Leonora Carrington
| Leonora Carrington | |
|---|---|
| |
| Nationality | British-Mexican |
| Born | 6 April 1917 |
| Died | 25 May 2011 |
| Occupations | Surrealist painter; novelist; sculptor |
| Movement | Surrealism |
| Known for | Surrealist art; feminist mysticism |
| Notable works | The Hearing Trumpet; Down Below; Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) |
| Themes | Esoteric feminism; visionary prose and painting |
| Wikidata | Q233207 |
Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) was a British-born Mexican Surrealist painter, sculptor and writer known for her richly detailed, dreamlike imagery and visionary storytelling. A rebel from her privileged Lancashire upbringing, she became one of the leading women of the Surrealist movement. Carrington’s art and fiction draw on mythology, mysticism and personal symbols – often featuring women, animals and strange hybrids – to explore the unconscious. She fused feminist ideas with esoteric lore, creating a work that is at once fantastical and subversive. Carrington spent most of her life in Mexico, where she joined avant-garde circles and helped inspire a generation of artists and writers.
Early Life and Education
Born in 1917 into a wealthy Catholic family in Lancashire, England, Carrington grew up in an old manor house that fired her imagination with Gothic atmospheres (her childhood home reputedly appears in her paintings years later). As a girl she had a strict upbringing: governess-teaching and convent schools, and even a debutante ball presentation, which she protested by reading aloud instead of curtseying. Carrington was expulsion-prone and restless, traits that foreshadowed her lifelong defiance of convention. She first encountered Surrealism in 1927 on a trip to Paris and was enchanted by its mysterious imagery.
In the mid-1930s her family reluctantly allowed her to study art. Carrington trained briefly in Florence and then at the Chelsea School of Art in London. She won a place at Amédée Ozenfant’s academy in London (1936–38), where fellow students included other women who would become Surrealists. A key mentor was Sari Dienes, who nurtured Carrington’s intense work habits and belief in intuitive creation. Meanwhile, Carrington read every Surrealist manifesto she could find. Her mother gave her Herbert Read’s Surrealism, and before long Carrington was corresponding with its authors. A wealthy patron, the Surrealist poet Edward James, recognized her talent and later arranged for early exhibitions of her work in New York. Despite her education and talent, Carrington’s father disapproved of an art career, so she relied on her own vision (and some family money) to get started.
Major Works and Ideas
Carrington’s output spans painting, sculpture, and writing. She produced hundreds of works, many of them small-scale oil paintings layered with intricate detail. Central themes recur throughout her oeuvre: the feminine psyche, alchemy and transformation, and the boundary between human and animal. Horses, unicorns, hyenas and mythical beasts frequently appear in her art, reflecting a childhood with a pet horse and her fascination with nature. In painting she pictured women not as objects of male desire but as powerful, magical figures. Her Self-Portrait (The Inn of the Dawn Horse) (1937–38), for example, shows Carrington perched in riding breeches beside a prancing hyena-horse creature; here she looks out confidently, a symbol that blends her identity with wild nature. Similarly, The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (1947) portrays a monumental female figure cradling an enormous, glowing egg – a statement of female creativity and fertility. In stark contrast to the male Surrealists’ eroticized visions of women, Carrington’s women confront challenges or survey strange realms; they are mothers, witches, rebels and mystics in their own right.
Her subject matter and approach defied the period’s norms. Instead of Freudian sex symbolism (the dominant Surrealist influence), Carrington drew on magical realism and occult ideas. She and close friend Remedios Varo studied alchemy, Kabbalah and Mayan mythology, and many of these ideas surfaced in her art. Carrington saw creativity itself as a kind of alchemical process, transforming raw experience into vision. She once said she painted “for [herself]” without expecting sales, and indeed her work often feels like private visual poetry.
In writing, Carrington was equally inventive. She produced surreal short stories and novels in English and Spanish. Her first published tales (the pamphlet La Maison de la Peur, 1938) and later collections like The Oval Lady (1975) are full of absurd, darkly comic vignettes – girls chatting to hyenas, enchanted dresses, or saints in asylum dining halls. Two of her best-known books are Down Below (written 1943, published 1983) and The Hearing Trumpet (1974). Down Below is a harrowing memoir of her breakdown and confinement in a Spanish psychiatric hospital during World War II; Carrington describes in surreal detail the treatments and humiliations she endured. Its frank portrayal of madness and institutional cruelty was unusual for its time. In The Hearing Trumpet, published decades later, Carrington turns to fantasy satire: the novel follows a group of elderly women who uncover conspiracies in their retirement home. Through humor and allegory this book confronts aging, female madness and social oppression. Critics have noted that Trumpet was one of the first novels to discuss gender in modern terms, celebrating female solidarity in a fairy-tale like setting.
