May’s Featured New Book:
The surreal life of
Leonora Carrington
759 CAR
In 2006 journalist Joanna Moorhead discovered that her
father's cousin, Prim, who had disappeared many decades earlier, was now a
famous artist in Mexico. Although rarely spoken of in her own family (regarded
as a black sheep, a wild child; someone they were better off without) in the
meantime Leonora Carrington had become a national treasure in Mexico, where she
now lived, while her paintings are fetching ever-higher prices at auction
today. Intrigued by her story, Joanna set off to Mexico City to find her lost
relation. Later she was to return to Mexico ten times more between then and
Leonora's death in 2011, sometimes staying for months at a time and
subsequently travelling around Britain and through Europe in search of the
loose ends of her tale. They spent days talking and reading together,
drinking tea and tequila, going for walks and to parties and eating take away
pizzas or dining out in her local restaurants as Leonora told Joanna the wild
and amazing truth about a life that had taken her from the suffocating
existence of a debutante in London via war-torn France with her lover, Max
Ernst, to incarceration in an asylum and finally to the life of a recluse in
Mexico City. Leonora was one of the last surviving participants in the
Surrealist movement of the 1930s, a founding member of the Women's Liberation
Movement in Mexico during the 1970s and a woman whose reputation will survive
not only as a muse but as a novelist and a great artist. This book is the
extraordinary story of Leonora Carrington's life, and of the friendship between
two women, related by blood but previously unknown to one another, whose
encounters were to change both their lives.
More about Leonora
Leonora Carrington, (b Clayten Green, nr Chorley,
Lancashire, 6 April 1917; d Mexico City, 25 May 2011).
Born in Lancashire as the wealthy heiress to her British
father's textiles empire, Leonora Carrington was destined to live the kind of
life only known by the moneyed classes. But even from a young age she rebelled
against the strict rules of her social class, against her parents and against
the hegemony of religion and conservative thought, and broke free to pursue an artistic
and personal freedom.
Today Carrington is recognised as the key female Surrealist
painter, for a time Max Ernst's lover in Paris, Carrington rubbed shoulders
with Salvador Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miró, André Breton and Pablo Picasso.
When Ernst fled Paris at the outbreak of the Second World War, Carrington had a
breakdown and was locked away in a Spanish asylum before escaping to Mexico,
where she would work on the paintings which made her name.
In 1936 she enrolled at Chelsea School of Art, where in the
classes of cubist Amédée Ozenfant, art, commitment and precision all
came together. Ozenfant insisted on understanding “the chemistry of
everything you used”
In 1936, she visited the London International
Surrealist Exhibition, and became obsessed with the movement. During this
time, she met Max Ernst at a dinner party; he became her lover, and
her much-desired passport to Paris, and the Surrealists. “I fell in love
with Max’s paintings before I fell in love with Max,” she
said. Ernst, captivated by her beauty and imp-like obstinacy,
abandoned his wife and ushered young Leonora into his social circles in
Cornwall and Paris. Leonora started to paint her first surrealist works, holding
her own among the greats of the Parisian art world: Picasso, Dalí, Miró,
Breton, Fini and Duchamp.
At the outbreak of World War II, Ernst was interned as an
enemy alien, and Carrington escaped to Spain, where she was admitted
to a private clinic after having a nervous breakdown; she later recounted the
experience in her book En bas (1943). After marrying the Mexican poet
Renato Leduc in 1941 (a marriage of convenience), she spent time in New York
before settling in Mexico in 1942, devoting herself to painting. There she and
Remedios Varo developed an illusionistic Surrealism
combining autobiographical and occult symbolism. Having divorced Leduc in 1942,
in 1946 she married the Hungarian photographer Imre Weisz.
Carrington remained committed to Surrealism throughout
her career, filling her pictures with strange or fantastic creatures in
surprising situations, notably horses, which appear in Self-portrait, as
well as unicorns, owls, dogs and lizards; she sometimes also combined features
of animals and human beings. Her references were wide-ranging, whether to
ancient Babylonian, Assyrian and Egyptian mythology or to visions reminiscent
of the Middle Ages. The strange, enigmatic and subtly humorous anecdotes that
appear in her work were the expression of a profound inner world, a mythology
of her own making, which although terrifying protected her from the aggressive
banality of the external world. A prolific painter, she combined technical
refinement with a careful but at the same time extremely free design.
