The art of Leonora Carrington is not hospitable. Bird-headed plague doctors and febrile, sprinting waifs; golden eggs and nest-haired sibyls: such is the cast of her uncanny carnival, gathered without colloquy in strange gardens and too-big drawing rooms. It’s playful, certainly, but menacing too. Her paintings have a quality one often finds in nature – the particular gaudiness that says ‘Do not eat me: I am poisonous’.
Hospitable, however, is just how Joanna Moorhead found the Surrealist at 194 Calle Chihuahua in Mexico City. Surreal Spaces begins with this glimmering accolade; its author, a cousin of the artist, is admitted to her confidence with colour and candour, ‘cups of tea and, later, tequila’. It’s a kingdom from which other journalists had long been barred either outright – André Breton was right that she was ‘superb in her refusals’ – or with smokescreens – think answers in the vein of: ‘I think a lot of things occurred, but I don’t know why.’ Visiting her often, as Moorhead puts it, she began to ‘discover her through osmosis’ – interviews were verboten, but she kept a diary of their time together in the years before her death in 2011; these conditions are the difference between a puzzle and a lock. Insights gleaned piecemeal from around the kitchen table bejewel the book, which tells the story of Leonora and the spaces she created by way of those she lived in.
Many of them, perhaps not surprisingly, were inhospitable. Carrington’s early years were spent between Crookhey Hall, a cold Gothic pile, and nun-ruled convent schools, whose denizens could have come straight from the mind of Matthew Lewis; even Hazelwood – the better-loved childhood home she left Crookhey for – adjoined a bay bedevilled by quicksand. Her twenties, meanwhile, were spent bobbing and weaving through the feverish stop-gaps of war-torn Europe. But Moorhead dodges the criticism of neutering the artist’s strangeness through biography. In Surreal Spaces, we meet an artist who, instead of the insular dream-weaver we might have pictured, is a visionary realist; one who, with dexterity and fidelity, could represent worlds past, present, future and imagined all at once; worlds that seemed, in a meaningful way, to coexist before her.
In Carrington’s paintings, indeed, you often get a sense of déjà vu – that the place itself, as well as the strange figures inhabiting it, is important in some way not yet clear to you. Marianne Moore coined the phrase ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’ to refer to well-made poems: in Carrington’s art, the ‘gardens’, as it were, are just as real – and equally warty. Her creatures are often dwarfed by cavernous drawing rooms, nurseries, kitchens and courtyards, and Moorhead attends them all eloquently, these sequestered spaces. The nurseries we see across her paintings recall the one in which she played with Nanny Carrington, the characteristic dance between play and peril animated in the link between her convent schools and her childhood home – ‘cushioned and privileged, but also full of a kind of Gothic Catholic drama’.
Again and again, though, we see her love of kitchens. Far from being symbols of gendered labour, these were potion-filled sanctuaries presided over by female elders – her nanny, her mother and her grandmother – atmospheric story-tellers all. That of Mary Monica, her mother’s mother, in Ireland (see Grandmother Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen, 1975, for an eerie homage) was, as the author puts it, ‘a place of stories and mystery’, extending into ‘mystical and unseen worlds’.
But in the details, like scents wafting across the room from different pots, one detects olfactory memories of different provenances – is that a Mexican grinding stone? Are those chipotle chillies? Anything goes in these domestic melting pots: real or fabled, present or past, eye of newt or toe of frog, throw it into the cauldron and see what happens. ‘For Leonora, painting was very like cooking,’ Moorhead discovered in Mexico – and not just because she mixed her tempera with egg, like the old masters did. With even the most motley ingredients – and despite the occasional floating bat wing – she knew how to make her art delicious.
Like pawing through a witch’s pantry, charting the spaces of Carrington’s life is a little like compiling a bestiary. Bird Bath II (1978), for instance, was inspired by Crookhey Hall, and represents, as Moorhead reads it, an older Carrington ‘washing the bird that represents Crookhey out of her life’. Designed by Alfred Waterhouse – who was also, appropriately, the Natural History Museum’s architect – for one Colonel Bird, her family seat is guarded by a porch-top stone bird. Thereafter, both caged and freed, these animals could often be seen perching in Leonora’s paintings. Dodos and hyenas, fish and pointers and scaly things, horned gods and hunters of all descriptions stride across her work with all the encoded meaning of hieroglyphs.
