Leonora Carrington was an English-born painter and writer (1917-2011). At twenty she left a debutante's life for the Surrealist Max Ernst, in 1940 she was locked in a Spanish asylum, and from 1942 she lived and worked in Mexico.
People look her up for her Self-Portrait with a hyena, her asylum memoir Down Below, and whether she was Ernst's muse. She said no. In 2024 one of her paintings sold for $28.48 million.
She outlived nearly every Surrealist who ever called her a muse, and she had a correction to make about the word.
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Max Ernst is where most accounts begin. In June 1937 she was twenty and he was forty-six, a German painter and one of the stars of Surrealism. She followed him to Paris that year, and her father disowned her.
For three years they worked side by side, at the end in a house in southern France where she painted guardian beasts on the walls and he taught her frottage, the art of rubbing a pencil over a textured surface.
Then the war reached them. Ernst was interned as an enemy alien in 1940, and Carrington fled to Spain, where she suffered a breakdown. She was interned against her will in an asylum in Santander and treated with Cardiazol, a drug that induces convulsions. She wrote it all down afterward. By 1942 she was in Mexico, and apart from long stays in New York and Chicago she never left.
What came next is the part the muse story leaves out. In Mexico City she found a fellow exile who cooked and wrote spells with her, and she turned the asylum into a book. She also had a short answer for anyone who called her Ernst's muse.
What You'll Discover
Why she left home at twenty.
What happened in Santander.
How she slipped her nurse.
Who she cooked spells with.
What the hyena is doing.
What she said about being a muse.