"Houses are like bodies," wrote artist Leonora Carrington in her novel
The Acoustic Trumpet
.
"We attach ourselves to its walls, its ceilings, and its objects, as well as our livers, skeletons, and bloodstream."
The one who speaks is not Carrington but a character named Marion, a 99-year-old woman who fears that her relatives will send her to a nursing home, and worries about her cats or her hen if they take her out of her house.
"The separation of these familiar beings and objects was death itself," she says in anguish.
Leonora Carrington, known for her surrealist paintings and sculptures, passed away 10 years ago at the age of 94, and lived more than 60 years in the same house: a three-story home on Chihuahua Street in Colonia Roma, in Mexico City. .
"I want you to leave the house to me, because I want to make a museum of yours, of your work," he asked before his son, Pablo Weisz, passed away.
In that place she made almost all her writing, sculpture and painting, in addition to raising her two children and sharing with her husband, the Hungarian photographer Émerico Weisz.
"For me this is a sacred place," says Pablo, who has since been committed to seeking the institution that could turn this intimate refuge into a museum.
The kitchen was one of Leonora Carrington's favorite spaces.Hector Guerrero
Ten years after Carrington's death, the museum is almost ready.
In 2017, the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) acquired the house and the following year began to make the necessary repairs so that the place could receive tourists and house more than 8,000 objects of the artist -the UAM invested five million pesos in the project -.
Now they are only waiting for the approval of the university to be able to open to the public in the coming months (some parts of the house can already be seen virtually).
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Leonora Carrington, the last surrealist
Like Frida Kahlo's famous Blue House in Coyoacán, Carrington's house can be visited room by room by curious people who want to find the artist in the memory of her objects, or in her creatures. His son Pablo donated 45 sculptures to the museum, mythical anthropomorphic figures that are now distributed in each of the rooms. "The idea is that people feel that the creatures are inside the home," says Alejandra Osorio, professor at the UAM and director of the project.
In the dining room on the ground floor, the first sculpture to greet is a bronze mother crocodile, with small lizards on its back, called
Mother is Always Right
.
Accompanying her maternal wisdom is a
Puss without boots
, a white pig with angel wings ready to fly, and a photo of Carrington's pet before he died: a long-haired white canine named Yeti.
"Woman with dove" in the main garden.
Hector Guerrero
"We try to respect the spaces as we receive them," says Alejandra Osorio.
"As she lived here for more than 60 years, she had three different studies, she changed the kitchen, she had it upstairs and downstairs in the house, and there were also many changes in the rooms."
The current kitchen on the ground floor is watched over by
Nigrum
, the sculpture of a cat with elongated legs who looks cautiously next to the dishwasher.
Check out the artist's old pots, the spices she used to cook, or some postcards taped to the cabinets with photos of UK royalty - Carrington was born in England in 1917 but left the country in the 1930s when she moved to France with the surrealist artist Max Ernst–.
During the Second World War, he escaped to Mexico in 1942, and never returned to live on the old continent.
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Leonora Carrington: "I don't regret my life"
"I prefer not to eat meat," says Carrington, while smoking at the table in the center of his kitchen, in an old video of the film director Arturo Ripstein. "I don't like the idea of eating other animals." Lover of dogs, birds or cats, the creatures were not only inspiration in his paintings or sculptures, but he always cared for several pets in the house. For cats, one of his favorite pets, he made holes in the lower corner of the doors of the house so that they could move around the home without problem. "People over seven or under seventy are not to be trusted, unless they are cats," Carrington writes in
The Acoustic Trumpet
.
Like other houses in the Roma neighborhood, Carrington's has internal courtyards.
In the one on the ground floor, he planted a jacaranda that is now taller than the house, and which is accompanied by the sculptures of
La gallina ciega
, the
Woman with a dove
and a crocodile-shaped bench that Alejandra Osorio installed there almost like a trap .
"Let's see if tourists dare to sit down, because they can touch it," he says.
The sculpture "Barca de Cuervos" in the upper part of the residence.Hector Guerrero
More treasures are found on the next floor, where the living room, the study, her room, her husband's dark room, or a small room with hundreds of books and the typewriter where he wrote
The Acoustic Trumpet, used to be
. "What we want is for this to also be a place for research," says Osorio. "Here is a huge archive with his books, with his photos, with his sketches, with his diaries, even with his medical history," he adds in the living room of the house, where in addition to the books is the figure of a woman with a head de ave (
The Palmist
). In one corner hangs the replica of his famous painting,
And Then We Saw the Daughter and the Minotaur
, whose original hangs in a corner of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
"The real work is done when you are alone, in your study," says Carrington in an old BBC documentary, sitting in the study of the house, a room lit by the light of the second inner courtyard. “First it is something you feel, then that becomes something you can see, and then that becomes something you can do. It's like cooking, but cooking is not very easy either ”.
The magnetic pole of attraction is that house is Carrington's studio, a workshop illuminated by the light of the interior patio and in which you can see the brushes he used, dozens of jars with different colors of paint, his easel, his apron for face a canvas without color. "I don't think one paints for someone," the painter told
La Jornada
newspaper in 1996
. Painting, he said, is more "a need to connect with the invisible parts, the invisible places of the human psyche."
What is invisible in the studio is everything that happened before she got there: the academy of painting in London that her parents sent her to when she was 19;
his flight to Europe with Max Ernst and his work with the Surrealists two years later;
her rejection of this movement for not considering her an artist and wanting to frame her as another
André Breton
femme-enfant
;
his terrible depression after Ernst is captured by the Nazis;
his escape to New York and then Mexico during WWII.
In Mexico, Elena Poniatowska wrote when her friend passed away, Carrington chose a life “away from sound amplifiers and images alien to her isolation.
His house was finally a retreat and his solitude was voluntary ”.
View of Leonora Carrington's studio.Hector Guerrero
In
The Acoustic Trumpet
, Marion, the 99-year-old, has a room in the house that overlooks a beautiful courtyard where she can "enjoy the stars at night or the sun in the morning."
He has been out of England for 50 years and wonders if he should return.
"There must be some sticky spell holding me here," he says of his refuge on this side of the Atlantic.
It felt "like a fly stuck to flypaper."
Now, in the museum, it is impossible to read those phrases and not imagine Leonora Carrington going out to her own interior patio, among pets, plants and fantastic creatures, to look at the stars at night in the house that was her refuge for more than 60 years in the Roma colony.
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