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Leonora Carrington’s real life was as strange, exciting, beautiful, and sometimes frightening as one of her paintings. She was born in sooty, industrial South Lancashire, England. Her father was a business tycoon who made a fortune in textiles and chemicals. Their lineage was humble, but Carrington’s parents aspired to appear aristocratic. In her youth, the family lived in a sprawling country manor (a house that would crop up in her future paintings from time to time, stately and a bit sinister). Much of her upbringing was in the hands of a nanny and young Leonora valued the rare times spent with her mother. Her Irish grandmother told her stories of “the little people” who lived underground, even suggesting that their family was descended from them. Mysticism and myths were part of her childhood: her grandmother’s stories, local legends, and magical tales of Catholic saints and miracles. She claimed to see visions, ghosts, and strange animals. She was enthralled by the stories of Lewis Carroll. Leonora began drawing at an early age, scribbling on walls when she was four. She loved drawing horses and other animals. Horses would later become an important icon in her art. Legends of witchcraft and supernatural phenomenon were abundant in the region—they fueled her imagination and she began writing her own stories at age six. She continued to write her whole life, keeping pace with her prolific output of paintings.
Leonora’s parents sent her to boarding school, compelled to keep pace with aristocratic neighbors. Eventually she was asked to leave the school, being deemed “mentally deficient.” She didn’t like sports, was antisocial, and was preoccupied with the supernatural and occult. Her precocious intelligence and disinterest in academics rubbed officials the wrong way. Sent to a different boarding school, she was expelled again in less than a year. She was a rebel and nonconformist—she got into trouble for playing the saw. The nuns found it spooky that she could write and draw equally well with both hands (at the same time). She was sent finally to finishing school in Paris, from which she was also expelled.
Carrington’s rebellion didn’t end with her school days. She refused to cooperate with her parents’ plan for her “coming out” as a debutante. They hoped she would marry someone wealthy and stop acting like a wild rebel. Leonora was exceptionally beautiful and could have had any young man she chose from the local eligible bachelors, but she wasn’t interested. She did have a debutante ball at the Ritz hotel in 1935 and was presented to the court of George V. When she went to the races at Ascot and sat in the royal enclosure, she was so bored (women weren’t allowed to bet or even view the horses in the paddock, something Carrington would have thoroughly enjoyed) that she read Aldous Huxley’s “Eyeless in Gaza” all the way through. She told her parents she wanted to go to art school and they told her she could paint as a hobby, or perhaps raise fox terriers.
In the end her parents did send her to the Chelsea School Of Art. Her father made it clear that he thought this was a poor choice and gave her very little money to live on. Carrington didn’t mind not having much money, she was elated to be learning about art and living as she pleased. Eventually she switched to the Ozenfant Academy, an avant-garde school run by Amédée Ozenfant. She was his first student in London and she learned to work hard and hone her technique. She drew the same apple for six months until it became dry and shriveled. She also painted fantastic scenes from her fertile imagination. She was still interested in the occult and alchemy, and these themes would saturate her work throughout her career.
While at art school, she began to learn about other artists and surrealism. In 1937 she met the forty-six-year-old surrealist painter Max Ernst. They fell in love and Ernst ended his troubled marriage (to a woman many years his junior) to be with Carrington. She was only twenty-six; Ernst’s eldest son was older than she was. This was the last straw for Carrington’s father. He disowned his daughter, saying her shadow would never again darken his doorstep. Carrington didn’t hesitate to choose Ernst over her family. She turned her back on wealth and comfort to live as and how she pleased. Being controlled by her family and a bourgeois husband along with the responsibilities of wealth did not appeal to her. It’s possible her casualness about choosing the art life was a result of growing up with wealth and comfort, but it was a bold move nonetheless.
She and Ernst moved to Paris, then to a rural French farmhouse to live, write, entertain friends, and make art. In 1939, Ernst, who was German, was arrested and put in a French internment camp. Carrington suffered a nervous breakdown from the stress. She went to Spain with friends and was put in a mental institution because of her bizarre behavior. She was given a drug that induced convulsions, a kind of shock therapy then in vogue. A relative eventually intervened and she was allowed to leave the asylum. Her nanny from childhood was sent to Spain in a submarine to retrieve her. The plan was to take her to another asylum in South Africa. She managed to slip away with her friend Renato Leduc, whom she married in order to escape her family’s control. Authorities didn’t consider her mentally fit and Leduc, acting as her husband, was able to make decisions about her care. Clearly, her family was bent on institutionalizing her. In 1941 she and Leduc sailed to New York. Meanwhile, Ernst was released from the internment camp and moved to New York as well. He married the wealthy art collector Peggy Guggenheim, but was still in love with Carrington. In 1943 Leduc took Carrington to Mexico City, where she would remain the rest of her life.
In Mexico she later met and married the Hungarian photographer Emeric Weisz and remained with him until his death in 2007. They had two sons, Gabriel and Pablo, whom she used as models for her painting And Then They Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur. She befriended the surrealist painter Remedios Varo and the two developed a close friendship. They invigorated and influenced each other’s art. With the finesse of a renaissance master, Carrington gave free-reign to her fertile and weird imagination. Her paintings are inhabited by giantesses, a race of white-haired mystics and human-animal hybrids. Myth and magic rule in her strange and glimmering realms. Mexico’s culture suited Leonora well—the ancient history, magic, occult, and spiritual beliefs fitted her like a glove. The stability of her husband, children and pet cats gave her a sense of family she had never really had before. She never reunited with her family in England, but did remain very English. Her gloomy house had a strange coolness for such a warm climate and she drank endless cups of tea. She had her friend Chloe Aridjis bring PG Tips tea for her from England, which she kept in a locked cabinet. She worked prolifically and happily on art, theater design, sculpture and writing. Her struggles with severe mental illness seemingly did not follow her to Mexico, where she was embraced and beloved for her art. She did seem to live in a constant state of anxiety, according to Aridjis, but a happy family life and a culture she could relate to made her more content and productive than she had ever been.
On being an artist she said, “The real work is done when you are alone in your studio and that’s it. It becomes a sense of something and then it becomes something you can see and then it becomes something you can do.” She lived to the age of ninety-four.
©2016 Alice DuBois
For Further Information See:
- "Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art" By Susan L. Aberth Ashgate Publishing 2010
- https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/jan/28/leonara-carrington-wild-at-heart
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