“The Surrealists explored liminal spaces between consciousness and dreaming, including mental illness. In contrast, Leonora experienced these first hand.”
Leonora Carrington’s life was, in one sense, a succession of escapes. She escaped two prestigious English schools by getting herself expelled. Then in ’37 she escaped a privileged yet confining life among the moneyed English by taking up with Surrealist enfant terrible Max Ernst and relocating to France. Nazi occupation and Ernst’s arrest necessitated another escape, this time to Spain. Then in ’42, she escaped a combination of sexual assault, mental illness and institutionalisation by moving to Mexico.
Yet, and despite so many of the works here being from so late in her life, it was those early English years which tended to dominate her imagery. And small wonder. “Do you think anyone escapes their childhood?” she once asked. “I don’t think we do. That kind of feeling you have in childhood of being very mysterious.” (Quoted in the recent ’British Surrealism’ show.) And of course we don’t. Childhood is when the basement of our brains are built, everything after just added on.
Her life story is something like a character from an Angela Carter novel. While her father wanted her married off to high society, her mother, nanny and grandmother read her Celtic folk tales from a young age. And, however taken she was when she discovered continental Surrealism, they remained her primary influence.
Take for example ’Green Tea’ (1942, up top.) The figure on the left is generally agreed to be Carrington herself, swaddled in some kind of strait-jacket. She’s paired with the two tethered animals, the cow hide on her swaddling echoing their animal state. While she also seems paired with the larva-like creature in the underworld beneath her feet. Beyond one tethered dog, the only points the stillness in that picture is broken is in that underworld.
Yet the focus isn’t on the swaddled figure but on the landscape. A cloistered garden of a landscape, with each tree depicted individually in an iconic fashion. Perhaps, confined long enough, she’ll turn into another tree. But the landscape still dominates. And it’s imbued with its own kind of charm. This isn’t a protest work, a rejection of green-lawned England, its a portrait of that England more than of herself. This is where she was grown.
Carrington first met Leonor Fini in ‘37. The two soon became fast friends, often painting one another. And a key feature of both their work is the delicate style, made up of small deft strokes. It’s not as bold and in-your-face as is standard for Surrealism, more diffuse, more similar to illustration. There’s definitely a feedback loop here where this led to their art being sidelined - this women’s art looks just like illustrative art and vice versa, not really proper painting you know.
One thing the show does well is to meet this square-on, displaying illustrations (including from children’s fairy books) which influenced her. (Less happily, it doesn’t always credit the artists.)
An artist it does name is Dore. Which is to the good, but it then disregards the way in which her art differs. His engravings are classical in style, foregrounding knowledge of proportion and anatomy in a bid to make the strange sights look credible. It’s like the tag line to the original ’Superman’ film - “You’ll believe a man can fly.” Whereas Carrington deadpans, more in the way of fables and folk tales. Characters within her work rarely react to the strangeness, they stay stoic, often calmly meeting our gaze. Her approach is “man flies”.
The show goes on to say “subversion and transformation were key approaches… [they] channel her rejection of the attempt at being categorised, where hybrids of animals and humans inhabit a mix of imagined, real and ritualistic worlds.” Again this channels childhood, where we don’t feel the same sense of separation from animals, can even feel like we are between the human and animal worlds.
See for example the etching ’Badger Causing Table To Fly As Medium Falls In Trance’ (1987, above). The badger and medium are not only placed the same side of the table, her ankle-length dress and its fur are made up of the same two blocks of shading - downward strokes and cross-hatching. The badger is the medium’s familiar, joined to her if not part of her self. Other works look very much like the Surrealist ‘exquisite corpse’ game of chimera creatures, one (undated) is appealingly titled ’Alien Whale Sphinx Goose’.
But the show misses one element of this. Yes, in her work the distinction between human, animal and spirit forms are slippery. But check out her lithograph ’Stag At Mourn’ (1974, above). No less than four of these figures are passing between physical form and symbols. Which surely reflects her interest in magic and alchemy. Those symbols may have meant something specific to her, or just found their way onto the plate. We’re never likely to know which, and it doesn’t matter much because the point is a broader one. Magic is the manipulation of symbols, with the intent to alter the physical world. It’s been said well enough before now how that links it to art, that the two may have at one time been interchangeable.
And her art often functions like symbols, an arrangement of elements where their combination is the thing to look out for. They’re usually discrete from one another but placed within the same pictorial space, prompting you to take them together. Take ’Night of the Eighth’ (1987, above). A highly symmetrical work, this immediately draws our attention to the place where that symmetry is broken. The silver-and-grey figure has an opposite number in purple, but that second figure has been shifted up in the composition. Its place is taken by another symbol, a loop. Or it may be the figure and symbol together make up the eight of the title. It ‘flies’ with birds, but they’re so stub-winged and chubby they could never soar like that. Suggesting that we’re seeing is some spirit form of flight.
Silver-and-grey holds its hand out in a shaping motion, and the outlined creature next to them looks the most morphing. You could say this figure represents the artist, just as you could for the medium earlier. But it’s more than that really. Reality isn’t depicted as something normally static, which a select band of magicians know the secrets to make it shift. Reality is in a continual state of flux, and we can learn how to ride the waves. As David Gascoyne, a fellow British Surrealist, put it: “the marvellous is within everyone’s reach.”
Overall this show does well on the indicia front, contextualising Carrington’s work. (See up top for an example.) Alas it does less well actually showing her work, which is sparse, not always well selected and padded out- at times with little more than ephemera. ’Green Tea’ is rather ridiculously represented by a print. (Disclaimer: it was free to get in.) Perhaps I’ll get to see a fuller show some day, maybe pairing her art with Fini’s. The title is right there, curators - ’Leonor and Leonora’!
In my more indulgent moments I like to think I’ve managed to give space to Surrealism’s more unorthodox currents, including Edward Burra, Paul Nash, Dorothea Tanning, Dora Maar, Wifredo Lam, Joseph Cornell, women and Surrealism, British Surrealism and Surrealism goes global. (Only in Surrealism would us Brits be the underdogs!) Though you can be sure there’s more out there to discover. It’s Surrealism, the only limit is your imagination.
