Rebel Visionary

Posted by Barbara on October 14, 2024 in Art, Blog, Exhibition, feminism | 2 comments

Here’s your starter for 10: In May 2024 who became the most successful female artist in UK history in terms of sales? Her painting Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for USD$28.5 million. 

Dames, we are talking about Leonora Carrington; born in 1917, this extraordinary artist came from a privileged upper middle class English background that she rejected as soon as was possible. I recently visited a major retrospective of her work on show at Newlands House Gallery in Sussex, which ends on 24 October.

Describing Carrington just as an ‘artist’ does not do justice to the range of her expression. As well as the visual arts, she wrote plays and stories, many of which articulated the repression she experienced as a little girl.  She had three brothers, all of whom were allowed much more freedom than she. Her parents sent her to a convent boarding school, where she rebelled and was asked to leave.  Later she was sent to finishing schools in Florence and Paris; she loathed the expectations put on her by the establishments, but adored the art, particularly Renaissance art in Italy.

She abhorred the ‘cattle market’ – the term used to describe the London Season, when young girls ‘came out’. Carrington wrote The Debutante to express her disdain for this; in it she sends a hyena to take her place at one such ball.

Carrington ran away to Paris, and joined the artists living and working there.  She met Max Ernst and he was her lover until his imprisonment as an enemy alien at the outbreak of World War II. She suffered depression, was hospitalised, moved to Spain and then to Mexico City where she made her home.

The sheer range of artistic creations astound; Carrington excelled at painting, sculpture, drawing, lithographs, and design of stage sets and theatrical costumes.  In the 1950s a family of weavers of Aztec heritage came to live at her house in Mexico City. This heralded a long period of tapestry creation; Carrington created the designs which were woven into tapestries by her new lodgers. The designs included a range of animals, symbols, and hieroglyphics inspired by Egyptian and Mesopotamian mythology.  Many of the forms used echo those in her paintings, and they also express an affinity which she felt with a spiritual realm that had no part in the organised religion of her childhood.

Carrington made masks. She used a huge range of materials and exploited them in unique ways. Many of these were created not for exhibition or sale, but as personal talismans.  

While in Mexico, Carrington heard about the feminist movement in the US, and in 1971 decided to travel there to learn more. There she met Gloria Feman Orenstein, a feminist art critic, and activist Betty Friedan. The three women discussed the need to organise women in Mexico to protest what was then an extremely patriarchal culture.

She is quoted as saying: ‘Most of us, I hope, are now aware that women should not have to demand Rights. The Rights were there from the beginning; they must be Taken Back Again, including the Mysteries which were ours and which were violated, stolen or destroyed’.

Carrington’s works draw on mythological themes and are full of mystery. Her composition was superb, and her rich use of colour intense and sophisticated.  The creatures in her sculptures at times seem to come from another dimension.  One feels sure that her decision to leave her native country and immerse herself in a completely different culture allowed a richness of expression that defies categorising.