In Leonora Carrington’s 1947 painting “Night Nursery Everything,” a giant golden woman with flowers in her hair smiles down at a pink dancer as a boy sits up in a hammock under a canopy, a woman in green sits at a spinning wheel, and a brown cat lies atop a cupboard of dishes.

After a blistering five years in which the English artist and writer left her childhood family, had love affair with a prominent married artist, took up with the Surrealists, was confined to a mental hospital, and fled the Nazis, she was now five years into settling down, into marriage and motherhood (she painted “Night Nursery Everything” a year after her first son was born and with her second boy on the way), into art and writing and stability in Mexico City. There, in the coming decades, she would paint dozens of dreamy scenes of giants, beasts, mysterious women, weird little men, magical eggs, occult symbolism, mythical creatures, and part-human, part-animal personages.

“Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver” at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum in Waltham from Jan. 22 to June 1, 2025, curated by Rose Director Gannit Ankori, brings together 32 of her drawings and paintings in a rare chance to survey her career, which has been gaining recognition over the past couple decades.

Carrington (1917-2011) generally declined to discuss what her art might mean. As she told Elaine Mayers Salian for a 2002 New York Times article: “I am as mysterious to myself as I am mysterious to others.” But there are rare hints. Her relative, the arts journalist Joanna Moorhead, recalls a 2006 conversation with Carrington in her 2023 book “Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington.” Surrealism, Carrington told her, is “the belief that nothing is ordinary; that everything in life is extraordinary.”

Leonora Carrington, "Night Nursery Everything," 1947. Tempera on masonite.
Leonora Carrington, “Night Nursery Everything,” 1947. Tempera on masonite.

Dreaming and Imagination

Carrington was 19 when her mother gave her a copy of Herbert Read’s 1926 book on Surrealism. “I thought, ah, this is familiar: I know what this is about,” Carrington said in a 1992 BBC documentary. “A kind of world which would move between worlds. The world of our dreaming and imagination.”

Surrealism sprouted from the wreckage of World War I. Max Ernst, who was featured on the book cover and had served in the German army, later said, “We young people came back from the war in a state of stupefaction at the absurdity, the total swinishness and imbecility of what had gone on for four years. We had to get back somehow at the ‘civilization’ which was responsible for the war.” In opposition to the status quo logic that had led to the, so called Great War, the Surrealists chose the unconscious, dreams, illogic, random chance.

Carrington saw artworks by Salvador Dali, André Breton (who authored the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924), Man Ray and Ernst in person at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. “I fell in love with Max’s paintings,” Carrington told Moorhead for a 2007 Guardian article, “before I fell in love with Max.”

Carrington first meet Ernst at a June 1937 dinner party in London, thrown by an art school classmate. She was 20. He was 46—and on his second marriage. He saved her beer bottle from rolling off the table. They became infatuated with each other. They spent a day in the country. Ernst show her his “frontage” rubbing art technique. “This for me was a whole world opening,” Carrington told Paul De Angelis for the 1991 book “Leonora Carrington: The Mexican Years, 1943-1985.”

In July, English artist and poet Roland Penrose hosted a Surrealist gathering at his brother’s home in Cornwall. Ernst and Carrington joined Surrealist artist Man Ray, model turned Surrealist photographer Lee Miller, Surrealist poet Paul Eluard and his wife Nusch. Surrealist liberation included shedding their clothes and partner swapping. Women were expected to be muses for the men. Breton liked to characterize women as “femmes-enfants,” who opened the men to erotic dreamworlds. Miller photographed Carrington and three of the other women feigning sleep. Miller photographed Ernst behind Carrington holding her naked breasts. “It was a delightful Surrealist house party,” the English artist Eileen Agar wrote in her 1988 biography, “with Roland taking the lead, ready to turn the slightest encounter into an orgy.”

Carrington’s parents disapproved of her romance with Ernst. When her textile tycoon father learned that she planned to follow Ernst to France, he told her never to come home.

