Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington, a surrealist painter and novelist, held both British and Mexican nationality. She was among the last figures active from the 1930s Surrealist movement and helped establish Mexico’s women’s liberation movement in the 1970s.

Born on 6 April 1917 in Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire, into a wealthy Roman Catholic family, Carrington grew up in a Gothic Revival mansion in Cockerham that deeply shaped her imagination. Educated by governesses, tutors, and nuns, she was expelled from two schools—including New Hall School in Chelmsford—for rebellious behavior. Her family then sent her to Florence to study at Mrs Penrose’s Academy of Art, and she briefly attended St Mary’s convent school in Ascot. At age ten, she saw her first Surrealist painting in a Paris gallery and later met Surrealists such as Paul Éluard. Her father opposed her artistic ambitions, but her mother encouraged her. Presented at Court in England, she brought Aldous Huxley’s *Eyeless in Gaza* to read, refusing to be “sold to the highest bidder.” In 1935 she studied at the Chelsea School of Art for a year, then transferred to the Ozenfant Academy in London, where she was among the first students alongside Stella Snead and Ursula Goldfinger, under Sari Dienes. She and Dienes remained lifelong friends. Her mother gave her Herbert Read’s *Surrealism* (1936), which introduced her to the movement, but her family offered little support for an artistic career. The poet and patron Edward James championed her work in Britain, buying many paintings and arranging a 1947 show at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York; some works still hang at West Dean College in West Sussex.

In 1936 Carrington saw Max Ernst’s work at the International Surrealist Exhibition in London and felt drawn to him before meeting him. They met the following year at a party, bonded, and returned to Paris, where Ernst left his wife. In 1938 they settled in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, collaborating and supporting each other’s art. They decorated their home with sculptures of guardian animals—Carrington made a plaster horse head, Ernst created birds. In 1939 they painted portraits of each other; Carrington’s *Portrait of Max Ernst* focused solely on him with heavy symbolism, while Ernst’s *The Triumph of Love* included both. Her earlier *Self-Portrait* (also called *The Inn of the Dawn Horse*, 1937–38), now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, shows her in white jodhpurs with a wild mane, perched on a chair, reaching toward a hyena while a tailless rocking horse flies behind her.

When World War II broke out, Ernst, as a German, was arrested by French authorities as a “hostile alien.” Released after a few weeks with help from Paul Éluard and others, he was soon rearrested by the Gestapo because the Nazis deemed his art “degenerate.” He escaped to the United States with aid from Peggy Guggenheim. Devastated, Carrington went to Spain with a friend, Catherine Yarrow. While alone in a Madrid café, Spanish soldiers took her to a hotel and gang-raped her. Suffering a psychotic break from paralyzing anxiety and delusions, she was admitted to an asylum in Santander, where she received Cardiazol shock therapy and Luminal. Released into a keeper’s care, she learned her parents planned to send her to a sanatorium in South Africa. En route, she stopped in Portugal and escaped. She went to the Mexican diplomatic mission to find Renato Leduc, a poet and diplomat she had met in Paris through Pablo Picasso. He agreed to a marriage of convenience, granting her diplomatic immunity. She took Mexican nationality in 1942; they divorced in 1943. Ernst married Peggy Guggenheim in 1941; that marriage ended years later. Carrington and Ernst never reunited.