" I've always had access to other worlds. We all do because we dream". - Leonora Carrington (1917-2011).
I was more than happy to catch this first retrospective on French soil of the work of painter Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) on my last visit to Paris too. I of course knew of her paintings (previously on this blog here), and connection with Max Ernst and Mexico, but knew very little about her life other than this. This exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg was fairly comprehensive and helped fill in the blanks. Arranged and displayed chronologically this exhibition explains how Lancashire-born Carrington rebelled against her upper-class upbringing, rejecting the rules of her strict Catholic boarding school and the debutante balls to pursue her interest in Irish folklore and mythology which would be related to her as a child by her Irish mother, grandmother and nanny. She found inspiration in these tales of humans, animals, and nature living harmoniously, joining forces against threats of injustice and violence, which would profoundly influence her art for the rest of her life. Writers of fantasy such as Lewis Carroll, Jonathan Swift and Beatrix Potter were also clearly influential on her earliest artworks. In 1937, Carrington's mother gifted her a copy of Herbert Read's Surrealism, which served as her first introduction to the avant-garde movement. At 19, Carrington visited the first International Surrealist Exhibition in London. where she was struck by the work of Max Ernst, and in particular his dreamlike painting Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale (1924). Carrington would meet Ernst in Paris the following year while studying at Amédée Ozenfant's academy, and the two began a romantic relationship, setting up home in St. Martin d’Ardèche in the south of France, where they would host their Surrealist circle of friends. The exhibition features a door painted by Carrington from the house they shared together (pictured below). In 1938, she participated in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris and a Surrealism exhibition in Amsterdam, cementing her position in art history among the Surrealists despite personally disagreeing with the categorisation choosing to remain on the periphery of the movement. The attitude of the Surrealists toward women was uncertain. André Breton, the founder of the movement was fascinated by the Freudian idea that the female psyche was unrestrained, mystical, and erotic. And some female artists associated with the movement, such as Carrington, were regarded as the femme enfant (woman child) who served as muse to the male artist. But as Carrington stated, “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse…I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.” When the Nazis occupied France in June 1940 the German-born Ernst was considered an enemy alien and arrested, Carrington fled south to Spain where she suffered an emotional breakdown and was subsequently interned in a psychiatric hospital in the Spanish city of Santander. Following her release from the Spanish hospital, Carrington made her way to New York for a brief spell, before moving to Mexico City in 1942, where she would stay for the rest of her life. Here she joined a growing community of expatriate artists, writers, and photographers, including Varo, Benjamin Péret, Kati and José Horna, and her new husband, Emerico “Chiki” Weisz. Mexico fuelled Carrington's passion for the esoteric allowing her to discover cooking, healing, and new mythologies. Her 1943 drawing Kitchen Clock shows the extent to which she saw the kitchen not just as a place of domestic routines, but as a magical realm, one where women could perform acts of alchemical transformation. Over the course of her eight-decade career, Carrington continued to explore the mystery of the world around her, claiming at the end of her life, “The only thing I know, is that I don’t know.” The exhibition contains 126 artworks with many of Carrington's most well known pieces on display. The exhibitions curators make the point of contemporaneity with themes from Carrington's personal biography such as sexual assault and mental illness still being very much present in society today and how these same themes sadly continue to affect other female artists. We see how the symbolism of the horse recurs continuously as a motif in her art. Looking at Carrington's body of work as a whole in the exhibition it struck me how much of it had a similar aesthetic to the works of Hieronymus Bosch which I'd seen a few weeks earlier at The Prado in Madrid. You can see similar animal/human hybrids, multiple-headed deities, strange woodland feasts, plants with sprite-like faces, and worlds floating on animals’ backs installed in eerie dreamscapes. I've since learnt that Carrington herself had visited the Prado and was indeed inspired by Bosch's painting The Temptation of Saint Anthony, creating her own version of it in 1947. This was my first ever visit to the Musée du Luxembourg, and first encounter with such a big retrospective of Carrington's work. It was a pleasure to make its acquaintance in Paris, one of my favourite cities.
Musée du Luxembourg door sculptures by Cecco Bonanatte
Leonora Carrington
until 19th July
Musee du Luxembourg
19 Rue de Vaugirard
75006 Paris
