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REVIEW BY YANI KONG
Leonara Carrington in Mexico, 2000
(photo by Daniel Aguilar/Reuters/Alamy Stock, courtesy of the publisher)
I became familiar with Leonora Carrington’s Surrealist artworks last year while attending the 59th Venice Biennale, which used her children’s book, The Milk of Dreams as a theme. The book was published in 2017, five years after the British-born artist’s death but written while her children were still young. The festival’s curator, Cecelia Alemani, drew on Carrington’s fascination with transformation, metamorphoses, dark magic and the uncanny to respond to our current period of political and environmental urgencies.
Tapping into the unconscious imagination is a way to process the unsettling qualities of day-to-day life, and the burdens of history. Reading the new biography, Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington, written by the artist’s cousin, Joanna Moorhead, the author creates parallels between Carrington’s art practice and her life, suggesting that Carrington herself dove deep into her own unconscious during periods of turmoil.
The book broadly covers Carrington’s entire life, beginning with her childhood spent trying to escape the hollow English mansions in which she was raised, and days spent infantilized and sheltered as a would-be-debutante. The early chapters betray the cloying limitations of being a young woman in the early 20th century. Failing to take to the finishing school-style training prescribed by Harold and Maurie Carrington, young Leonora dispenses with debutante pursuits to become an artist, heavily inspired by the Surrealists who took London by storm in 1936, and in particular, the artist Max Ernst, her future lover.
The story of a poor wealthy girl who doesn’t fit in to the society where she was born is a familiar cliché. My eyes glazed over when Moorhead describes how Carrington “detested balls, especially when they are given in my honour.” It’s not that I don’t think it is possible to dislike these conventions of wealth, but I felt irked that Carrington’s disdain for luxury is something that makes her more interesting, even if it shows off her grit.
Leonora Carrington, The House Opposite, 1945
tempera on board, 33" x 82," (photo courtesy of the publisher)
Certainly, her life is far richer (in love, lust, and art — the other clichéd sense of the term) once Carrington takes Ernst as her lover. Introduced through friends, the two quickly escape to the Cornwall seaside to live alongside other legendary artists of the time, among them Lee Miller and Man Ray. Ernst, though serially cheating on his wife, is profoundly enamored by Leonora, and the chapters that cover their ensconcement by the sea, their years spent in Paris, and the small house they share in the south of France are juicy, full of love, jealousy, and more famous artists.
Carrington’s escape from the throes of the Second World War, first to Lisbon and then to New York, are exciting to read. She is crafty in evading her father who had hired colleagues to spy on her and a governess to mind her activities. She shakes them finally in Lisbon after fleeing a Spanish sanatorium. She reconnects with Ernst (now with Peggy Guggenheim) but marries the Mexican poet Renato Leduc, who will eventually bring her to Mexico City, her ultimate home, but not before stopping for a length of time in New York.
Leonora Carrington, The Bird Men of Burnley, 1970
oil on canvas, 44.5" x 66" (photo courtesy of Gallery Wendi Norris)
Carrington’s life in Mexico feels glossed over, though it’s funny and telling when Frida Kahlo refers to Carrington and her ex-pat friends as “those European bitches.” It seems Carrington loved her life in Mexico but remained insular in her group, never fully integrating with the wider Mexican community. Indeed, fragments of her life in Mexico don’t show up in her work necessarily, but that may be more in keeping with the flow of her unconscious. Indeed, her lack of cultural appropriation is supremely more tasteful by today’s standards.
I appreciate Moorhead’s commitment to walking in her cousin’s shoes, traveling to the key locations in Paris, Saint-Martin-d’Ardeche, the hospital in Santander, and the house in Mexico City where she raised her children with the photographer, Chiki Weisz. The author explores these sites as if she is inspecting for Carrington’s ghost. On the other hand, she draws too literal a parallel between her cousin’s wickedly imaginative paintings and the events of her life, though she is insightful in noticing the repeated symbolism that appears throughout the artist’s oeuvre. When we see a white horse, we witness a version of Leonora exorcising her demons. This volume’s beautiful reproductions are plentiful and impressively illustrate the book, even if I resist the way Carrington’s paintings are so rigidly mapped onto her life. ■
Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead, Princeton University Press, 2023.
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