Plymouth College of Art Library : Not Just a Room Full of Books: Book of the Month for May

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