Leonora Carrington, a female Surrealist

I was inspired to do a post on one of my favorite artists, Leonora Carrington, a Surrealist painter, because as of late I feel the world is becoming more topsy-turvy than ever and the story of her life, reflected in her works, reassures me that this life is nothing less than fantastical.

The Surrealist movement began in France with ideologies compounded by André Breton, a French poet, who by means of his own experiences of World War I, began to denounce worldly conflicts and the bourgeois. A circle of male artists and writers formed around Breton’s ideas; calling themselves Surrealists and in 1924 they penned the Surrealist Manifesto. Male Surrealists collectively believed in the unconscious, free association and Freud’s theories regarding the duality of women “at the center of the creative and the subversive” which is reflected in many of their works by a dominating presence of a femme-enfant “onto whom their romantic, sexual and erotic desire is projected,” usually realized in the destruction or manipulation of the female form.

 

The Gigantess (The Guardian of the Egg)

1947

Tempera on wood panel

Women joined the Surrealist movement in the 1930’s, and although it has been stated that never before had a movement been so welcoming of female artists, I don’t necessarily think that women fully subscribed to the ideas and concepts set forth by the original male Surrealists. Instead I believe - whether knowingly or not - female Surrealists created a type of Surrealism through self-portraiture, (not solely being "femme-enfant" muses), exchanged the Freudian beliefs of psychology for the art of self-exploration using mythological and alchemical influences and for many, including Leonora Carrington, Surrealism was a method of dealing with and escaping the bourgeois roles that their family’s and society placed on them.

 The Temptation of Saint Anthony

1947

Oil on fabric

Leonora Carrington was born in Clayton Green, Lancashire, England, in 1917 and raised in a strict household. Carrington came from a wealthy family with an industrialist father and lived in many different homes in Great Britain, most notably Crookhey Hall, an expansive Edwardian manor. She lived a bourgeois lifestyle with servants, nannies and governesses, who came to the home to educate and watch over her and her siblings. The manor itself became a breeding ground for her imagination that grew with the folkloric tales she was told by her Irish nanny Mary Kavanaugh and her Grandmother Moorhead. Carrington uses animals, fantastical and allegorical creatures in all of her works, sometimes bordering on cartoon-like, but each laden with deep meaning and symbols that were inspired by the stories she learned as a child.

In 1940, at twenty-three years old, Carrington was stricken with fear and grief when Max Ernst, a male Surrealist painter whom she had been living and working with in France, was suddenly interned in different camps at the beginning of World War II. Carrington suffered a mental breakdown and spent time in a mental institution in Santander, Spain . Her paintings from this time offer deeply intimate views into her emotional struggles at the hospital, coinciding with her written records of that time, entitled “Down Below”. Carrington found herself at a vulnerable point in her life, where hysteria had come over her.

The Memory Tower

1995

Color intaglio

Carrington was able to find her independence from Max Ernst’s influence and the emotional roles he played in her life in 1942 when she moved to Mexico on asylum and where she has lived since. She was married as per previous arrangements in order to procure a visa, and found herself quickly assimilated within the artist community already living in Mexico City. Mexico was a principle country and time for rehabilitation and renewal for Carrington because she was welcomed as a European artist. Her fantastical and organically influenced works complimented Mexico’s prost-revolutionary celebration for its indigenous roots, tales and folklore and a movement away from the socially conscious mural paintings.

Although Leonora Carrington was initially brought into the world of Surrealist painters and influenced by its members, she was able to break away and develop her own practice of Surrealism. By looking within herself and developing a vocabulary of imagery and symbols and using her own psychic reality, Carrington negated

male Surrealist and Freudian ideas about women, making it possible to break free from the bourgeois and idealist society of her childhood and create a body of work that is truly Surreal and fantastical. 

(All written material is personal and part of a lager thesis written by myself. Please do not re-copy any of the above work in any way. All images used with permission unless otherwise noted).