Biography
Leonora Carrington was born on 6 April 1917 in Lancashire, England, and grew up surrounded by Celtic myths. They were told them by her mother, Maureen Moorhead, her grandmother and her nanny, all of whom were Irish and prone to fables. Her father, Harold Wilde Carrington, on the other hand, was a successful businessman, who was fiercely opposed to his daughter's fantasy and artistic interests. What he hoped was that, after debuting with a ball at the luxurious Ritz Hotel in London and being presented at the Royal Court of George V, Leonora would find a husband and a comfortable future among the upper classes.
The oral stories of her mother and her nanny nourished an imagination that soon led to her first writings full of fables and to an early vocation for painting. After being expelled from several Catholic schools for her irreverent behaviour, she began to study art, first in Florence, then in Paris and London. Her early works are a prodigious invention of hybrid animal species and powerful female figures in which various legendary worlds are syncretised. His encounter with Surrealism, thanks to his visit to the exhibition The International Surrealist Exhibition (New Burlington Galleries, London, 1936), is a foundational moment, for there he encounters a world to which he thought he had long belonged.
At that time, in 1937, at the age of 20, she met the German painter Max Ernst, 47 years old and married, who already had a reputation for avant-garde surrealist art. Leonora fell in love and, fleeing from her family, moved to Paris. During her stay in that city, she met the surrealist movement and lived with important figures of the movement who met around the table of the Café Les Deux Magots. After a year in Paris, they settled in St Martin-d'Ardèche. Inside the house, the ramps and walls of the house were covered with fantastic creatures; at the same time, Carrington began to publish her first books, illustrated with collages by Ernst, such as The Oval Lady and The House of Fear. To this day a relief on the façade of the house depicts the couple and their role-playing: "Loplop", Max Ernst's alter ego, a fabulous, winged animal somewhere between bird and starfish, and his Bride of the Wind: Leonora Carrington.
Carrington and Ernst's romance was interrupted by the advance of the Second World War. In 1940, Max Ernst was imprisoned as a German citizen and Leonora fled to Spain with the intention of going to the other side of the Atlantic. Her stay is prolonged in what ends up being the calvary that marks the rest of her biography. On arriving in Madrid, she was raped by a group of requetés officers, perhaps the trigger for a psychotic episode that led to her admission (on the orders of her father, who extended his tentacles to Spain) to a sanatorium in Santander. There, the patients are treated with a powerful drug capable of generating epileptic attacks and temporarily annulling their will. Years later, in the novel La trompetilla acústica (The Acoustic Trumpet), he would say: "Brainwashing is said to be the last word in torture". From this experience would emerge her deeply felt story Memories from Below, parallel to the enigmatic canvas Down Below and numerous drawings. From this period the painter kept an indelible mark, which had a decisive effect on her later work. Carrington described the details of this dramatic story in her autobiographical work (En bas).
Like many intellectuals of his time, he arrived in New York in 1941, where he met up with some of his fellow Surrealists. Her time in the sanatorium was traumatic, but it also enabled her to develop a freer and more veiledly autobiographical visual vocabulary, which she applied at that time to works now considered classics, such as Green Tea. From then on Carrington was a constant exile, but she also took on a more prominent role in the activities that began in the American city, such as the exhibition First Papers of Surrealism and the magazines View and VVV. She would never live in Europe again.
In 1943 he moved to what would become his permanent home: Mexico. The interest in magic that had been awakened in Europe was revived by this civilisation. On arriving in Mexico she met a group of exiled surrealist artists who had in common the trauma of the war; this new family was made up of artists such as the photographer Emerico "Chiki" Weisz, whom she married; the photographer Kati Horna and her husband; the painter Remedios Varo, who became her close friend; Alice Rahon, who captured the landscape and popular traditions in her poems and paintings, and the anthropologist Laurette Séjourné. The trio formed by Leonora Carrington, the Spanish painter Remedios Varo and the anthropologist Laurette Séjourné, with whom she shared a fascination for the archaeology and ethnography of the country, explored remote regions, visiting healers, witches and shamans and recovering testimonies of their ancestral practices, which Séjourné collected in a text illustrated by Carrington: Supervivencias de un mundo mágico (1953).
La lectura de La Diosa Blanca (1948) de Robert Graves fue la que, según Carrington, supuso la mayor revelación de su vida. El texto explora la historia de los cultos desaparecidos a deidades femeninas. Con esta lectura da un nuevo impulso a su obra: mujeres, heroínas y diosas dotadas de poderes y mensajes proféticos aparecen de manera reiterada, mostrando mil facetas de lo femenino. Hecho clave para Leonora es la celebración de su primera exposición individual, inaugurada en la Pierre Matisse Gallery de Nueva York en 1948
Carrington also contributed to the Poetry Out Loud theatre movement in the 1950s. This movement associated plays from the Spanish Golden Age and contemporary playwrights of the world with productions inspired by the Theatre of the Absurd, with the aim of renewing theatre in Mexico. The artist adapted some of her stories for the theatre, produced the scenery and costumes for some important plays by other authors and wrote the play Penelope, for which she created the set and costumes.
The late 1960s are marked by her interest in feminist movements and her long stays in the United States. Carrington participated in groupings with her friend and art critic Gloria F. Orenstein (1938-), in whose company she met Betty Friedan (1921-2006), activist and emblematic figure of the feminist movement in the United States. Carrington was a pioneer of ecofeminism, a school of thought defined as a feminist critique of decisions related to the extraction of natural resources. These circles rescued the cult of the goddess and revised the role of matriarchy in history. With an advanced ecological vision, they often expressed their indignation at the predatory attitude of the human species and its treatment of ecosystems.
Founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s. Her house became a meeting point for a small circle of women concerned about the situation of inequality and lack of rights for women. Her painting Mujeres Conciencia was used in the printing of the poster of the same name in 1972 as an expression of "indignation and anger about the situation of women". In it, two women, one white and one black, exchange apples and an inscription on the back reads: "Eve gives back to Eve the fruit of wisdom". The questioning of the figures of Eve and other women in the biblical stories as the cause of sin and justification for the oppression of their gender was very present in Carrington's work during these years. There also appears a commitment to the complementarity between the sexes which is materialised in androgyny. Parallel to all this, in 1968 the Tlatelolco massacre took place, where the repression of student mobilisations caused several hundred deaths. This event led her to politicise her painting and inspired works with a clear political content, such as No!, clearly in favour of non-violence.
In the 1980s, Carrington began to cast bronze sculptures, her themes referring to the multiple faces that confront the reality of old age.
She won the National Prize for Sciences and Arts in Fine Arts, awarded by the Government of Mexico in 2005. She died at the age of 94 in 2011.
In her honour, the Leonora Carrington Museum was inaugurated in 2018 at the Centro de las Artes San Luis Potosí Centenario in San Luis Potosí and, on 19 October 2018, another museum venue in Xilitla.
Biased by sensationalist anecdotes about her life and her role as a "muse" for other artists, her work has recently begun to be seen in a fresh light.
Bibliography
De la Fuente Rocha, Eduardo (2017). "Leonora Carrington. Frente a la desestructuración", en Revista Iberoamericana de las Ciencias Sociales y Humanísticas, Vol. 6, Nº. 12, 2017 págs. 1-25, (02-04-2022),<https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=6059140>
Gariglio Rangel, Eva Marina (2018). "Leonora Carrington: el arte y el misterio", en Revista Avance y perspectiva, vol. 8, n. 4, CINVESTAV, (02-04-2022), <https://avanceyperspectiva.cinvestav.mx/leonora-carrington-el-arte-y-el-misterio/>
Leonora Carrington. "Revelación". (2023). Exposición Fundación Mapfre, (25-05-2024), <http://inclusion.womenslegacyproject.eu/uploads/resume/attachment/4610/textos-sala-leonora-carrington-es.pdf>
Leonora Carrington. "Revelación". (2023). Exposición Fundación Mapfre, (25-05-2024), <https://www.fundacionmapfre.org/media/arte-cultura/exposiciones/folleto-leonora-carrington-es.pdfnes/folleto-leonora-carrington-es.pdf>
Leonora Carrignton, en Wikipedia, (27-05-2024), <https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonora_Carrington>
Leonora Carrignton, CULTURA, Museo Leonora Carrington (02-05-2022)< https://www.leonoracarringtonmuseo.org/leonora-carrington >
Audiovisuales:
Museo Leonora Carrington ,(25-05-2024) <https://www.leonoracarringtonmuseo.org/slp >
Canal Once. [Canal Once], del Instituto Politécnico Nacional, México, (12-09-2015), Historias de vida-Leonora Carrington. [Vídeo], (04-04-2022), <https://youtu.be/c8wRNh6yaEE>
Canal22. [Canal22]. (12-06-2015). Leonora Carrington, imaginación a galope fino. [Vídeo], (04-04-2022), <https://youtu.be/e9iQx8m1JAc>
Leonora Carrington. "Revelación". (2023). Exposición Fundación Mapfre, (25-05-2024), <https://exposiciones.fundacionmapfre.org/LeonoraCarringtonFM/visita_virtual.html>
Páginas interesantes sobre la relación entre Remedios Varo y Leonora Carrington:
Ochoa, Andrea (30-08-2020). "Leonora Carrington y Remedios Varo: cómo distinguir sus grandes obras". AD (Arquitectura y diseño). AD Latinoamérica, (04-04-222), <https://www.admagazine.com/cultura/leonora-carrington-y-remedios-varo-como-distinguir-sus-grandes-obras-20200830-7343-articulos>
Secretaría de Cultura. "Remedios Varo y Leonora Carrington: Una amistad estrecha, peculiar y surrealista". MEXICANA. Secretaría de Cultura/Dirección General de Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicaciones, México, (04-04-2022), <https://mexicana.cultura.gob.mx/es/repositorio/x2b5egs060-1#:~:text=No%20hay%20nada%20que%20explicar.&text=La%20amistad%20entre%20Remedios%20Varo,la%20guerra%20y%20el%20exilio.&text=Las%20dos%20eran%20extranjeras%3A%20Remedios,Lancashire%2C%20al%20noroeste%20de%20Inglaterra>
Didactic approach
It can be worked on in Visual and Plastic Education, dealing with different aspects of his work in terms of subject matter and technique, such as portraiture, drawing from life, scientific illustration or text illustration, the concept of the representation of reality in art (surrealism as a movement), techniques such as frottage or collage, the use of colour in his works, proportion and perspective, among others.
It is also possible to work in Spanish Language and Literature, with an approach to his stories and other written work.
In Philosophy and Education in Civic and Ethical Values, feminism and non-violence could be addressed. The sense of the mysterious, which permeates Leonora Carrington's work, inherited from the Celtic mythology of her childhood and her inclination for the supernatural, the mystical and the magical - which is linked to the Mexican tradition in which she lives - is linked to myth, to femininity, to the enigmas of the unconscious.
