Home of artist Leonora Carrington becomes museum in Mexico City

The home of British-Mexican surrealist artist Leonora Carrington in Mexico City will be converted into a museum, its management announced on Monday.

Read also: Death of artist Leonora Carrington

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”Alejandra Osorio, head of the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM), in charge of the project, told AFP.

The painter's son, Pablo Weisz Carrington, sold the house to the university for $ 500,000 (and donated several of his works, valued at $ 3 million), ten years after his mother's death, against the promise that the place is transformed into a museum. Its opening date, which will include 45 sculptures by the artist in addition to hundreds of objects that belonged to him, will depend on the pandemic. The idea is to keep rooms such as the kitchen or the studio intact, in order to “

,” explains the curator.

Died in 2011, Leonora Carrington, born in England in 1917, took refuge in Mexico in 1942. At the age of twenty, she moved to Paris where she lived an intense love affair with the surrealist painter Max Ernst, 26 years old. older than her.

It was he who introduced him to the great figures of this artistic movement such as André Breton, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp and Joan Miro.

After the arrest of Max Ernst in 1939, then his deportation to a concentration camp, Leonora fell into a deep depression, before being interned in a psychiatric clinic in Santander, Spain.

She will relate this experience in one of her books,

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Leonora Carrington managed to escape the hospital and her friend, the Mexican journalist and poet Renato Leduc, allowed her to leave Spain by marrying her. She settled permanently in Mexico from 1942, where she befriended the future Nobel Prize winner Octavio Paz and the painter Frida Kahlo.