Leonora Carrington (1917–2011)

Leonora Carrington was born to an Anglo-Irish family in Clayton Green, Lancashire, England. Her parents were Marie (Moorhead) and Harold Wylde Carrington, a wealthy textile manufacturer, and she had three brothers. She was educated by governesses and attended two convent boarding schools, but was expelled for rebellious behavior. In 1935, her mother sent her to Chelsea School of Art in London for a year; she transferred to the Ozenfant Academy of Fine Arts established by French modernist Amédée Ozenfant. She then went to Florence, Italy, where she attended Mrs. Penrose's Academy of Art. Her father opposed her desire to pursue a career as an artist and writer, but her mother encouraged her and gave her a copy of Herbert Read's book Surrealism. In 1937, 19-year-old Carrington met German Surrealist artist Max Ernst, 26 years her senior, at a party in London, after which Ernst separated from his wife and ran off with Carrington. The couple went to live in a small farmhouse in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche in the Rhône Valley of France, where they began to collaborate and support each other's artistic development. They painted and sculptured guardian animals to decorate their home, and made portraits of each other. At this time, Carrington completed her first major painting Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse), now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. After Nazi Germany invaded France in World War II, Ernst was arrested by the Gestapo, but managed to escape and flee to the USA with the help of Peggy Guggenheim. Carrington was devastated. She was persuaded to go to Spain, where she had a mental breakdown and was institutionalized. She was given electro-convulsive therapy and treated with the drugs Cardiazol and Luminal. This experience would influence her artistic and written works, for example, her 1944 memoir Down Below and her paintings Portrait of Dr. Morales (1940), Green Tea (1942), and Map of Down Below (1943). Carrington was released from the asylum into the care of a keeper sent by her family, whom she eluded in Lisbon. She made a marriage of convenience with Mexican poet Renato Leduc and in 1942, arrived in Mexico City, which already had a large community of European refugees from the Nazis. She remarried to Hungarian photographer Emerico "Chiki" Weisz, with whom she had two sons. After seven years, she held the first solo exhibition of her art at the Galeria Clardecor, and became famous almost overnight. She is considered to have feminised Surrealism by bringing a woman's perspective to what was otherwise a male-dominated artistic movement. She was also a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s. Her best-known novel The Hearing Trumpet (1974) was reissued in 2021. At her death, she left behind an immense body of work: novels, prints, plays, costumes, and hundreds of sculptures and paintings.