Jane Rye

A true original

Joanna Moorhead celebrates the beautiful, rebellious writer and artist who captivated all who met her

Leonora Carrington was strikingly beautiful with ‘the personality of a headstrong and hypersensitive horse’ (according to her friend and patron Edward James); and she fled from her family, renouncing a life of privilege and ease to pursue her calling as an artist. Joanna Moorhead deplores the fact that she is ‘not much more than a footnote in art history’.

But she has long been a legendary figure (among recent devotees, apparently, Madonna and Björk); in Mexico, where she lived and worked for most of her life, she is a national treasure; and for the feminist she is a heroine and her art ‘a modern woman’s codex’. She painted some marvellous pictures in her own, very personal brand of surrealism and wrote, in addition to fantastic, gruesome and often very funny stories, an account of her experience of madness, Down Under, which the Guardian considered one of the 1,000 books everyone should read.

In 2006 Moorhead, a journalist who writes mainly on family matters, discovered by chance that Leonora Carrington (1917–2011), an ancient, vaguely disreputable cousin of her father’s, was still alive and one of Mexico’s most celebrated artists. She set out to meet her in search of a good story; and the friendship that ensued over the last five years of the artist’s life, she tells us (more than once, changed the course of her own life forever. Moorhead was surprisingly unaware of the major exhibition of Carrington’s painting at the Serpentine in 1991 or of Susan L. Aberth’s 2004 monograph Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art (both of which challenge the idea that the artist was no more than a footnote in art history, and neither of which is mentioned in this book).

‘Stultifying’ or ‘suffocating’ are the words customarily used to describe the background against which Leonora so spectacularly rebelled and which she so ferociously ridiculed in her art.

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