Leonora Carrington, "Sueño (Nephesh as the Soul in a State of Sleep)," 1959. Oil on linen.
Leonora Carrington, “Sueño (Nephesh as the Soul in a State of Sleep),” 1959. Oil on linen.

Paradise

Carrington and Ernst moved into a Paris apartment in the fall of 1937—landing in the heart of Surrealism. “Our family weren’t cultured or intellectual—we were good old bourgeois, after all,” Carrington told Moorhead for a 2007 Guardian article. “From Max I had my education: I learned about art and literature. He taught me everything.”

Their circle included Breton, Dali, Ray, Pablo Picasso (“A typical Spaniard—he thought all women were in love with him. … I certainly wasn’t. Though I liked his art,” she told Moorhead in 2007). The painter Joan Miro “gave me some money one day and told me to get him some cigarettes. I gave it back and said if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself. I wasn’t daunted by any of them.” Carrington’s art was included with works by Ernst, Duchamp, Dali, Meret Oppenheim and Remedios Varo in the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris.

In 1938, Ernst and Carrington moved to St-Martin d’Ardeche, in Provence, the south of France—first in a hotel, then a tent, then into a stone farmhouse that she bought. She painted and wrote, he painted and sculpted. They painted portraits of each other. They decorated their home with sculptures, mosaics and murals. Carrington told Salian, “It was an era of paradise.”

Leonora Carrington, "Rabinos (the Rabbis)," 1960. Oil on Canvas.
Leonora Carrington, “Rabinos (the Rabbis),” 1960. Oil on Canvas.

The Injustice of Society

Two days after Germany began World War II with its blitzkrieg invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. The German Ernst was arrested as an enemy alien by the French and imprisoned at a camp at Largentiere. Carrington followed and successfully lobbied for his release.

They returned to the farmhouse, but as Germany invaded France in spring 1940, Ernst was taken away in handcuffs by armed gendarmes and imprisoned at Camp des Milles near Aix-en-Provence. In her 1988 memoir of this time, “Down Below,” Carrington recalled crying for hours in the village, then returning to their house and vomiting: “I had realized the injustice of society, I wanted first of all to cleanse myself, then go beyond its brutal ineptitude.”

This time Carrington was unable to liberate Ernst. As the German army advanced, Carrington became increasingly terrified. She drove with friends across the Pyrenees to Spain, where Carrington hoped to somehow assist Ernst. In “Down Below,” she describes her increasing paranoia and erratic behavior—including visiting the British Embassy and Imperial Chemicals Industries, of which her father was a principal shareholder, trying to convince them that “the World War was being waged hypnotically” by Hitler. She was committed to a mental hospital.

Leonora Carrington, "Country House," 1957. Oil on canvas.
Leonora Carrington, “Country House,” 1957. Oil on canvas.

Escape

Carrington’s abusive doctors seemed to be “hypnotic masters of the universe.” She had visions. She was administered Cardiazol, a drug that induced convulsions similar to electric shock therapy.

In “Down Below,” Carrington says her childhood nanny, sent by her parents, arrived via a warship, then a cousin working as a doctor at a nearby hospital managed to get her released. A man from Imperial Chemicals began arrangements to have Carrington sent to a sanitarium in South Africa. She would travel by ship from Lisbon. But in the Portuguese city, she eluded her minders in a cafe and hailed a taxi to the Mexican embassy. Renato Leduc, a Mexican poet she had befriended in Paris, was a diplomat at the embassy—he arranged a marriage of convenience with her, which helped her get a passport out of war ravaged Europe.

In Lisbon, Carrington bumped into Ernst. He had twice escaped prison only to be recaptured. After the American writer Varian Fry of the Emergency Rescue Committee finally got Ernst out, he returned to the farmhouse to find Carrington gone. Living with Fry in Marseilles, he fell into an affair with the wealthy art collector Peggy Guggenheim. Guggenheim took him to Lisbon—along with Guggeinheim’s former husband, his new wife, and children from both relationships. Guggenheim’s group boarded a plane to fly to the United States. Carrington and Leduc departed Lisbon by ship for New York in July 1941.

