@eduardmsmr

Happy Surrealist Saturday!! I have no idea what happened to the previous exploration, or maybe I hadn't done it all though I doubt it, but this doesn't matter anymore cause here I am, exploring the life of someone who was one of the most influential figures in Surrealism. And to be honest I think she might be the single most important figure keeping Surrealism alive today. You can't say Surrealism without thinking about Leonora Carrington She was born on April 6, 1917, in Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire, England, and she lived for 94 years which was long enough to become one of the last surviving participants of the original Surrealist movement. Leonora grew up at Crookhey Hall, a Gothic Revival mansion that looked like it belonged in a fairy tale. Her Irish mother and Irish nanny filled her childhood with Celtic mythology and stories of the Sidhe (a fairy race her grandmother claimed they were descended from, beings who retreated underground when invaders took their land and dedicated themselves to magic and alchemy). She was expelled from at least two convent schools for rebellious behavior. Her father, a wealthy textile manufacturer, wanted her to be a debutante. Leonora wanted none of it. At her society debut, she buried her nose in a book by Aldous Huxley (British writer and philosopher) instead of making conversation. Her father suggested she try "breeding fox terriers" instead of art. But she ignored him. Her parents finally relented and let her study art, first in Florence, then in London at the academy of Amédée Ozenfant (French Purist painter and theorist). It was in London, in 1937, at a party hosted by Ernő Goldfinger (Hungarian-born British architect), when the 20 year old Leonora met the 46 year Max Ernst (German Surrealist painter and sculptor). They fell in love immediately and she ran off to Paris with him, and her father disowned her. In Paris, Leonora entered the Surrealist circle directly, meeting André Breton (French poet and founder of Surrealism), Salvador Dalí (Spanish Surrealist painter), Pablo Picasso (Spanish painter and sculptor), Yves Tanguy (French Surrealist painter), and Léonor Fini (Argentine-Italian Surrealist painter). Breton championed her immediately, drawn to her dark, satirical writing and her fascination with fairy tales and the occult. Her stories appeared in Surrealist publications. Her paintings were included in their exhibitions. She participated in the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris. But Leonora refused the role the movement typically assigned to women. The male Surrealists regarded women as natural embodiments of irrationality, idolized as muses, and sidelined as creators. Leonora's now-famous response: "I didn't have time to be anyone's muse... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist." She and Ernst settled in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche in the south of France, where they hosted an extraordinary roster of visitors including Léonor Fini, Lee Miller (American photographer and war correspondent), Roland Penrose (English artist and collector), and Peggy Guggenheim (American art collector and patron). They painted, wrote, and collaborated on floor mosaics and dreamscapes. It was an idyll. And then the war destroyed it. When World War II broke out, Ernst, a German living in France, was interned as an "enemy alien". This made Leonora suffer a devastating nervous breakdown. She was committed against her will to an asylum in Santander, Spain, where she was subjected to Cardiazol injections which was a drug that induced terrifying convulsive seizures, a barbaric alternative to electroshock therapy. She was also sexually assaulted during her descent into crisis. Three years later, encouraged by Breton, she recorded these experiences in her memoir Down Below, first published in the Surrealist journal VVV in 1944. She saturated her prose with alchemical and religious symbolism, using the language of the alchemical laboratory to structure her understanding of psychic reality. Where her male Surrealist peers drew on Freud, Leonora built an entirely different symbolic grammar rooted in alchemy, Celtic mythology, and lived bodily experience. Down Below remains one of the most powerful documents ever produced from within the Surrealist movement. In Madrid, she ran into Renato Leduc (Mexican diplomat and poet), an old friend of Picasso's. They married in a marriage of convenience to secure her passage. She traveled through New York, where she briefly reconnected with other exiled Surrealists, and arrived in Mexico City in 1942. She divorced Leduc, and her real life began. Mexico became Leonora's alchemical crucible. She married Emerico "Chiki" Weisz (Hungarian-born photographer and former darkroom manager for Robert Capa), and they had two sons: Gabriel, who became an intellectual and poet, and Pablo, who became a doctor and Surrealist artist in his own right. She became close friends with Luis Buñuel (Spanish filmmaker), Benjamin Péret (French Surrealist poet), Octavio Paz (Mexican poet and Nobel laureate), Frida Kahlo (Mexican painter), and Diego Rivera (Mexican muralist). But the friendship that changed everything was with Remedios Varo (Spanish Surrealist painter). Leonora and Remedios had first crossed paths in Paris, where both were cast as "femmes-enfants" by the older male artists in their lives. In Mexico City, their bond deepened into something rare and generative. They saw each other almost daily. Leonora said that Remedios's presence in Mexico changed her life. Though they painted separately with distinct styles, Leonora's work was about tone and color, Remedios's about line and form, they spent their time together cooking, writing spells, studying the Kabbalah, exploring alchemy with kitchen ingredients, and looking for ways to prank their guests. Alongside Kati Horna (Hungarian Surrealist photographer), they formed a surrogate family in the Colonia Roma neighborhood, transforming domestic spaces into creative laboratories. Their behavior was just as outré as that of Dalí and Breton in Paris, but while the Surrealist men attracted enormous attention, the Surrealist women in Mexico passed largely unremarked. Leonora poured all of these influences (Celtic myth, Mesoamerican folklore, Jungian psychology, alchemy, Buddhism, the Kabbalah, the sacred narratives of the K'iche' people) into a body of work that defied every category. Her paintings were populated by sorceresses, shapeshifters, elongated women in great cloaks, many-armed creatures, people turning into birds, faces within bodies. She used small brushstrokes, building up layers with meticulous care, creating imagery that was simultaneously whimsical and deeply unsettling. The hyena, considered "unladylike" and grotesque, became her signature symbol of subversive feminine power. In her Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse), she sits with a wild mane of hair, a hyena at her feet, and a white horse galloping away outside the window. The horse and hyena would follow her through decades of work. In 1973, she designed Mujeres Conciencia, a poster for the women's liberation movement in Mexico depicting a "new Eve." She became a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico. She won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Women's Caucus for Art convention in New York in 1986. In 1970, she wrote the essay "Female Human Animal," arguing that women must challenge patriarchal authority for the planet to survive. Her novel The Hearing Trumpet is now celebrated as one of the first books to tackle gender identity in the 20th century. In it, she modeled the two main characters after elderly versions of herself and Remedios Varo, a testament to the friendship's importance and her wish that it would last into old age. In 2022, curator Cecilia Alemani (Italian curator and artistic director) named the 59th Venice Biennale "The Milk of Dreams", after Leonora's illustrated children's book from the 1950s, a collection of bizarre fairy tales featuring children who lose their heads, vultures trapped in gelatin, and carnivorous machines. Alemani drew three guiding themes from Leonora's work: the metamorphosis of bodies, the relationship between individuals and technologies, and the connection between bodies and the Earth. In May 2024, Leonora's 1945 painting Les Distractions de Dagobert sold at Sotheby's for $28.5 million, surpassing any price ever achieved by Dalí at auction. Recent scholarship argues that it is Leonora, not Breton or Ernst, who is most responsible for keeping the Surrealist message alive in the 21st century. Thank you for reading!!🌹

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