Leonora Carrington
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Leonora Carrington (born April 6, 1917 in Clayton Green, Lancashire, England - ) is a British-born Mexican novelist and surrealist painter. Her father was a wealthy industrialist, her mother was Irish. She also had an Irish nanny, Mary Cavanaugh, who told her Gaelic tales. Leonora had three brothers. Places she lived as a child included Crookhey Hall.
Educated by governesses, tutors and nuns, she was expelled from many schools for her rebellious behavior until her family sent her to Florence where she attended Mrs. Penrose's Academy of Art. Her father was opposed to an artist's career for her, but her mother encouraged her. She returned to England and was presented at Court, but sneaked out to read Aldous Huxley instead. In London she attended the Chelsea School of Art and joined the Academy of Amédée Ozenfant.
She saw her first Surrealist painting in a Left Bank gallery in 1927 and met many surrealists, including Paul Eluard. (She was already familiar with surrealism from Herbert Read's book.)
The first exhibition of her work appeared at a Bloomsbury gallery in 1933. Carrington was invited to show work in a 1936 international exhibit in London where she was the only female English professional painter. She became a celebrity almost overnight.
She met Max Ernst at a party in London in 1937. The artists bonded and returned to Paris together where Ernst promptly separated from his wife. The new couple collaborated and supported each other's artistic development until the Germans invaded their French village and took Ernst to a concentration camp in 1940. Devastated, Carrington fled to Spain. Paralyzing anxiety and growing delusions culminated in a final breakdown at the British embassy in Madrid. Her parents intervened and had her institutionalized. She was given cardiazol, a powerful shock-inducing drug. When released into the care of a nurse who took her to Lisbon, Carrington escaped once again to arrange passage to New York through a Mexican diplomat whom she had met through Picasso. In fact, she married the diplomat as part of the travel arrangements.
Ernst meanwhile had been extricated from Germany with Peggy Guggenheim, but he and Carrington had experienced so much misery that they were unable to reconnect. Events from that period would inform her work perhaps forever. She lives and works in Mexico and New York.
"I didn't have time to be anyone's muse...I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist." --Leonora Carrington, 1983
[edit] Additional Resources
Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement by Whitney Chadwick, Thames and Hudson, New York, 1985. With 220 illustrations, 20 in color.
"Visions: stories of women artists" by Leslie Sills, A. Whitman, Morton Grove, Illinois, 1993.
[edit] Bibliography
- La Maison de la Peur (1938) - with illustrations by Max Ernst
- Une chemise de nuit de flanelle (1951)
- El Mundo Magico de Los Mayas (1964) - illustrated by Leonora Carrington.
- The Oval Lady: Surreal Stories (Capra Press, 1975)
- The Hearing Trumpet (Routledge, 1976)
- The Seventh Horse and Other Tales (Dutton, 1988)