Throughout her work, Carrington emphasized sisterhood and independence. She claimed that women have “legendary powers” and must reclaim the rights taken from them. Many of her paintings and tales invert classic myths – imagining, for example, female-dominated worlds where witches and goddesses reign. One aspect of her Surrealism was to subvert traditional gender roles: where Surrealists often cast women as muses or monsters, Carrington made women the subjects and heroes of their own stories.
Method
Carrington’s creative method blended careful technique with spontaneous vision. In her paintings she used fine brushwork, building up multiple translucent layers of oil paint to create luminous, jewel-like surfaces. This patient approach allowed her to render both vivid detail (feathered wings, river stones, lacework) and a chimeric depth, as if each canvas had secret scales of meaning. She rarely painted large canvases; most of her works are moderately sized and demand close viewing.
Although she did not practice the automatic drawing advocated by André Breton, Carrington often painted with a sense of inner storytelling. She recounted that images would come to her from dreams or out of “nothing”, and she would bring them into being. In this way her process was partly rational (many works use geometric patterns or mystical diagrams) and partly intuitive. She also worked in sculpture and collage; for instance, early on she and Ernst built carved wooden guardian animals for their home. In Mexico she painted murals, the most famous being El Mundo Mágico de los Mayas (1963), a lively fresco of Mexican folk tales and spirits.
As a writer, Carrington’s style is wry and baroque. Her sentences can loop in unexpected ways, like her paintings. She loved riddles, puns and double meanings. For example, in The Hearing Trumpet, an explanation of a magic cave plays on the word mère (mother) and mer (sea), linking maternal themes with elemental mystery. She treated storytelling itself as a kind of ritual: characters often speak in verse or absurd logic. This visionary quality – mixing the real and the fantastical – blurs the line between awake and dreaming. In interviews Carrington said she was more interested in “magic” than in modern psychology; indeed, her prose frequently references alchemical stages or tarot-like symbolism.
Overall, Carrington’s method was to channel her profound interest in animals, myth and the inner life. She drew on Celtic legends from her mother’s Irish side and on Indigenous American myths from her adopted Mexico. But everything was filtered through her personal imagination: no strict adherence to textbook mythology, but a free reinterpretation. This is why critics often call her work esoteric – it points to hidden or arcane meanings that invite the viewer or reader into a secret world.
Influence
Carrington’s influence has grown steadily since her first exhibitions. In Mexico, where she lived off and on from 1943 onward, she became a beloved figure of the art scene. She gathered around her a network of fellow émigré artists, writers and political exiles, helping to create a cross-cultural avant-garde. Carrington’s friendship and collaboration with Spanish-born painter Remedios Varo and Hungarian photographer Kati Horna in Mexico produced some of the era’s most haunting work by women. These three are now often mentioned together as great women Surrealists, each giving Surrealism a feminist twist.
Carrington was also an early advocate for Mexican women’s rights. In 1973 she designed the poster Mujeres conciencia for the nascent women’s liberation movement; it features a naked female figure sprouting plants, rebirthing herself anew. She spoke publicly about the need for political change to free women’s spirits. In 1986 she received the Women’s Caucus for Art Lifetime Achievement Award in New York for her contributions. Younger generations of feminist artists have cited Carrington as a direct inspiration, pointing to how she explored the intersection of women’s lives and imagination.
On the international stage, Carrington’s reputation has benefited from several late-career revivals. Major exhibitions in the 2010s in London, New York and Dublin examined her influence on Surrealism and her connection to Ireland. Her paintings began selling at high-profile auctions, introducing her to collectors. Art critics praise her today as a key Surrealist who broadened the movement’s scope. The press often emphasizes how Carrington feminized Surrealism – that is, how she expanded it beyond the male gaze to include a woman’s wildness and wisdom.
Moreover, her books have found new readership. The New York Review Books Classics revived The Hearing Trumpet and The Stone Door in English in the 2000s–2020s, with introductions by contemporary authors, and Down Below was published again as well. In popular culture, her life has inspired documentaries, a recent graphic novel and, in 2025, a feature film. Museums in Mexico (such as the Museo Leonora Carrington, opened 2018) and abroad display her art regularly. In short, Carrington’s blend of mystical art, feminist ideas and sparkling humor continues to resonate with artists and audiences today.
