Leonora Carrington: The Complete Story
Leonora Carrington was presented as a debutante to King George V, ran away with Max Ernst at 20, escaped a Spanish asylum and a keeper in Lisbon, and became the grande dame of Mexican surrealism. In 2024 one of her paintings sold for 28.5 million dollars.
She outlived every surrealist who ever called her a muse, and she had corrections to make about that word.
Leonora Carrington at a glance:
1917: born in Lancashire to a textile magnate; expelled from two convent schools before the family gives up.
1937: meets Max Ernst at a London dinner and leaves for France within the year, at 20 to his 46.
1940: Ernst's internment breaks her; institutionalized in Spain, she later turns the ordeal into the memoir Down Below.
1942: escapes to Mexico via a marriage of convenience in Lisbon; Mexico City becomes home for nearly seventy years.
2011: dies at 94, the last of the Surrealists, with statues and a full national mourning in her adopted country.
The debutante who bolted
Carrington was born on April 6, 1917, at Clayton Green, Lancashire, into a textile fortune, was expelled from two convent schools, and endured a season as a debutante presented at the court of George V, which she remembered as livestock display. In 1937 she met Max Ernst, 26 years her senior and married, at a London dinner party and left for France with him within months, painting her Self-Portrait with its white rocking-horse and hyena around 1938.
1940: the asylum, and Down Below
When Ernst was interned as an enemy alien in France and then hunted by the Gestapo, Carrington collapsed, fled to Spain, and was committed by her family to an asylum in Santander, where she was treated with Cardiazol, a convulsion-inducing drug.
Her memoir of it, Down Below, is one of the most lucid accounts of madness ever written.
Escorted toward Lisbon to be shipped to another institution, she slipped her keeper, took refuge in the Mexican embassy, and married the diplomat Renato Leduc to cross the Atlantic.
More incredible painter stories
If Leonora Carrington pulled you in, you will love these too:
Mexico: the second life
From 1943 Mexico City was home. With the painter Remedios Varo she formed the closest partnership in surrealism, two kitchens of alchemy a few streets apart.
She married the Hungarian photographer Chiki Weisz in 1946, raised two sons, painted the Celtic myths of her Irish nanny into Mexican light, and in 1963 covered a wall of the National Museum of Anthropology with El Mundo Magico de los Mayas.
In the 1970s she co-founded Mexico's women's liberation movement and designed its first poster.
The myth of the muse
Histories long filed her as Ernst's beautiful young muse. Carrington's own answer was that she had no time to be anyone's muse, being too busy rebelling against her family and learning to be an artist.
5 million dollars, the record for a British-born woman artist.
The last surrealist, and where to see her
Carrington died in Mexico City on May 25, 2011, at 94, the last of the original surrealists. The Met holds the Self-Portrait, Tate and the Museo de Arte Moderno in Mexico City hold major canvases, the Anthropology Museum keeps the mural, and a museum in San Luis Potosi is devoted to her sculptures.
The kitchen as laboratory
In Mexico the kitchen doubled as laboratory: she ground pigments and mixed egg tempera on the table where she cooked, and treated recipes and spells as one genre.
With Remedios Varo she ran culinary pranks, once serving tapioca dyed with squid ink as caviar. The friendship worked on jokes with footnotes in alchemy.
Her novel The Hearing Trumpet, whose 92-year-old heroine storms an institution for old women, is the same practice in prose: domesticity boiled until it hallucinates.
Eve hands back the apple
In 1972 she drew Mujeres conciencia, a poster for Mexico's young women's movement: a new Eve returning the apple.
She had no patience left for the muse economy, and said in interviews that the Surrealist men had wanted sphinxes, not colleagues.
When feminist art historians arrived in the 1970s, the archive was already waiting for them: a fifty-year critique, conducted in paint.
Explaining the Maya to Mexico
In 1963 the National Museum of Anthropology commissioned a mural. She went to Chiapas first, living near Zinacantán to study Maya belief before touching a brush.
El Mundo Mágico de los Mayas treats healers, caves and the underworld as ethnographic fact, which for her they were.
It hangs in the museum still: the English runaway hired to explain Maya cosmology to Mexico, and delivering.
The Leonora Carrington questions that keep coming up
Who was Leonora Carrington? An English-born surrealist painter and writer who escaped family, asylum, and war to become one of Mexico's most beloved artists, working until her death at 94 in 2011.
Was Carrington Max Ernst's muse? She rejected the label flatly, saying she was too busy rebelling to be anyone's muse. Their three years together were a fraction of her seventy-year career.
Why did Carrington live in Mexico? She reached it in 1943 via a marriage of convenience to a Mexican diplomat after escaping a Spanish asylum, and stayed for nearly seventy years.
How much does a Carrington cost? Les Distractions de Dagobert brought 28.5 million dollars in 2024, the auction record for any British-born woman artist.
What should I read first? Down Below, the asylum memoir, then The Hearing Trumpet. Both are short, neither is minor, and the paintings open differently afterward.
Who was Chiki Weisz? Emerico Weisz, the Hungarian photographer who had saved Robert Capa's negatives. They married in 1946 and stayed married for six decades, raising two sons in Mexico City.
More secrets to unlock
Winning the long game by seventy years
The girl her family presented to the King of England as marriage stock ended up on Mexican banknotes of cultural memory: statues of her stand in Mexico City, and her asylum memoir is taught beside her paintings. She won the long game by seventy years.
