The symbols, mysteries and spells of Leonora Carrington, the 'white goddess' of surrealism

Leonora Carrington painting her painting 'Nunscape at Manzanillo', around 1956Ana María Norah Horna y Fernández (Kati and José Horna Private Photography and Graphics Archive)

Born in 1917 in Lancashire (England) into a powerful cloth-making family, Leonora Carrington is the most notable artist of the Surrealist movement.

Her extensive work is full of symbology and personal experiences charged with drama.

In his paintings, drawings and books he narrates episodes in which he recreates his happy times with Max Ernst in pre-war Paris, the hell suffered in Spain during the Civil War or the flight by sea until he found some peace in Ciudad de Mexico, the place where he rebuilds his life again and where he lived until he was 94 years old.

Despite her European roots, her work has been rarely seen in important exhibitions, a forgetfulness that is now repaired with the opening of the

an anthology of 188 works at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid until May 7.

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The dramatic Spanish confinement of the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington

Divided into 10 sections that span the two floors of the building, the exhibition begins with a section entitled

in which works made up to the age of 15 are grouped together, the moment when her family wants to introduce her to society and she refuses. roundly.

Leonora was the youngest of four siblings.

All of them men and all of them macho.

She grew up in a luxurious estate, Crookhey Hall, listening to Irish folk stories that her nanny and her own mother told her.

According to the writer Elena Poniatowska in the fictionalized biography

(Seix Barral 2011), when she was only five years old she “edited” her first story.

She didn't know how to write, but she dictated it to her mother.

Her growth and adolescence were a coming and going of different schools from which she was expelled.

As brilliant as she was disobedient, the girl got her mother to finance her art studies in Florence to get to know the old Italian masters in depth.

In 1936 she overcame her parental reluctance and settled in London to study drawing.

There, at the opening dinner of the International Surrealism Exhibition, she met Max Ernst.

He was 48 years old and she was 22. He left his wife, they became lovers and shortly after they left for Provence, to an old farm in the village of St.-Martin-d'Ardèche.

'Downstairs', 1940 painting by Leonora Carrington.

Private collection Mia Kim. Estate of Leonora Carrington / VEGAP, Madrid, 2023

The curators of the exhibition (Tere Arcq, Carlos Martín and Stefan van Raay) have wanted the chronological order to be the guiding thread of an exhibition in which personal experiences are mixed with social and political concerns: women's rights and care of the animals.

Carlos Martín adds that Carrington developed a language determined by topics such as Celtic mythology, the world of magic and the occult, nature and the animal world, psychology or Tibetan Buddhism.

All these dreamlike themes appear in paintings to which Carrington did not want to give any meaning.

“The works cannot be explained,” she said on several occasions.

The drama that ended up living in Spain begins in 1939 when Max Ernst is arrested in France for his German origin.

Leonora leaves the house and together with a friend travels to Spain to obtain a safe-conduct.

It is known that she arrived in Madrid by train and spent weeks staying in successive hotels in the hope that someone would take care of her.

According to what she recounted in her book

(1943), one night when she was walking uneasily through the streets of Madrid, she was attacked by three requetés (Carlist paramilitaries) who took her to an abandoned house and raped her to death. her.

They walked away from her and left her lying unconscious on the floor like a dirty rag.

'Artes, 110', a work by Leonora Carrington dated 1944. Collection of Stanley and Pearl GoodmanEstate of Leonora Carrington / VEGAP, Madrid, 2023

News reached England that Carrington was suffering from a tremendous depression.

It is not known if the parents were aware of the causes and the best thing that occurred to them was to transfer her daughter to a sanatorium in Santander to be treated by Dr. Luis Morales, a questioned philonazi psychiatrist who applied a convulsive chemical called cardiazol.

The artist always kept the image of a naked woman strapped to a bed in a room in a Spanish sanatorium during the summer of 1940. Someone convinced the parents that it was best to move their daughter to South Africa and she took the opportunity to escape to Lisbon and from there to New York.

Meanwhile, her beloved Max Ernst had married the patron and billionaire Peggy Guggenheim, with whom he settled in New York.

Carrington also arrived in New York after a marriage of convenience with his friend Renato Leduc.

In the American city, she aroused the interest of Pierre Matisse, who soon dedicated an exhibition to her.

She went to Mexico and together with the photographer Emeric Weisz (the Capa employee who carried the suitcases of photographs of the Civil War) she settled in a three-story house in the Roma neighborhood.

The house was a perfect metaphor for the painful journeys she's taken in her life, descents into madness and ascents to healing fueled by her own inner strength.

In these oscillating states she achieved the moderate calm that balanced her anxiety and placed her in an exceptional state of creative activity.

They lived in that Bauhaus-style concrete house for 54 years and raised her two children: Pablo, an artist and pathologist, and Gabriel,

'Las pompas del subsuelo', a work by Leonora Carrington from 1947. Sainsbury Center for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia, UK.JAMES AUSTIN (Estate of Leonora Carrington / VEGAP, Madrid, 2023)

The works that are exhibited, explains the curator, respond to the memory of the artist.

They are paintings loaded with surrealist references and her admired masters such as El Bosco, Pieter Brueghel or the Italian painters she met in Florence.

Many of her have come from her famous alchemical kitchen, the one she often shared with the Spanish Remedios Varo and the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna.

Together they distilled formulas and spells intended to preach love for nature and end the oppressive power of the patriarchy.

In front of the mural

(1963-1964), commissioned by the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, the Spanish curator explains that there is still no catalog of Carrington's work, although it is estimated that it may there are around 2,000 pieces between painting, sculpture and tapestries.

In Spain, only the Thyssen has one painting and there are two others in private collections.

The only major exhibition that she has dedicated to her so far was in 2018 in the Mexican capital with a hundred works gathered under the title of

.

The Madrid exhibition, carried out in co-production with the Arken Museum of Denmark, has had a reduced version in Copenhagen.

'Are you speaking Syrian?', a work by Leonora Carrington from 1953. Estate of Leonora Carrington / VEGAP, Madrid, 2023

Known as the "bride of the wind" or "the witch of Mexico", she seemed to feel closer to

by Robert Graves, one of the books that best accompanied her along with

by Lewis Carroll. , and

by Jonathan Swift.