Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington, Green Tea, 1942, Oil on canvas, The Museum of Modern Art, New York NY. Gift of the Drue Heinz Trust (by exchange), © 2022 Leonora Carrington / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

BIOGRAPHY

Leonora Carrington was born in 1917 in Lancashire, England and passed away in 2011 at the age of 94 in Mexico City, Mexico. A leading artist of the 20th century, Carrington incorporated painting, drawing, sculpture, textiles, printmaking, and writing into a body of work produced throughout her nearly seven-decade career.

Raised in the English upper class, Carrington’s early life was privileged, yet her personal freedom was restricted by the conventions of traditional gender roles. However, Carrington’s childhood was imbued with magical stories of Celtic mythology and folklore, as told by her Irish mother, grandmother, and nanny. In these fantastic tales of humans, animals, and nature living harmoniously as joined forces against threats of injustice and violence, she found ideas which would profoundly influence the rest of her life.

In 1937, Carrington’s mother gifted her a copy of Herbert Read’s Surrealism, which served as her first introduction to the growing avant-garde movement. While studying at Amédée Ozenfant’s academy, Carrington met Max Ernst, and they began a romantic relationship. Together they moved to Paris where Carrington was introduced to André Breton, Yves Tanguy, Leonor Fini, and the larger community of artists and intellectuals in the city. In 1938, she participated in the Exposition Internationale du Surréalisme in Paris and a Surrealism exhibition in Amsterdam, cementing her position in art history among the Surrealists despite personally disagreeing with the categorization as such. While she and the Surrealists shared a disdain for bourgeois values, Carrington was resolutely autonomous, never ascribing to common Surrealist motifs.

At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, the German-born Ernst was considered an enemy alien and arrested. Alone in France, Carrington’s mental stability weakened. With friends she fled to Spain, but along the journey her psychological state continued to deteriorate, leading to her forced admission into a sanitarium in Santander. She would later recount this experience in her memoir Down Below (1943).

Carrington escaped Spain in 1941 and passed through New York before arriving in Mexico City in 1942. She found a home in Mexico with fellow European émigrés Remedios Varo, who became her close friend, and the Hungarian photographer Emerico “Chiki” Weisz, whom she married in 1946. Carrington continued to exhibit internationally. As she experienced marriage and motherhood, Carrington’s work became steeped in archetypically feminine iconography, such as cooking motifs and domestic interior scenes. She recognized the remnants of an ancient magic still present in the acts of making food, having a family, and painting pictures. She saw the similarities between what she was doing at home and what alchemists attempted to do—both involved manipulating inanimate matter to harness its life-endowing properties. It was in this period that Carrington revisited the Renaissance practice of using tempera paint, made from pigment and egg yolk, to imbue her aesthetic vision and the physical substance of her paintings with life itself.  

Her art was well-received in Mexico, and in 1963 Carrington received a government commission to create a mural for the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, which she titled El mundo mágico de los mayas (The Magical World of the Maya). In the 1960s and 1970s, Carrington became a political activist, hosting student meetings at her home and co-founding the Mexican women’s liberation movement in 1972. In the 1980s, the renowned mural was moved to the Regional Museum of Anthropology and History of Chiapas in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, and in 1986 Carrington’s political involvement earned her the Lifetime Achievement Award at the United Nations Women’s Caucus for Art convention in New York. In 2005, Leonora Carrington received Mexico’s National Prize of Sciences and Arts. 

Carrington’s work has been acquired by museums worldwide, including The Museum of Modern Art,New York, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; The Tate, London, United Kingdom; National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; and Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands, among others.

Since Carrington’s passing in 2011, her work has been the subject of the following solo museum exhibitions: Leonora Carrington: Revelation at the ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark and Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, Spain (2022-2023); Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Monterrey, Mexico (2018); Leonora Carrington at the Tate Liverpool, United Kingdom (2015); and The Celtic Surrealist at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2014). Her work has also been featured in the exhibitions In Wonderland: The Surrealist Adventures of Women Artists in Mexico and the United States (2012) at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, Germany (2020) and the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark (2020); Surrealism Beyond Borders at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021) and Tate Modern, London (2022); Surrealism and Magic: Enchanted Modernities at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, Italy (2022) and Museum Barberini, Potsdam, Germany (2022); and the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams (2022), the title of which was taken from a book by Leonora Carrington.

