Almost 20 years ago, I travelled 5,000 miles to meet my father’s cousin, who had been estranged from our family for 70 years. At the time, Leonora Carrington was welcomed in her adopted country of Mexico, but little known in her native Britain. She was neglected by her country and our family, as well as by the art world in general.
Twenty years later, the story is very different. In April this year, one of his paintings – The Distractions of Dagobert (1945) – sold at Sotheby’s in New York for $28.5 million, making her the best-selling female artist in British history. In recent years, exhibitions of her work have been held around the world: in Madrid and Copenhagen, in Dublin and Mexico City, and at the Tate Liverpool. An exhibition next month at Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, Sussex, will celebrate the artist’s wider work, exploring her output beyond the dreamy canvases of her paintings and the surreal fictional writings for which she is now best known. For as well as being a painter and writer, Carrington was also a sculptor, tapestry and jewellery maker, lithographer, playwright, designer of stage sets and theatrical costumes. The Sussex exhibition will feature examples of these works, many of which have never been seen in the UK before.
In the 1980s, the feminist art collective Guerrilla Girls compiled an ironic list of the perks of being a female artist. The “perks” included: “knowing that your career can pick up after you’re 80”; and “being included in the revised editions of art history.” That’s exactly what happened for Carrington. After my first visit to Mexico City in 2006 to meet her, I visited her many more times over the next five years, until her death in 2011 at age 94. We’d sometimes joke around the kitchen table that one day she’d be working; like her old friend Frida Kahlo, she’d be making T-shirts, refrigerator magnets, tote bags, and headscarves.
It was really a joke, but today I have all these items and more. Like Kahlo, who remained virtually unknown after her death in 1954 (her husband, muralist Diego Rivera, was the couple’s “celebrity” artist), recognition of her status came slowly. The reasons why some artists are sought-after and fashionable is a multi-layered and complex phenomenon. Carrington, like Kahlo, had an extraordinary life story: In 1937, she fled her family and England to join her lover Max Ernst in Paris, becoming the youngest member of a circle that included Picasso, Dalí, Duchamp and Miró. After 18 months of an idyllic life with Ernst in the south of France, in a farmhouse adorned with their surviving works of art, she fled to Spain, and after a terrifying period in a psychiatric hospital, she fled war-torn Europe to the USA. Then he went to Mexico.
As with Kahlo, Carrington’s work was always intertwined with her own experiences: She once told me that everything she does is connected to her biography, both her visual art and her writing. Another reason why it is in fashion today is that its concerns, which were unusual and even eccentric in their time, are now ubiquitous. Ecology, feminism, the interconnectedness of all life forms, spirituality outside organized religion: we are all aware of these issues today, but they were front and center for Carrington 80 years ago.
We used to say that one day his works would produce t-shirts, bags and refrigerator magnets. Today I have these items
Joanna Moorhead
“Great” artists are always experimental; They push boundaries, try new ideas, and turn things upside down. They do not seek a comfortable space; They are curious, constantly seeking challenges. All of this was true of Carrington, too: as his friend and supporter Edward James, who was also a chief supporter of Salvador Dalí and René Magritte, wrote in a 1975 essay: “He never abandoned his love of experimentation; as a result, he used hundreds or more objects to express his creative powers.” “He has been able to diversify and explore many techniques and continues to experiment with new media that help him clothe his vital ideas in fresh forms.”
The new exhibition I am curating will bring together more than 70 of Carrington’s works, many of which have never been seen in the UK before, including a series of masks made for theatre productions. Storm A collection of 1974 lithographs of costumes made in the 1950s, also for the production of S An-sky’s play The Dybbuk or Between Two Worldsin New York. The exhibition highlights Carrington’s work as a playwright, including: Penelope And judithboth with strong female leads. And its game The Story of the Last EggIt is the precursor to Margaret Atwood’s book, written in 1970. The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) envisions a world where greedy overlords have stripped the planet of all its resources, including its women. There’s only one left – and she only has one egg.
Carrington’s rebellious spirit underpins the new exhibition: she later recalled that she had been expelled from several convent boarding schools as a child, admonished by nuns for not cooperating “in work or play”. Later, when she was introduced to society during the 1936 London season, her parents hoped she would find a “suitable” husband: instead she fell in love with the divorced, remarried, penniless (by Carrington standards) artist Ernst. When she left the family home in Lancashire to join him in Paris, her father Harold warned her that she would no longer be part of the family: she never saw him again.
As a new exhibition explores, her rebelliousness continued throughout her long life: Carrington never fit in. She defied the art establishment in Mexico, her base for 70 years; she broke with the “official” surrealist movement when she left New York in 1942; she attracted neither art historians nor journalists (if I had not been her cousin, I would never have been accepted into her life). In her 50s and 60s she lived alone for long stretches in New York and Chicago, sometimes so poor that she later told me she ate ice cream because it was the cheapest way to get calories.
In her late 80s and 90s – when I knew her – she was rebelling against old age: and she had already written the story of her later life through a fictional character called Marian Leatherby in her short novel. Hearing TrumpetIt was a matter of life imitating art. Trumpet of HearingPublished in 1974 and written when Leonora was in her 50s, this novel from 50 years ago tells the fantastic and stereotype-breaking story of a nursing home. The residents of the nursing home overturn all conventions in their search for the Holy Grail and plan to escape to Lapland in a knitted tent. Hearing Trumpet‘s anniversary is the starting point for another exhibition, which will open in Colchester later this year.
Carrington never stopped working throughout her life: she had a studio in her Mexico City home, recently restored as a museum and not yet open to the public, but she worked in every aspect of the house. For 10 years in the 1950s, she and her family (her Hungarian photographer husband Chiki, whom she met and married after coming to Mexico, and her sons Gabriel and Pablo) lived with a family of weavers. Tapestry from that period will be featured in the Newlands House Gallery exhibition. In her later years, unable to paint, she turned to sculpture, focusing on individual figures in her paintings. Throughout my time with her, she worked with an assistant on sculptures of strange and wonderful creatures, many of which will be exhibited in the Newlands House Gallery, along with visits to the garage between our teacups in the kitchen.
Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary, 12 July–26 October at Newlands House Gallery, Petworth, Sussex; Leonora Carrington: Avatars and Alliances, 26 October–23 February at Firstsite, Colchester, Essex