Why didn’t Carrington and Ernst rekindle their romance? “It was wartime, emotional things weren’t so important,” Carrington told Moorhead in 2008. “You had to do what you had to do to survive, and to get out. Hitler was coming—we were all trying to get away from him.”

Leonora Carrington, "Untitled (Griffin)," 1950. Woven with the weaver's mark upper left wool tapestry.
Leonora Carrington, “Untitled (Griffin),” 1950. Woven with the weaver’s mark upper left wool tapestry.

New York

At parties at Guggenheim’s New York apartment and other social gatherings, Carrington reconnected with the Surrealists in exile—Breton, Luis Buñuel, Roberto Matta, André Masson, Marcel Duchamp and Ernst. 

Insanity and nightmares were among of the Surrealists’ fascinations and inspirations, so Breton convinced Carrington to dictate the story of her confinement in the mental hospital in a 1944 issue of VVV, the Surrealist magazine he began publishing in New York. (Her account later grew to become “Down Below.”)

Carrington exhibited her art, and exchanged portraits with Ernst, though Guggenheim worked to keep the two of them at a safe distance from each other. The European artists in exile in the United States instilled a feeling that the art being made in the United States was now more serious and important, and inspired the New York painters toward what became Abstract Expressionism.

Leonora Carrington, "Cabbage," 1987. Acrylic on canvas.
Leonora Carrington, “Cabbage,” 1987. Acrylic on canvas.

Mexico

Carrington and Leduc drove from New York to Mexico, settling in Mexico City in 1942—but they soon dissolved their marriage.

“Once you cross the border and you arrive in Mexico, you feel you are coming to a place that’s haunted,” Carrington said in a 1992 BBC documentary. Over her decades there, she would draw inspiration from Mexico City markets, the blend of indigenous beliefs and Catholicism, and pre-Columbian archaeological sites that she visited—especially as part of her research for her 1963 mural “El mundo magico de los mayas (The Magical World of the Maya)” commissioned for the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City.

Carrington attended Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera’s second wedding. Rivera, Carrington told Moorhead for a 2010 Guardian article, “asked me who I was, and I said, ‘Leonora Carrington, and who are you?’ He said, ‘Moctezuma,’ so I said, ‘Really, I thought you were dead.’ He didn’t seem to find it funny.” Carrington’s circle included the Mexican writer Octavio Paz and later the Chilean filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky. By the time of a 1960 retrospective at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno in Mexico City, Carrington was considered one of Mexico’s most important living artists.

Leonora Carrington, "The Chair: Daghda Tuatha de Danann," 1955. Oil on canvas.
Leonora Carrington, “The Chair: Daghda Tuatha de Danann,” 1955. Oil on canvas.

The Three Witches

But Carrington’s closest friendships were with other European exiles of the war. Carrington; Spanish-born painter Remedios Varo, whom she’d met in 1937 in the Paris Surrealist circle; and Hungarian-born photographer Kati Horna (née Katalin Deutsch) got nicknamed “the three witches” due to their interest in Surrealism, magic and the occult. Carrington’s art was fueled by her studies of tarot, alchemy, the Jewish Kabbalah, the Maya chronicle Popol Vuh, and Irish Celtic legends that were first told to her by her mother, grandmother and childhood nanny.

The title of Carrington’s 1955 painting “The Chair: Daghda Tuatha de Danann” refers to a divine dynasty in Irish lore: the Tuatha de Danann—“children of Danu,” the universal mother goddess—and Daghda was their father. It depicts an ornately patterned black and white chair, with a sun mask at the top of the chair back, in a blood red room. Smoke or spirits coalesce around a shimmering white egg atop a table that sprouts a white rose. (A nearby sketch shows Carrington working out the chair design.)

Carrington began a romance with Hungarian Jewish photographer Emerico “Chiki” Weisz, who had arrived at Mexico on the same ship as Varo. He had served as darkroom manager for war photographer Robert Capa in Paris. Most of Weisz’s family was murdered by the Nazis. Carrington and Weisz married in 1946, raised two sons, and remained united until his death in 2007.

