Joanna Moorhead on the Rebel Visionary Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington 1917-2011, United Kingdom Follow +

Joanna Moorhead first met her cousin, the artist Leonora Carrington, in the autumn of 2006. Standing on the doorstep of Carrington's house in Roma Norte in Mexico City, Moorhead—a writer and journalist—wasn't sure what to expect.

She knew very little about 'Prim'—a family nickname for the Surrealist—other than that the debutante had run away from her family home in Lancashire to live with the artist Max Ernst in Paris at age 19, and had since settled in Mexico City.

Over the next five years, until the artist's death in 2011, Moorhead would venture twice a year to Mexico to visit Carrington, who would share the stories of her life from the kitchen table dressed with Liberty linen. In exchange, Moorhead would tell her about the family she had bid farewell to all those decades earlier.

It was an extraordinary life Carrington led. When in Paris with Ernst, Carrington rubbed shoulders with the likes of Picasso, Dalí, and Duchamp, before heading to the south of France and then Spain, and later fleeing to the U.S. and Mexico to escape war-torn Europe. All the while, she continued to pursue art up until her final year.

Earlier this year, Carrington became the highest selling British-born female artist at auction when her painting, Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945), sold for just over £22.5 million at Sotheby's in New York. Her influence even extended to the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022, with the main exhibition curated by Cecilia Alemani, The Milk of Dreams, drawing its title from Carrington's fantastical children's book published after her death.

This summer, Newlands House Gallery in Petworth, West Sussex, hosts the exhibition, Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary (12 July–26 October 2024) curated by Moorhead. It brings together over 70 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, tapestries, jewellery, and masks, with a particular focus on the artist's later years.

I spoke with Moorhead about her relationship with her cousin, what the exhibition in West Sussex does differently, and what Carrington taught her about living and ageing adventurously.

How did Leonora fall upon Surrealism?

Leonora was invited to a dinner party in 1937, hosted by the Hungarian-British architect Ernő Goldfinger and his wife Ursula. Ernő's friend Max Ernst was also in town for his first ever London solo show at The Mayor Gallery on Cork Street.

A few weeks later, following a brief jaunt with Max and others in Cornwall, Leonora joined him in Paris where she found herself surrounded by his close circle of friends: Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, and Joan Miró, among others.

Leonora was only 20 years old. Most of those men—including Max—were in their 40s and 50s; some even older. They were men who regarded women as their muses. Leonora recalled a memory of Miró once asking her to get him some cigarettes, to which she replied: 'Get your bloody own!'

I think she always had Surrealism in her, even before she met Max.

Was she Max Ernst's muse?

She didn't fit into the idea of being a muse; she was very single-minded and determined to go on painting and making art in her own right.

What did she learn from her time in Paris?

She learned how artists lived and supported each other. She always said she received her real education from Max, and that the education she received from her convent was a 'diseducation'. She was incredibly determined to follow her own path, and you see that time and time again in her story.

In the U.K., Leonora is largely known as a painter and writer. In the show at Newlands House you're presenting a full range of her work, including her sculptures, masks, and drawings. What spurred this decision?

I never actually knew Leonora as a painter—when I met her in 2006, she had given up painting. Right up to the end of her life, she worked in a variety of other mediums including bronze sculpture, tapestry, jewellery... She had also written plays and designed stage sets and masks for theatre. A number of the masks in the show were made for a theatrical production of The Tempest in Mexico in the 1950s.

One work in the show is a sculpture of a bird, nearly a metre long, rendered in bronze. It's hard to imagine her working on a piece so detailed, so fiercely delicate, at that late stage in her life.

Many great artists in history experiment; I know Leonora was among them. With this exhibition we wanted to show her curious mind, and how her curiosity never stopped until the very end.

Is there a particular work in the show that you felt important to include?

Leonora painted Play Shadow in 1977 while living in New York. She was 60 that year: at a stage when life gets easier for many people. Children have grown up, there's sometimes a bit more money around, and it's easy to fall into familiar patterns.

But Leonora was always trying to get out of her comfort zone. She went to live in New York, rented a basement apartment, painted, walked around the city, and made new friends. She certainly wasn't a famous artist at this point in her life. Money was tight, and although she was represented by a New York gallery, they sometimes paid her rent to bail her out. It was a tough and sometimes lonely time, a searching time.

What does Play Shadow show?

There are three central figures that might all be Leonora; it speaks of the reality of her life at that time. Words and even whole sentences are written across the painting in her characteristic mirror writing.

When you hold a mirror up to the piece and decipher the text—which I have done with the help of the painting's owner—you get a sense of a cri de coeur, a cry from the heart. The words and sentences are an attempt to make sense of what is going on in her inner consciousness: 'Help', 'Be quiet, stop screaming', 'Where is my house?', 'I am nowhere'.

It's very affecting, imagining Leonora alone in her New York basement.

Behind the figures and the words is what looks like a musical score. Perhaps what she's saying is that even these toughest of times are all part of the symphony of life. The music goes on; things change. And they did change: after a while in New York, Leonora went to live in Chicago, before returning to live in Mexico City in the 1990s with [her second husband] Chiki Weisz, in their house in Calle Chihuahua.

How did your time with Leonora impact you?

When I met Leonora in 2005, I was in my early 40s and she in her late 80s. She was growing old in a way that I wanted to grow old; she was still very positive, still living curiously.

Her novel The Hearing Trumpet (1974) is all about how later life has as much potential for fun as any other years. That sense of adventure she expressed really appealed to me. —[O]

Main image: Leonora Carrington, Untitled (1979) (detail). Wool tapestry. 197 x 260 cm. Courtesy Leonora Carrington Council and rossogranada.