BOOKS & ARTS
BOOKS
A true original
The surrealists’ muse and a distinguished artist in her own right,
Leonora Carrington captivated all who met her, says Jane RyeThe Surreal Life of Leonora
Carrington
by Joanna Moorhead
Virago, £20, pp. 340The Debutante and Other Stories
by Leonora Carrington
Silver Press, £9.99, pp. 153Leonora Carrington was strikingly beau-
tiful with ‘the personality of a headstrong
and hypersensitive horse’ (according to her
friend and patron Edward James); and she
fled from her family, renouncing a life of
privilege and ease to pursue her calling as
an artist. Joanna Moorhead deplores the fact
that she is ‘not much more than a footnote
in art history’.
But she has long been a legendary fig-
ure (among recent devotees, apparently,
Madonna and Björk); in Mexico, where she
lived and worked for most of her life, she is
a national treasure; and for the feminist she
is a heroine and her art ‘a modern woman’s
codex’. She painted some marvellous pic-
tures in her own, very personal brand of sur-
realism and wrote, in addition to fantastic,
gruesome and often very funny stories, an
account of her experience of madness, Down
Under, which the Guardian considered one
of the 1,000 books everyone should read.
In 2006 Moorhead, a journalist who
writes mainly on family matters, discov-
ered by chance that Leonora Carrington
(1917–2011), an ancient, vaguely disrepu-
table cousin of her father’s, was still alive
and one of Mexico’s most celebrated art-
ists. She set out to meet her in search of a
good story; and the friendship that ensued
over the last five years of the artist’s life, she
tells us (more than once, changed the course
of her own life forever. Moorhead was sur-
prisingly unaware of the major exhibition
of Carrington’s painting at the Serpentine
in 1991 or of Susan L. Aberth’s 2004 mon-
ograph Leonora Carrington: Surrealism,Alchemy and Art (both of which challenge
the idea that the artist was no more than a
footnote in art history, and neither of which
is mentioned in this book).
‘Stultifying’ or ‘suffocating’ are the
words customarily used to describe the
background against which Leonora so spec-
tacularly rebelled and which she so fero-
ciously ridiculed in her art. Her father was
a wealthy textile magnate, her mother an
Anglo-Irish Catholic. Her early childhood
was spent in Crookhey Hall, a neo-gothic
mansion in Lancashire, with three broth-
ers, an Irish nanny and a French governess.
But, as Marina Warner observes in an excel-
lent afterword to The Debutante and Other
Stories, it was an Edwardian childhood in
which ‘the paddock on the one hand and
the nursery on the other feature vividly aszones of thrill and transgression’ and the
‘rituals and privileges of her background...
provided her with a heaped storehouse to
raid’ for her stories and paintings. Rather
than suffocation there seems to be a pre-
vailing sense of freedom and lightness in
the figures who drift about its gardens in
Carrington’s 1947 painting ‘Crookhey Hall’.
A spell at a convent from which she was
soon expelled (she told Marina Warner
how she had wanted to be a nun or a saint:
‘I probably overdid it. I liked the idea of
being able to levitate’) was followed by fin-
ishing schools in Florence and Paris before
she was launched into society to find a hus-
band. Moorhead devotes several pages to
the dress in which Leonora was presented
at court in 1935, but does not mention the
charmingly surreal detail that debutantes
were required to make their laboriously
rehearsed curtsies to a cake (representing
Queen Charlotte).Eventually, her determination to
become an artist prevailing against tradi-
tional parental warnings about starving in
garrets (even Michelangelo’s father beat
him for hanging around artists’ studios)
was successful, and she was allowed to go to
art school in London. Here, in 1937, she met
the surrealist Max Ernst at the home of the
celebrated modernist architect Ernö Gold-
finger (whose ‘most enduring fame’, Moor-
head rather curiously claims, ‘would be as
the inspiration for James Bond’s most noto-
rious adversary’). They became lovers pret-
ty much on the spot, and Leonora ran away
to live with Ernst in Paris and entered the
circle of André Breton, Paul Eluard, Marcel
Duchamp, Picasso and Dali.
Surrealism — which demanded the
emancipation of writers and artists from all
bourgeois constraints in both art and life —
seems to have been made for Carrington.
Her 1935 painting ‘Hyena in Hyde Park’
suggests a surrealist imagination already
established, and from the outset, according
to Susan Aberth, she was given ‘unparal-
leled opportunities to exhibit her paintings,
publish her stories and participate in the
movement’s activities’.
This does not, however, fit with Moor-
head’s feminist agenda, and she speaks
disparagingly of ‘the surrealist greats who
once glanced in her direction and saw only
a beautiful young woman whose presence
might help them paint better’ and for whom
Leonora was ‘the quintessential femme-
enfant’ rather than an artist in her own right.
It is a fault of this biography that the author
retains such prejudices in the teeth of
her own honest and scrupulously detailed
evidence, which clearly contradicts them.
Max Ernst was interned as an enemy
alien in 1939, and in 1940 Leonora left
France for America via Madrid, where
she had a spectacular mental breakdown
and spent months in an asylum. It is diffi-
cult to disentangle this chaotic interlude. InLeonora claimed she had wanted to be
a nun or a saint, because she ‘liked the
idea of being able to levitate’