Leonora Carrington, "Nunscape at Manzanillo," 1956. Oil on canvas.
Leonora Carrington, “Nunscape at Manzanillo,” 1956. Oil on canvas.

A Need

Carrington painted and wrote. “You don’t decide to paint,” Carrington told Moorhead for a 2007 Guardian article. “It’s like getting hungry and going to the kitchen to eat. It’s a need, not a choice.”

Her past sometimes flickers through her art. Her childhood family’s home, Crookhey Hall, a sprawling 19th century gothic mansion in Lancashire, became the sinister house in many of her paintings—like 1957’s “Country House” here. 

Photos here by Horna show Carrington in a spare, brick-walled studio, carefully painting in details of her 1956 canvas “Nunscape at Manzanillo,” which is included in the exhibition. Like many of Carrington’s paintings, the paint is matte and feels scrubbed on, or abraided, giving the scene a soft focus, cloudy appearance. A proliferation of Catholic nuns in black and white habits packed into a sailing ship, gathering in a ring in the waves, running into the frothing surf, or sitting cradling a giant fish may be a relic of Carrington’s girlhood in two convent schools, from which she was expelled. A line of red mountains in the misty distance ring the scene suggesting Manzanillo, a mountainous city west of Mexico City on the Pacific coast. Fish flop out of the waves onto the shore. A white bird with three eyes and a human face perches beside a blue egg atop a column and eats a black bird. Below stockings and bloomers, a bra and boots are hung from a laundry line or scattered on the ground—as if someone has run off naked.

The most prominent Mexican artists of that era—muralists, like Diego Rivera, and the print cooperatives—focused on Mexican history, society and politics. Frida Kahlo’s paintings, meanwhile, burrowed into her fantastic, symbolic autobiography. But Carrington and Varo deployed the odd juxtapositions and dreamlike scenarios of Surrealism to imagine fantasy worlds—with a feel something akin to grown-up, mystical, haunted versions of “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” or “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” or “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” (books Carrington left behind at St-Martin d’Ardeche included Lewis Carroll and collections of fairy tales).

Carrington’s 1950 painting “Pastoral” shows people, creatures and animals gathered between the edge of a forest and the edge of a river. A placid naked man, a leopard and a robed woman lounge around a picnic blanket as a wolf-guy walks up and offers them a dead bird. Okapi and other deer, dog-wolves and birds gather along the river. Snarling harpies flutter along treetops filled with disembodied heads with haunted eyes.

In Carrington’s paintings, things always seem to be emerging out of mist, appearing or disappearing, various signs and beings, all confidently operating, suggesting they’re following rules or rituals of significant import. What it all means persistently eludes deciphering, but the mysteries continue to allure.

Leonora Carrington, "Pastoral," 1950. Oil on canvas.
Leonora Carrington, “Pastoral,” 1950. Oil on canvas.

Related: Since 2017, Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield, Massachusetts, has presented a number of productions of “Leonora, La maga y la maestra,” their theatrical spectacle that brings Leonora Carrington’s biography and art to life.


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Kati Horna, "Leonora Carrington with 'Nunscape at Manzanillo' in her studio, Mexico City," photograph.
Kati Horna, “Leonora Carrington with ‘Nunscape at Manzanillo’ in her studio, Mexico City,” photograph.
Leonora Carrington, "Dream Weaver," 1955. Pencil on paper.
Leonora Carrington, “Dream Weaver,” 1955. Pencil on paper.
Leonora Carrington, "Study, The Chair: Daghda Tuatha de Danann," 1955. Pencil on paper.
Leonora Carrington, “Study, The Chair: Daghda Tuatha de Danann,” 1955. Pencil on paper.
Leonora Carrington, "The Last Resort," 1954. Oil on canvas.
Leonora Carrington, “The Last Resort,” 1954. Oil on canvas.
Kati Horna, "Leonora Carrington with 'Nunscape at Manzanillo' in her studio, Mexico City," photograph.
Kati Horna, “Leonora Carrington with ‘Nunscape at Manzanillo’ in her studio, Mexico City,” photograph.
Categories: Art