in Xilitla.’ She would re-
ply, ‘In Xilitla? What on earth for?’”
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