Other books in the Library featuring Leonora Carrington
50 British Artists
You Should Know
709.41 HAW
This roll-call of British artists confirms the dominance and
excellence of British art across five centuries, from Blake to Banksy, Turner
to Tracey Emin. This highly readable and informative collection of the best of
British art showcases magnificent portraits by Thomas Gainsborough and Stanley
Spencer; landscapes by J. M. W. Turner and David Hockney; satire by William
Hogarth and Gilbert & George; sculpture by Henry Moore and Rachel
Whiteread; and the latest works by Grayson Perry and Damien Hirst. Each artist
is presented in a double-page spread that features a major work, details from
the work, a brief biography and fascinating insights into the artist's life and
times. Lucinda Hawksley's engaging survey compares the skill of the Elizabethan
miniaturists and the magnificence of the High Victorians with the grit of
post-war British modernists and the best of the Young British Artists, whose
fearless approach to controversial themes make them worthy inheritors of the
great traditions of British art.
The Artist's Joke
700.417 HIG
This title traces the role humour plays in transforming the
practice and experience of art, from the early twentieth-century avant-gardes,
through Fluxus and Pop, to the diverse, often uncategorizable works of some of
the most influential artist's today. Artists' writings are accompanied and
contextualized by the work of critics and thinkers including Freud, Bergson,
Helene Cixous, Slavoj A iA ek, Jorg Heiser, Jo Anna Isaak and Ralph Rugoff,
among others. Artists surveyed include Leonora Carrington, Maurizio Cattelan,
Marcel Duchamp, Marlene Dumas, Fischli & Weiss, Andrea Fraser, Guerilla Girls,
Hannah Hoch, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Barbara Kruger, Sarah Lucas,
Paul McCarthy, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenberg, Raymond Pettibon, Francis
Picabia, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, Arnulf Rainer, Ad Reinhardt, Ed Ruscha,
Carolee Schneemann, David Shrigley, Robert Smithson, Annika Strom, Kara Walker
and Andy Warhol. Writers include Hugo Ball, Henri Bergson, Andre Breton, Helene
Cixous, Sigmund Freud, Jorg Heiser, Dave Hickey, Jo Anna Isaak, Ralph Rugoff,
Peter Schjeldahl, Sheena Wagstaff, Hamza Walker and Slavoj A iA ek.
Black Mirror 1 – Embodiment
704.949133 BLA
In esoteric traditions, the mirror does not just reflect
back an image of the self. It is understood as an instrument of vision through
which inspiration and knowledge may be gained. The occult, with its constant
questioning of theories of perception and notions of the self and subjectivity,
has been at the centre of counter-cultures and avant-gardes since the first
esoteric revival at the end of the nineteenth century. Since the beginnings of modernism, artists have used
esoteric, magical and occult philosophies as sources of inspiration. They have
written and theorised about them, and made them central elements of their
practice. But these aspects have been marginalised by a critical culture that
emphasizes ‘truth to the materials’ and negates any examination of the role of
the spiritual and esoteric in the making of art. Black Mirror seeks to redress this imbalance and examine
ways in which the occult and the esoteric have been at the heart of art
practice now and throughout the modernist period. It is part of a growing
movement that seeks to critique the dominant twentieth century notion of
disenchantment, and that rejects notions of the esoteric and occult as
irrational, escapist, regressive and essentially anti-modern.
Intersections : women
artists/surrealism/modernism
709.04063082 ALL
Featuring new essays by established and emerging scholars,
Intersections: Women artists/surrealism/modernism redefines conventional
surrealist and modernist canons by focusing critical attention on women artists
working in and with surrealism in the context of modernism. In doing so it
redefines critical understanding of the complex relations between all three
terms. The essays address work produced in a wide variety of international
contexts and across several generations of surrealist production by women
closely connected to the surrealist movement or more marginally influenced by
it. Intersections explores work in a wide range of media, from painting and
sculpture to film and fashion, by artists including Susan Hiller, Maya Deren,
Birgit Jurgenssen, Aube Elleouet, Dorothea Tanning, Claude Cahun, Elsa
Schiaparelli, Joyce Mansour, Leonor Fini, Mimi Parent, Lee Miller, Leonora
Carrington, Ithell Colquhoun and Eileen Agar.
Women Artists and the
Surrealist Movement
704.042 CHA
Examines the work and careers of Eileen Agar, Leonora
Carrington, Leonor Fini, Frida Kahlo, Dorothea Tanning, and Kay Sage, all
surrealist painters.
Other ways to access more information about Leonora Carrington
A quick Search on the Library’s Databases brought up a
wealth of scholarly articles about Leonora, her life and artistic output.
Click here for Full
Text Articles on Art Source about Leonora Carrington
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Text Articles on JSTOR about Leonora Carrington
Articles are also available from American Vogue about Leonora Carrington - just type Leonora's name in the search box
Articles are also available from the
Oxford Art online about Leonora Carrington.