Critiques
In Carrington’s lifetime and early career, some critics and contemporaries tended to overlook her. This was partly because Surrealism was dominated by men who often treated women as muses rather than peers. Carrington sometimes bristled at this; she was nicknamed a femme-enfant (“woman-child”) by Breton for her rebellious demeanor. As a result, her work was occasionally dismissed as eccentric or immature by the old guard. Even her lover of the moment, Max Ernst, once painted her in a way that many interpret as patronizing. It took decades for art historians to reassess Carrington on her own terms.
Today, scholars note that Carrington’s fairy-tale imagery can be daunting to newcomers, since she used a private symbol language. Some feminist commentators have debated aspects of her worldview: for example, Carrington often emphasized motherhood and biological destiny, which some modern feminist readers find at odds with later views of motherhood as oppressive. In The Hearing Trumpet, she famously wrote that women are “animals conditioned by maternity,” invoking cave-birth metaphors (a blend of the mother and sea, mère and mer). This complex idea – that female sexuality is tied to both biology and mystery – has drawn both interest and criticism.
Her asylum memoir Down Below has also been scrutinized. While some psychiatric historians in the late 20th century claimed it might exaggerate or fictionalize her ordeal, most critics accept it as a poetic, if disorienting, account of real events. In any case, Carrington herself never intended Down Below as straightforward testimony; it reads more like a hallucinatory diary.
Overall, the balance of critical opinion is positive today. Art reviewers now celebrate Carrington’s originality and “wild, feminist intensity” There is broad agreement that her work enriches Surrealism by centering the female experience. Any remaining critiques tend to focus on the interpretive challenges her rich symbolism poses, not on her technical skill or vision, which are almost universally admired.
Legacy
Carrington passed away in Mexico City in 2011 at age 94, but she left a remarkable legacy. Mexico regards her as a national treasure of art and literature. Its Senate and cultural institutions have paid posthumous tribute to her, and art schools study her paintings as part of the modern canon. Internationally, she is cited as a forerunner of the surreal feminist wave. Contemporary artists and writers look to her as proof that Surrealism can be reimagined through a woman’s perspective.
In literature, her works are increasingly seen as ahead of their time. The Hearing Trumpet is often praised for tackling issues like body image, aging and gender identity long before they were common topics. Plots about rebellion and transformation have inspired later fiction involving feminism and fantasy. In art, her style – meticulous yet free – is referenced by illustrators and painters who wish to blend fine craftsmanship with mythology. She is also remembered for her commitment to community: later in life Carrington taught art workshops in Mexico and mentored younger artists.
The market value of her works has soared: in 2024 one of her 1945 paintings sold for over £22 million, a record for a British female artist. Major galleries now include her in shows of Surrealism and Latin American art. Films and books about her life (for example, Mexican filmmaker Arturo Ripstein’s documentary and a novel by her niece Joanna Moorhead) keep her story alive.
In sum, Leonora Carrington is regarded today as much more than a survivor of Surrealist circles—she is viewed as an originator who expanded the movement in new directions. Her esoteric feminism – meaning her feminism rooted in myth and magic – resonates in a culture that values diversity of voices. Young illustrators, animators and writers often cite her as a key influence when mixing fantasy with social commentary. Carrington’s legacy is a body of work that continues to be discovered afresh: each painting is a little world, each story a portal, and together they form a testament to imagination’s power to reshape reality.
Selected Works
- Self-Portrait (The Inn of the Dawn Horse) (1937–38, oil on canvas) – Carrington’s iconic self-portrait, merging herself with a wild hyena/horse. Metropolitan Museum of Art.
- The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (1947, oil on canvas) – A surreal painting of a towering woman nurturing a large egg, symbolizing creation and fertility. Private collection.
- The Temptation of St. Anthony (1945, oil on board) – A phantasmagoric scene with the saint besieged by untamed, otherworldly creatures. Private collection.
- And Then We Saw The Daughter of the Minotaur! (1953, oil on canvas) – A crowded banquet with strange guests (dogs, a minotaur, female figures) and floating spheres. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
- Mujeres conciencia (1973, poster) – Graphic print for Mexican feminism showing a nude woman sprouting plants (used inwomen’s liberation). Museo de la Mujer, Mexico.
- Down Below (memoir, written 1943, published 1983) – Carrington’s surreal account of her psychotic breakdown and escape from a Franco-era Spanish asylum.
- The Hearing Trumpet (novel, 1974) – A fantasy novel following a widowed 92-year-old heroine who uncovers conspiracies in an old-folks home; a classic of feminist surrealist fiction.
- The Stone Door (novel, 1977) – A strange family tale set in Mexico and Britain, involving psychedelic nights and dream logic.
- The Oval Lady and Other Stories (short stories, 1975) – Six tales blending fairy-tale logic with dark humor (includes “La Debutante,” “The Seventh Horse,” etc.).