Leonora Carrington, the Surrealist Who Painted Alchemy
From Lancashire to Mexico City: Celtic tales, Max Ernst, Remedios Varo and the alchemical kitchens in Leonora Carrington's visionary painting.
Leonora Carrington was born in 1917 at Clayton Green, in Lancashire, into a wealthy family of textile industrialists, and died in Mexico City in 2011. In almost a century of life she passed through Parisian Surrealism, the war, a dramatic hospitalisation in Spain and exile in the Americas, building a body of work in which alchemy, Celtic mythology, tarot and ancient religions are woven into a highly personal painted world.
From Irish tales to Max Ernst
Her mother, of Irish origin, told her legends full of fairies and of the people of the Sidhe, which remained a constant source of her imagination. Rebelling against the conventions of her class, she studied painting in Florence and then in London, at the academy of Amédée Ozenfant. In 1937 she met Max Ernst and followed him to France, where she joined the Surrealist group and lived with him at Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche.
From this period dates the Self-Portrait known as The Inn of the Dawn Horse, now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. The painter sits in a bare room, facing the viewer, while a hyena approaches her and a white rocking horse floats behind her; through the window a white horse can be seen running free. The horse, which some critics link to the Celtic goddess Epona, becomes her alter ego.
War and the descent
When war broke out Ernst, a German citizen, was interned in France. Carrington fled to Spain, where in 1940 she suffered a mental breakdown and was confined in a clinic in Santander. She later recounted the experience in the book Down Below, a testimony in which the crisis also appears as an initiatory journey through symbols and trials. To leave Europe she married the Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc and reached New York, then Mexico.
Mexico, Remedios Varo and alchemy
In Mexico Carrington found a community of European exiles and formed a deep friendship with the Spanish painter Remedios Varo. The two shared an interest in alchemy, the Kabbalah, tarot and the teachings of George Gurdjieff, and exchanged games, dreams and stories. In 1946 Carrington married the Hungarian photographer Emérico Weisz, known as Chiki, and began to paint her most famous scenes.
Her pictures are peopled with kitchen-laboratories in which women and hybrid creatures move around mysterious cauldrons, with ritual processions, sacred animals and cosmic eggs. The kitchen becomes for her the site of an alchemical transformation, a feminine and domestic work replacing the traditional laboratory. In 1963 and 1964 she created for the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City the mural The Magic World of the Mayas.
Carrington was also a writer of novels and stories, including The Hearing Trumpet, published in English in 1976, which blends satire, the quest for the Grail and mythology. In 2022 the Venice Biennale took the title of its central exhibition, The Milk of Dreams, from one of her illustrated books of tales for children.
Late recognition has given Carrington the place she deserves: that of one of the most original painters of the twentieth century. Her work shows how the esoteric imagination, far from being a repertoire of the past, could become in the hands of a modern artist a living language, ironic and deeply personal, able to unite myth, autobiography and spiritual search.