Emergence: How the Writing & Art of Leonora Carrington Is Receiving Overdue Accolades

Born in 1917 in the United Kingdom, growing up, Leonora Carrington rebelled against the limitations and expectations that society placed on women, especially as one born into a wealthy family. She was kicked out of two schools due to her inability and refusal to shrink herself to fit into the idea of who she was meant to be. As an adult, she found herself attracted to the seemingly bohemian art world, specifically the Surrealist moment of the period. She saw her first Surrealist painting at age ten and was instantly taken by the experimental elements of the technique. In 1936, she began attending the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts, a newly established art school founded by modernist artist Amédée Ozenfant. 

In 1937 she met artist Max Ernst and subsequently began a relationship with him after his divorce from his wife, cohabitating in southern France. Although frequently surrounded by Surrealist painters like Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, and, of course, Ernst, she was never entirely accepted as a Surrealist painter due to the sexism within the movement and the idea that women were muses, not artists. Unlike the male surrealist painters, whose work stemmed from and was inspired by Freudian psychology, Carrington was concerned with infusing her work with elements of mythology, animism, and female sexuality. Her first self-portrait, and presumably her most well-known, Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) (1937-1938), portrays her in a bedroom surrounded by a hyena and a horse. The horse, symbolic of freedom and independence, and the hyena representing ferocious animalism would become motifs she would utilize in artwork throughout her career. Her depiction of women contradicted women's representation within the movement, which was constrained to the mystifying, fetishizing, and othering of their bodies. They were viewed solely as objects of masculine desire and fantasy and femme enfants.

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Leonora Carrington, Self Portrait (The Inn of the Dawn Horse),  ca. 1938-1939. Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Pierre and Maria-Gaetana Matisse Collection, 2002. 

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Carrington rejected this classification, refusing to be anyone’s muse and instead focusing on developing her own art, saying, “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse...I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist. Despite his support and encouragement of her art career, which was in stark contrast to the Surrealist movement’s acceptance of women artists, Ernst still framed Carrington as his femme enfant. She thought the role of the muse was ridiculous, and as she had in her youth, she rebelled against this identity. The development of War World II upended the couples’ life in France after Ernst was interned in 1939 by Nazi forces and Carrington was forced to flee South. Their sudden violent and traumatic separation led Carrington to experience a psychotic breakdown and, subsequently, a stay in a psychiatric hospital. From her anguish—which could be argued was the result of not knowing if she’d ever see Ernst again—and her time in the hospital came about a short but intensely affecting memoir, Down Below. 

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“How could I write this when I don't even dare think about it? I am terribly anguished, yet I cannot continue living alone with such a memory...I know that once this has been written down, I shall be delivered.”

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In the memoir, she details the days she spent in the hospital, essentially incarcerated and undergoing, at times, brutal treatments. Her memoir echoes the exploration of her body and the self represented in her paintings. Much like her paintings, a magical, uncanny, and dreamlike energy pulsates throughout the text, real as their events may be. This confusion of reality and imagination leads one to question while reading whether the book is actually a fever dream brought on by the loss of Ernst. Down Below, her second published book proved to be the start of a prolific literary career. Carrington subsequently went on to write more surrealistic stories and novels like The Hearing Trumpet (1976), The Oval Lady: Surreal Stories (1975), and The Stone Door (1977). 

Like other female artists of artistic movements in the past, Carrington has historically been either overlooked or relegated to conversations about her relationship with Ernst. It seems that recently her work—both literary and visual—has experienced a rebirth. A quick look at the Instagram community Bookstagram, in which readers share and discuss what they’re currently reading, exhibits the acclaim for her written work. More people are picking up her books and becoming acquainted with her meditations and examination on aging, the female body, and gender identity. Her paintings are also receiving overdue recognition. Three of her pieces, Queria Ser Pajaro, Hierophante pour Dauphine, and Lepidoptera were recently part of Christie’s live auction The Art of the Surreal, which closed on February 28th. Additionally, the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid has organized an exhibit of her work featuring over 188 of her pieces, which opened on February 11th and will run until May 7th. 

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Leonora Carrington, And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, 1953. Museum of Modern Art.

Why is it that a decade after her death, Carrington’s work is now being celebrated and revered in a way that it wasn’t during her career? Could it be that her work, both fantastical and a visual commentary on female subjugation and the struggle for women’s rights, is a salve for the rights women have recently lost, such as the overturn of Roe v. Wade in the United States in 2022, the right to protest in Cuba, and the suspension of education for girls in Afghanistan in 2022? Potentially, her work serves as a portal to addressing political change from the perspective of a female artist, finally emerging from the sexist restraints that previously kept her oeuvre on the periphery. Carrington has been credited with feminizing the Surrealist movement, bringing the female subject out of the idealized and mythicized portrayals, and fusing it with the burgeoning women’s rights movement. As Hadley Suter writes for Cultured Magazine, Carrington’s works post-hospitalization, particularly in the 1960s and 1970s, show her preoccupation with rights for women. For Carrington, the personal was political, and it's safe to say that for many women and other minority groups, it is as well.