From torrid affairs to teaching French to a
SURREAL SPACES: THE LIFE AND ART OF LEONORA CARRINGTON
by Joanna Moorhead 224pp, Thames & Hudson, £30 (0844 871 1514), ebook £21.99 ÌÌÌÌÌ
In 1935, aged 18, Leonora Carrington was presented at Court; the following year, she attended the UK’s first major exhibition of surrealist art at the New Burlington Galleries. She didn’t get much out of doing the season – she regularly bunked off to visit the zoo, where, according to a short story she wrote two
T
years later, she taught French to a hyena – but the exhibition fired the starting gun on Carrington’s career as a painter, and introduced her to the work, and subsequently the person, of one of surrealism’s central figures at the time: the German emigré and early-onset silver fox Max Ernst, nearly 30 years her senior.
A passionate affair ensued, much to the chagrin of Carrington’s father, a bluff Northern industrialist who tried to get Ernst’s 1937 solo London show shut down for obscenity. The couple went on the lam to Cornwall, and thence to the Ardèche, where they decorated a farmhouse with murals and reliefs before the Second World War swept them up and away, and eventually apart. After traumatic experiences, including a brief period of institutionalisation and (as recounted in her 1944 memoir,
Down Below) a gang-rape by Spanish soldiers, Carrington settled in Mexico City. There, her dreamlike tableaux of animals, people and animal-like people carrying out obscure rituals in domestic spaces seemed to make perfect sense. She passed a long and, it seems, agreeable second act before her death in 2011, at the age of 94, working to the last.
Surreal Spaces builds on
The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington, a more straightforward memoir that Joanna Moorhead, Carrington’s cousin once removed on her Irish
mother’s side, published in 2017. It has a great deal to commend it: snatches of intimate conversation with the artist, good reproductions of not just her work but also Ernst’s, detailed and luminous images of the Ardèche house (still in private hands) and the Mexico City apartment (now a museum).
Carrington’s personal qualities shine through: not just the acute observational powers and sheer wit that suffuse her art – and her extraordinary writing, which might have featured more prominently here – but also a peculiar sense of loyalty towards figures from her past. Moorhead’s account of wandering around her cousin’s apartment after her death is suggestive and moving. Still, given the existence of the earlier book, not to mention the title of this one, we might have hoped that the latter would contain a bit more consideration of the art to set alongside the life.
Part of the issue is that although we all know roughly what “surrealism” means, if we’re to make sense of Carrington’s ambivalent relationship with the movement, it would help to know a little more. How do you achieve the “pure psychic automatism” called for by André Breton in the surrealist manifesto? And why would you want to do so? Moorhead includes a vignette of Carrington and Ernst taking “rubbings” together: this technique was used by Ernst to create accidental patterns and suggest motifs, bypassing – he hoped – his conscious mind. Some similar techniques are evident in Carrington’s work; yet Moorhead’s accounts of her cousin’s paintings are all about trying to locate them in the artist’s own experience, as if they were a series of crossword clues rather than true postcards from the unconscious.
One of Moorhead’s goals in the book is clearly to restore Carrington to her rightful place in the surrealist pantheon, and while she’s hardly languishing in obscurity, it’s definitely the case that the market holds her work in less esteem than (say) Ernst’s. But Carrington was a bolter rather than a joiner: an ounce of freedom outweighed a barrowload of belonging. She was always an idiosyncratic sort of magic-realist rather than a “true” surrealist, intent not so much on unlocking the doors of perception as on giving life to the world as she saw it: a world outside time, charged with a bizarre syncretic spirituality, where the mundane, the absurd and the nightmarish all danced along together.