Download Curriculum Vitae

Frieze Masters 2023 Artwork Highlights
Gods and Monsters | Susan L. Aberth on “Leonora Carrington: Revelación”
Paying Tribute to Leonora Carrington, 2022 Venice Biennale Takes the Title ‘The Milk of Dreams’
Leonora Carrington’s Irreverent Dreamscapes
The Tarot of Leonora Carrington
Sotheby’s Global Hybrid Online Evening Sale Soars to $363.2 M.
Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg
Top Ten Surrealists: From Dorothea Tanning to Man Ray
ADAA: Artwork Highlights at the New York Art Fair
8 of the Best Artworks to See at the ADAA Art Fair, From a Supernatural Alice Neel Painting to Zanele Muholi’s Latest Portrait Series
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Politics, Picasso, and Rabbit Bones Make the Scene at ADAA Art Show Opening in New York
Surrealism Was a Decidedly Feminine Movement. So Why Have So Many of Its Great Women Artists Been Forgotten?
Fantastic Women | Schirn Kunsthalle Frank­furt, Germany
Searching for Britain’s most important surrealist
Here come the 'angels of anarchy': Surrealist women to steal the shows in 2020
Best Art of 2019
Wicked! Modern Art’s Interest in the Occult
Leonora Carrington GALLERY WENDI NORRIS OFFSITE
Art Dealers Association of America Welcomes Eight New Member Galleries
Leonora Carrington and the Secret of the Sacred Feminine
Female Surrealists Re-emerge in 2 Startling Shows
The Spirits at the End of the World
Leonora Carrington: As Above, So Below on Madison Avenue
Goings on About Town: Leonora Carrington
Eggs and Horses and Dreams
The Surrealist, Feminist Magic of Leonora Carrington
Leonora Carrington Brought a Wild, Feminist Intensity to Surrealist Painting
Symposium | Leonora Carrington
Private view: must-see gallery shows opening this May
What Was Dorothea Tanning Trying to Tell Us With Her Art? The Curator of Her New Show Explains the Surrealist’s Intimate Symbology
The Woman Sorcerer
Why the Resurgent Interest in Female Surrealists Needs to Be Reflected in Museum Collections
A New Collection of Surrealist Writings Focuses on Women Authors
The Market for Female Surrealists Has Finally Reached a Tipping Point
Resurrecting Leonora Carrington’s World
On the trail of Britain's lost surrealist in Mexico
Surrealist portrait by Leonora Carrington acquired by National Galleries of Scotland for £560,000
 Leonora Carrington Museum is a surreal location for surrealist art
From a smiley snowman to an "awareness of death"
Moon Dancers: Yup'ik Masks and the Surrealists
The Surrealists’ Dance with the Yup’ik Mask
How Native Alaskan Culture Influenced Surrealist Masters
How the Native Americans of Alaska Influenced the Surrealists
'The Dictionary of Animal Languages' inspired by Leonora Carrington’s extraordinary life
Leonora Carrington: Magical Tales
Whitney Chadwick studies love, war and the women of Surrealism
Review: ‘Leonora and Alejandro’ and One Rather Trippy Encounter
Women Surrealists Setting Records
The Other Art History: The Overlooked Women of Surrealism
More than a muse
Down Below review: A valuable report from a descent into the unspeakable,
The Romance and Heartbreak of Writing in a Language Not Your Own,
Leonora Carrington Rewrote the Surrealist Narrative for Women
The Strange, Irreverent Worlds of “Down Below” and “The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington
The Forgotten Surrealist Painter Who ‘Didn’t Have Time to Be Anyone’s Muse’
Lionising Leonora – An Irishman’s Diary about artist Leonora Carrington,
My ‘wild child’ cousin, the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington
Nace La Fundacion Leonora Carrington
New Collectors Fuel Demand and Double Estimates at Latin American Art Auctions
Leonora Carrington: A surreal trip from Lancashire to Mexico
Critic’s Picks: San Francisco
Nobody’s Muse
Rebel painter who turned her back on English high society
Leonora Carrington dies at 94; a leading figure of the Surrealist movement
Leonora Carrington Is Dead at 94; Artist and Author of Surrealist Work
Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington dies aged 94
Leonora Carrington, artist and surrealist muse, dies at 94
Leonora Carrington
 Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington dies
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