They mostly don’t count as artist signatures, however: that honour goes to horses, with which ‘from her earliest years, she felt a special affinity’. Moorhead points to Whitney Chadwick’s reading – that they’re a ‘metaphor for an androgynous creative whole’ to ‘resolve the polarities of male and female’ – and, it’s true, they often suggest an artistic vigour and duality of which many male Surrealists didn’t seem able to quite imagine women capable (those wonderful muses). But, as Moorhead also points out, horses are more than symbols, and more than statements of defiant oddity: ‘Where is the boundary, she seems to be asking, between a human being and a tree? Where does a woman stop and a horse begin?’
Moorhead shows us the madder places of Leonora Carrington too. ‘Houses are just like bodies,’ the artist said in her remarkable novella, The Hearing Trumpet: ‘We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and blood stream.’ It’s a Boschian vision the artist felt most keenly in Spain. ‘In the political confusion and the torrid heat,’ she later wrote, ‘I convinced myself that I was the world’s stomach and I had been chosen for the task of restoring this digestive organ to health. The dysentery I suffered from later was nothing but the illness of Madrid taking shape in my intestinal tract.’
The author is conscientious about shepherding her reader through the pitfalls with respect to how Carrington’s self-perception, her mental health and her Surrealism are interconnected. When Moorhead arrives at the Sanatoria Peña Castillo, where the artist spent six months, she uses the artist’s Map of Down Below (c1941) to make her point. At a glance, the asylum is the hellish ‘down below’ referred to in the title, her surreal figures mutually understood as mad in an unintelligible plan of her surroundings. When she was there, though, the author found the map startlingly faithful, the symbols clear analogues for landmarks in the sanatorium gardens; ‘down below’, she explains, refers to the downstairs area reserved for the recovered. What emerges is a reverse Inferno: far from offering a language that aligned with insanity, for Carrington, Surrealism was a means of finding her bearings.
As the book goes on, the Surrealist refuges the artist made become ever more embodied. We go with her to Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche and visit the home she shared and beautified with Ernst. Les Alliberts, as it’s called, still bears bas reliefs of the couple and their imaginings around the outside, and their murals within (WoI Feb 2018). (Inside, a horse-head sculpture emerges, head cocked: Leonora, the author detects, is still alive here.) Then there are the artistic spaces Carrington made and inhabited following her flight to New York: the vast criss-cross web of twine she wove with Marcel Duchamp across the Manhattan gallery that housed the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in 1942. Designed by Duchamp to create barriers between the visitor and the work – like those the exiled artists had faced reaching America – it’s also an analogy for Leonora’s practice as we understand it in the book. Her paintings are worlds, complete and varied and allusive, but worlds that embed difficulty. But a playful difficulty, woven tenderly: a challenge.
Following the thread Leonora Carrington laid out behind her leads Moorhead right back where she started. Mexico was the place the artist found with room enough to contain her: over 8,600 of her chattels currently rest in 194 Calle Chihuahua. It was here that she painted many of the pieces that emblazon Moorhead’s book; here where she branched out into the worlds of sculpture and textile art – further acts of imaginative embodiment that peace-time afforded her.
This house, says the author, was ‘her kingdom, her lair, her place of refuge’; one of the principal illicit pleasures of the book is feeling we are admitted to it, and to the world of reflections that occasioned the pieces she made here. Her half-smoked cigarette lying in an ashtray in the kitchen, her sculptures and studies, piles of books from alchemy and shamanism, to Birds with Human Faces. It’s sparse too: Carrington was always frugal, we learn. But her sparseness is also pregnant, as it is in her art. ‘Empty spaces, as well as objects,’ Carrington told her cousin, require just as much attention. ‘The appearance of things is quite limited and informs us only of certain elements of reality, because there are many other realities and ways to approach them.’ As her home lies on the cusp of opening its doors as a house museum, Moorhead’s book is a handy guide to the fantastical realities and past places that she hid within it, in plain sight.
‘Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington’ is published by Thames & Hudson, rrp £30. The Casa Estudio Leonora Carrington is scheduled to open to the public for the first time in 2024
