Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was an English-born Mexican Surrealist artist and writer known for her haunting, autobiographical and powerful paintings that incorporate images of the occult, sorcery, metamorphosis, alchemy, and dream realm.
Who was Leonora Carrington
Carrington was born in a wealthy Roman Catholic family and rebelled agaist her privileges upbringing and gendered expectations. Carrington’s mother, who was Irish, introduced her to Celtic mythology and Irish folklore, which profoundly impacted her art. She reached Florence at the age of 14 and started studying painting. She was exposed to world’s best art museums during that time. Later on, she moved to London to pursue art at Amédée Ozenfant’s academy. It was in the academy that she encountered Surrealism for the first time. She met Max Ernst, the primary pioneer of the Dada movement and surrealism in 1937 and soon got involved with him, resulting in her moving to Paris. There, she met the wider Surrealist circle: André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Yves Tanguy, Léonor Fini, and others. She created her earliest Surrealist works in the next two years, including her well-known Self-Portrait: The Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937–38), which shows her with a wild mane of hair in a room with a rocking horse floating behind her, a hyena at her feet, and a white horse galloping away outside the window.
Leonora Carrington, Self Portrait (The Inn of the Dawn Horse), 1938-1939
In 1938 Carrington participated in both the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris and a Surrealism exhibition in Amsterdam. She not only painted but also wrote prolifically, authoring Surrealist short stories like The House of Fear (1938), illustrated by Ernst and first published as a chapbook, “The Debutante” and “The Oval Lady” (1938).
The couple lived in Saint-Martin d’Ardèche until 1940, when Ernst was interned as an enemy alien in a Nazi prison camp. Utterly distraught, Carrington left France for Spain and suffered a mental breakdown in 1940. As a result, she was hospitalized against her will in a mental institution in Santander, Spain. She wrote of the harsh treatment she endured there in her book Down Below (1944). In 1942, she settled in Mexico City, where she lived the rest of her life.
Carrington connected with a vibrant and creative group of European artists who had also fled to Mexico City in search of asylum. Carrington flourished in Mexico and painted fantastical compositions that portrayed metamorphoses. In 1946 she married Hungarian photographer Emerico Weisz and bore two children (1946 and 1947). Images of domesticity and motherhood—tinged with magic and sorcery—began to appear in her work at this time, as in The House Opposite (1945) and The Giantess (c. 1947).
Carrington made history in 2005 when her painting Juggler (1954) sold at auction for $713,000, which was believed to be the highest price paid for a work by a living Surrealist artist. Throughout the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st, she was the subject of many exhibitions in Mexico and the United States—and after 1990 in England as well. When she died at age 94, Carrington was believed to be the last of the Surrealists.
Leonora Carrington, 1939. Image Courtesy: Lee Miller Archive.
11 Things Lesser Known Facts About Leonora Carrington
1. She was expelled from multiple schools for rebellious behavior from at least two convent schools in her youth – once for refusing to eat her meals and another time for her disruptive behavior.
2. She escaped a Nazi Concentration Camp during World War II, following the arrest of her lover Max Ernst by the Nazis. After a severe mental breakdown, she was institutionalized in Spain and later fled to Mexico by marrying a Mexican diplomat, Renato Leduc.
3. Her White Horse Obsession Stemmed from Celtic Mythology. The meaning of “Carrington” itself relates to horses, and in Celtic tradition, white horses are psychopomps, creatures that guide souls between worlds.
4. She Was a Practicing Witch and Serious Student of the Occult. She studied alchemy, Kabbalah, and various esoteric traditions throughout her life and practiced divination, created magical objects, and considered herself a practicing witch.
5. She Designed One of Mexico’s Most Important Public Murals “The Magical World of the Mayas” (1963), a significant mural in the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City.
6. Her Cookbook Was Actually a Manual of Magical Recipes. The book contained actual magical recipes alongside conventional ones, spells, potions, and ritual instructions disguised as culinary advice.
7. She Outlived Almost All Her Surrealist Contemporaries. Born in 1917, Carrington lived to be 94, dying in 2011. She witnessed and survived not only her Surrealist colleagues but also multiple generations of art movements.
8. She Created Intricate Jewelry That Was Never Mass-Produced. She was a skilled jewelry designer, creating intricate pieces that incorporated the same mystical symbolism found in her paintings. These one-of-a-kind pieces were never commercially produced and remain highly sought after by collectors who appreciate their combination of precious metals with esoteric imagery.
9. Her Mental Breakdown Led to Her Greatest Artistic Innovation. The severe psychological crisis Carrington experienced during World War II, while traumatic, became a crucial turning point as the hallucinations, visions, and altered states of consciousness she experienced provided her with a path to the unconscious imagery that would define her mature work.
10. She Was One of the First Artists to Explore Feminist Spirituality. Decades before the feminist spirituality movement of the 1970s, Carrington was creating art that centered on the divine feminine, goddess worship, and women’s mystical power. Her paintings consistently feature powerful female figures—crones, witches, goddesses and so on.
11. Leonora Carrington’s most expensive painting, Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945), sold for $28.5 million at a Sotheby’s auction in New York in May 2024. This sale set a new auction record and made her the most valuable British-born female artist at auction.
Leonora Carrington. Les Distractions de Dagobert. 1945. Courtesy: Sotheby’s
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