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: \u201cI am as mysterious to myself as I am mysterious to others.\u201d But there are rare hints. Her relative, the arts journalist Joanna Moorhead, recalls a 2006 conversation with Carrington in her 2023 book \u201cSurreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington.\u201d Surrealism, Carrington told her, is \u201cthe belief that nothing is ordinary; that everything in life is extraordinary.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dreaming and Imagination<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrington was 19 when her mother gave her a copy of Herbert Read\u2019s 1926 book on Surrealism. \u201cI thought, ah, this is familiar: I know what this is about,\u201d Carrington said in a 1992 BBC documentary. \u201cA kind of world which would move between worlds. The world of our dreaming and imagination.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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, \u201cWe 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 \u2018civilization\u2019 which was responsible for the war.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrington saw artworks by Salvador Dali, Andr\u00e9 Breton (who authored the first Surrealist Manifesto in 1924), Man Ray and Ernst in person at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London in 1936. \u201cI fell in love with Max\u2019s paintings,\u201d Carrington told Moorhead for a 2007 Guardian article<\/a>, \u201cbefore I fell in love with Max.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrington first meet Ernst at a June 1937 dinner party in London, thrown by an art school classmate. She was 20. He was 46\u2014and 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 \u201cfrontage\u201d rubbing art technique. \u201cThis for me was a whole world opening,\u201d Carrington told Paul De Angelis for the 1991 book \u201cLeonora Carrington: The Mexican Years, 1943-1985.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n In July, English artist and poet Roland Penrose hosted a Surrealist gathering at his brother\u2019s 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 \u201cfemmes-enfants,\u201d who opened the men to erotic dreamworlds. Miller photographed Carrington and three of the other women feigning sleep. Miller photographed<\/a> Ernst behind Carrington holding her naked breasts. “It was a delightful Surrealist house party,\u201d the English artist Eileen Agar wrote in her 1988 biography, \u201cwith Roland taking the lead, ready to turn the slightest encounter into an orgy.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrington\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Paradise<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrington and Ernst moved into a Paris apartment in the fall of 1937\u2014landing in the heart of Surrealism. \u201cOur family weren\u2019t cultured or intellectual\u2014we were good old bourgeois, after all,\u201d Carrington told Moorhead for a 2007 Guardian article<\/a>. \u201cFrom Max I had my education: I learned about art and literature. He taught me everything.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Their circle included Breton, Dali, Ray, Pablo Picasso (\u201cA typical Spaniard\u2014he thought all women were in love with him. \u2026 I certainly wasn\u2019t. Though I liked his art,\u201d she told Moorhead in 2007<\/a>). The painter Joan Miro \u201cgave 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.\u201d Carrington\u2019s art was included with works by Ernst, Duchamp, Dali, Meret Oppenheim and Remedios Varo in the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism in Paris.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In 1938, Ernst and Carrington moved to St-Martin d\u2019Ardeche, in Provence, the south of France\u2014first 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, \u201cIt was an era of paradise.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Injustice of Society<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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, \u201cDown Below,\u201d Carrington recalled crying for hours in the village, then returning to their house and vomiting: \u201cI had realized the injustice of society, I wanted first of all to cleanse myself, then go beyond its brutal ineptitude.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cDown Below,\u201d she describes her increasing paranoia and erratic behavior\u2014including visiting the British Embassy and Imperial Chemicals Industries, of which her father was a principal shareholder, trying to convince them that \u201cthe World War was being waged hypnotically\u201d by Hitler. She was committed to a mental hospital.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Escape<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrington\u2019s abusive doctors seemed to be \u201chypnotic masters of the universe.\u201d She had visions. She was administered Cardiazol, a drug that induced convulsions similar to electric shock therapy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In \u201cDown Below,\u201d 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\u2014he arranged a marriage of convenience with her, which helped her get a passport out of war ravaged Europe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2014along with Guggeinheim’s former husband, his new wife, and children from both relationships. Guggenheim\u2019s group boarded a plane to fly to the United States. Carrington and Leduc departed Lisbon by ship for New York in July 1941.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Why didn\u2019t Carrington and Ernst rekindle their romance? “It was wartime, emotional things weren\u2019t so important,\u201d Carrington told Moorhead in 2008. \u201cYou had to do what you had to do to survive, and to get out. Hitler was coming\u2014we were all trying to get away from him.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n New York<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n At parties at Guggenheim\u2019s New York apartment and other social gatherings, Carrington reconnected with the Surrealists in exile\u2014Breton, Luis Bu\u00f1uel, Roberto Matta, Andr\u00e9 Masson, Marcel Duchamp and Ernst. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Insanity and nightmares were among of the Surrealists\u2019 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 \u201cDown Below.\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mexico<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrington and Leduc drove from New York to Mexico, settling in Mexico City in 1942\u2014but they soon dissolved their marriage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOnce you cross the border and you arrive in Mexico, you feel you are coming to a place that\u2019s haunted,\u201d 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\u2014especially as part of her research for her 1963 mural \u201cEl mundo magico de los mayas (The Magical World of the Maya)\u201d commissioned for the Museo Nacional de Antropolog\u00eda in Mexico City.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrington attended Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera\u2019s second wedding. Rivera, Carrington told Moorhead for a 2010 Guardian article<\/a>, “asked me who I was, and I said, \u2018Leonora Carrington, and who are you?\u2019 He said, \u2018Moctezuma,\u2019 so I said, \u2018Really, I thought you were dead.\u2019 He didn\u2019t seem to find it funny.\u201d Carrington\u2019s 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\u2019s most important living artists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Three Witches<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n But Carrington\u2019s closest friendships were with other European exiles of the war. Carrington; Spanish-born painter Remedios Varo, whom she\u2019d met in 1937 in the Paris Surrealist circle; and Hungarian-born photographer Kati Horna (n\u00e9e Katalin Deutsch) got nicknamed \u201cthe three witches\u201d due to their interest in Surrealism, magic and the occult. Carrington\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The title of Carrington\u2019s 1955 painting \u201cThe Chair: Daghda Tuatha de Danann\u201d refers to a divine dynasty in Irish lore: the Tuatha de Danann\u2014\u201cchildren of Danu,\u201d the universal mother goddess\u2014and 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.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrington began a romance with Hungarian Jewish photographer Emerico \u201cChiki\u201d 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\u2019s family was murdered by the Nazis. Carrington and Weisz married in 1946, <\/strong>raised two sons, and remained united until his death in 2007.<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Need<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrington painted and wrote. \u201cYou don\u2019t decide to paint,\u201d Carrington told Moorhead for a 2007 Guardian article<\/a>. \u201cIt\u2019s like getting hungry and going to the kitchen to eat. It\u2019s a need, not a choice.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Her past sometimes flickers through her art. Her childhood family\u2019s home, Crookhey Hall, a sprawling 19th century gothic mansion in Lancashire, became the sinister house in many of her paintings\u2014like 1957\u2019s \u201cCountry House\u201d here. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Photos here by Horna show Carrington in a spare, brick-walled studio, carefully painting in details of her 1956 canvas \u201cNunscape at Manzanillo,\u201d which is included in the exhibition. Like many of Carrington\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2014as if someone has run off naked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The most prominent Mexican artists of that era\u2014muralists, like Diego Rivera, and the print cooperatives\u2014focused on Mexican history, society and politics. Frida Kahlo\u2019s 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\u2014with a feel something akin to grown-up, mystical, haunted versions of \u201cThe Wonderful Wizard of Oz\u201d or \u201cThe Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe\u201d or \u201cAlice\u2019s Adventures in Wonderland\u201d (books Carrington left behind at St-Martin d\u2019Ardeche included Lewis Carroll and collections of fairy tales).<\/p>\n\n\n\n Carrington\u2019s 1950 painting \u201cPastoral\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Carrington\u2019s paintings, things always seem to be emerging out of mist, appearing or disappearing, various signs and beings, all confidently operating, suggesting they\u2019re following rules or rituals of significant import. What it all means persistently eludes deciphering, but the mysteries continue to allure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Related:<\/strong> Si<\/a>nce 2017, Double Edge Theatre in Ashfield, Massachusetts, has presented a number of productions of \u201cLeonora, La maga y la maestra,” their theatrical spectacle that brings Leonora Carrington’s biography and art to life.<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n If this is the kind of coverage of arts, cultures and activisms you appreciate, please support Wonderland by contributing to Wonderland on Patreon<\/a>. And sign up for our free, occasional newsletter<\/a> so that you don’t miss any of our reporting. (All content \u00a9Greg Cook 2025 or the respective creato<\/em>rs.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n In Leonora Carrington\u2019s 1947 painting \u201cNight Nursery Everything,\u201d 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25875,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[100],"tags":[1296,1282,1294,1295,467],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25858"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25858"}],"version-history":[{"count":33,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25858\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25907,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25858\/revisions\/25907"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/25875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Leonora](\"https:\/\/gregcookland.com\/wonderland\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/Carrington_Night_NurseryW.jpg\")
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