The Accomplished Surrealist

This year, the surrealist movement, which started with the publication of André Breton’s Manifesto, turned 100 years old. And as the colder seasons roll around, with the typical seasonal depression and desire to escape, is there any better time to celebrate this movement that encourages the escape to strange dream-like worlds and the exploration of one’s psyche, of the deepest parts of the unconscious?

Leonora Carrington, Green Tea, 1942. Available via MoMa.

While the first names that pop up when thinking about surrealism may be those of Breton, Dalí, Magritte or Tzara, there is one artist in particular who was consecrated as a surrealist heroine, recognized even by her contemporaries, and that is Leonora Carrington.

Carrington’s early life is well-documented. Born in 1917 to the English textile magnate Harold Carrington and Irish mother Maurie Moorhead Carrington, she spent her childhood on the family estate in Lancashire, a sight that ended up as the background for many of her paintings. As she grew up, she started rebelling against her bourgeois upbringing and refused to follow the lifestyle of her rich industrialist family. She preferred leaning into her mother’s Irish roots: mysticism, Irish Catholicism and folk tales inspired her.

Her journey with surrealism began in 1936 when she attended the International Exhibition of Surrealism at London's New Burlington Galleries. A year later, at 19 years old, Leonora Carrington met a 46-year-old Max Ernst and began their affair, quickly moving to Paris together. She joined the tight-knit group of surrealist artists and, in 1938, she finished her first surrealist painting, her Self-Portrait. Living with Ernst, she started painting, writing, and creating more than ever - they inspired each other and their house in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche has, to this day, its walls sculpted and painted by the two artists. But their relationship was not the most harmonious one, as her works from the time seem to suggest. Critics have long picked up on a degree of terror in them that goes beyond the usual surrealist macabre mood.

Leonora Carrington, Self-Portrait, 1937-38. Available via The MET.

Ernst viewed the young Carrington as his femme-enfant, his woman-child: the incarnation of the focal point of the surrealist doctrine, the perfect combination of innocence and sexuality, of transparency and mystery. Sure, he encouraged her as an artist, but for him, she was first and foremost his fantasy, his muse. His behavior is not out of line with the ideas behind the surrealist movement. Finding its roots in Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, surrealism has often been said to be hostile towards women. Most of the male surrealists took inspiration from the female body and depicted it in a distorted, often monstrous manner. Their female colleagues rebelled against this by adopting cross-dressing or by depicting themselves as animals, and Leonora Carrington was no exception. Her Self-Portrait already debuted her alter-ego, the hyena, a recurring figure in her writings and paintings.

In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, Max Ernst was arrested and thus began Carrington’s descent into madness. After a psychotic breakdown, she was institutionalized and she underwent shock therapy. This experience traumatized her and completely changed her and her work, but it also earned her the recognition of her peers. She managed to obtain that complete derangement of the senses that surrealism promised; she traveled to the other side of reason as they all wanted to - but at what cost?

Two works are direct references to this period of her life: a painting from 1941 and a memoir from 1943, both titled Down Below.

Leonora Carrington, Down Below, 1941. Available via Gallery Wendi Norris.

The painting depicts 5 feminine figures and a dark green horse against a verdant background. The woman on the right resembles Carrington and her body seems to be in the process of metamorphosis. The other figures, a chimaera with red stockings, a handless bearded lady, a green Medusa, and a glowing white bird-woman are mythical figures representing reincarnations of the artist. This painting is considered a seminal one as it marks the turn towards Carrington’s new world, as she began to see it while in the sanatorium.

Down Below, the text, is a unique act of remembrance as it accurately recounts the experience of being insane, despite being composed in hindsight. Written in the form of a diary, the text swings between moments of lucidity and hallucinations; it factually describes psychotic behavior, cruel scientific therapies, epiphanies derived from random patterns that were given esoteric meaning, as well as moments of metaphysical connection with the natural world. There is a constant change in point of view, not only from sane to insane but also from macroscopic to microscopic. This interest in shifting ways of seeing is something that was transferred to her painting in the following years.

Leonora Carrington’s work surpassed the label of surrealist and recent inquiries into her art have started to recognize that, moving more towards ecofeminism. In 2019, Gallery Wendy Norris in New York organized an exhibition entirely dedicated to the exploration of Carrington’s ecofeminist worldview - “Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg”. It advanced the idea that, in the face of humanity's destructive dominion over the environment, Carrington's imagery highlighted the redeeming force of feminism, ecology, and mysticism, all the while acknowledging a universal interconnectedness and a primordial wisdom.

For a long time, Leonora Carrington’s work was overshadowed by her connections to the likes of Max Ernst and André Breton and her status as a femme-enfant stood in the way of her being regarded as a serious artist by her peers. Her descent into madness, her voyage to the other side of reason is what earned her her recognition and admiration. In her crazed state, she met the ideals of surrealism, and her sanity was the price to pay for artistic recognition on the part of her peers. Her art and self were changed, and thus she became a heroine, but I cannot help but wonder: was it worth it? Does good art require suffering?