British-born surrealist painter and novelist: Other surrealists may have gentler dreams, but Carrington's world has a feminine frighteningness.
Carrington, a key figure in the surrealist movement, was born in Clayton Green, Lancashire, in 1917. She spent her childhood on the family estate in England. There she grew up around animals and listening to her Irish nannies tell tales of fairy tales and Celtic folklore. She later used these as sources of symbolism to inspire her works of art.
Carrington was a rebellious and disobedient child, educated by a series of directors, teachers, and nuns, and was expelled from two convent schools for bad behavior. When she continued to rebel, her family sent her to study art briefly in Florence, Italy. Carrington was impressed by the medieval and Baroque sculpture and architecture she saw there. Italian Renaissance paintings particularly inspired her.
Mary Leonora Carrington (6 April 1917 – 25 May 2011) was a British-born surrealist painter and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the surrealist movement of the 1930s. Carrington was also a founding member of the women's liberation movement in Mexico during the 1970s.
In 1937, she met Max Ernst at a party in London. The two fell in love and set off for Paris. Ernst left his wife and settled with Carrington in Saint-Martin-d'Ardeche in the south of France in 1938. During this phase of their Romantic period, Carrington became immersed in Surrealist practices. She explored collaborative processes with painting, collage, and automatic writing. Ernst was arrested several times in German-occupied France and eventually escaped to the United States with the help of Peggy Guggenheim. Carrington broke up with Ernst and left France. She escaped from the Nazis and went to Madrid. She suffered a psychotic breakdown in Spain and was hospitalized in a mental hospital in Madrid. Her parents intervened in her medical care when she began suffering from recurring delusions and anxiety attacks. The artist was traumatized by her ordeal and eventually sought refuge in Lisbon's Mexican embassy.
With the encouragement of Andre Breton, Carrington wrote her first novel, "Down Below." She wrote about her experiences with mental illness in her novel. In addition, she created many dark paintings reminiscent of her psychotic collapse. In 1941, Carrington married Renato Leduc, a Mexican poet and diplomat who was a friend of Pablo Picasso.
Carrington settled in Mexico in 1942. In Mexico City, she met Jewish Hungarian photographer Emeric (“Chiki”) Weisz. In the 1950s, she devoted herself to her art and developed an intensely personal surrealist sensibility that combined autobiographical and occult symbolism. She became close to other Surrealists working in Mexico, such as Remedios Varo and Benjamin Peret.
Carrington published many articles and short stories over the course of a decade in Mexico. She also collaborated with other avant-garde members and intellectuals such as writer Octavio Paz and filmmaker Luis Buñuel. In 1960, Carrington was honored with a major retrospective of her work at the Museo Nacional de Arte Moderno in Mexico City.
Starting in the 1990s, Carrington split her time between her home in Mexico City and visits to New York and Chicago. In addition to her paintings, prints, and drawings, she created bronze sculptures and human figures. She gave live interviews about her life and career, from her occasional Surrealist experiments to her later artistic exploits.
In Carrington's work, themes such as metamorphosis and magic have given her art an enduring appeal. She shared the surrealists' interest in the unconscious mind and the world of imagination. To these ideas, she added her distinctive blend of cultural influences, including Celtic literature, Renaissance painting, Mesoamerican folk art, medieval alchemy, and Jungian psychology. She filled it with hybrid figures that are half-human and half-animal, combinations of various fantastic animals, both frightening and humorous. Thanks to these images, she discovered themes of transformation and transformation in an ever-changing world.
Carrington died in Mexico City in May 2011 due to complications from pneumonia.