Leonora Carrington, photographed by Lee Miller in St-Martin d’Ardeche, France, in 1939.
‘Romantic heroines, beautiful and terrible... come to life in women like Leonora Carrington,’ said Octavio Pazher account, Carrington herself is aware of
‘drifting into fiction’. Madness was a state
theoretically venerated by the surrealists
and some of Leonora’s legendary surreal-
ist pranks (such as slathering her feet with
mustard in a smart restaurant or feeding her
guests omelettes filled with their own hair)
seem not dissimilar to the behaviour which
in Madrid, raised ‘immediate suspicion as to
my mental balance’ in ‘the ordinary bour-
geois’.
Moorhead states, according to her own
evidence quite unjustifiably, that ‘from
being an inconvenience, Leonora had
become an embarrassment’ to her par-
ents. But after various adventures in which
she evaded their ‘clutches’ and, spotting a
handsome Mexican acquaintance across
a crowded room, made a marriage of con-
venience to ease her passage to America,
she arrived in New York in 1942. Here she
re-connected briefly with Breton, Duchamp
and Ernst (now married to Peggy Guggen-
heim) before settling in Mexico City.
In some ways the most intriguing part of
Carrington’s life is the years she spent in the
1970s and 1980s travelling about the Unit-
ed States alone, with long periods in Chi-
cago and New York, returning sometimes
to Mexico to her second husband, the Hun-
garian photographer ‘Chiki’ Weisz and their
two sons.
In her afterword to this first complete
edition of Carrington’s stories MarinaWarner describes how she visited the artist
between 1987 and 1988 in the small base-
ment room in New York where she paint-
ed and cooked ‘at a table between her bed
and the kitchenette’ and ‘every week or so
... would go to her gallery and deliver one
of her dream paintings in return for a small
stipend’. She was by then in her seventies,
small and thin, with very dark round eyes that
still radiated the feral beauty of her youth, and
a smoky voice filled with energy and humour.
There was a quality in her of alert, warm curi-
osity about people and all phenomena.Carrington’s ‘characteristic tone of voice
is comic’, Warner observes, tracing its roots
to English nursery classics: Lewis Carroll,© LEE MILLER ARCHIVES, ENGLAND 1917. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.LEEMILLER.CO.UK