Her gaze still heralds the magic of Gaelic tales mixed with the afterlife cult of Aztecs and Mayans. The Mexican-based, British artist Leonora Carrington, who at the age 14 faced and defied a Catholic priest by lifting her skirt, continues to denude in her art—notably painting, sculpture, and literature—a rebellion against the claptraps of her early bourgeois upbringing in Lancashire.
Affinity in artistic temperament, rather than a deliberate rebarbative choice, landed her with the Parisian surrealist group shortly after spoiling her expected role as a debutante in court. In 1942, a skein of vicissitudes and stunts led her to flee Europe and seek refuge in Mexico, where she has lived for most of her life, revered as one of the nation’s highest cultural assets. This month she turned 94, and celebrations carry on with a new exhibit of her latest pieces.
Carrington’s Artwork
The subjects in Carrington’s trademark artwork envision a flight through zoomorphic configurations. Her palette glows under a pre-Renaissance dusk that fleshes rituals fraught with the self-contained oddness and mysteries of dreams. Although she mines multiple sources, the same muses that helped her escape from a stultified childhood take hold of her “parler femme,” or that voice in only a handful of female surrealist artists that decentralizes convention and spreads the creases of a woman’s greater sensibilities.
Carrington and Mexico
War-torn Europe never forgave Carrington’s elope from the global emporiums of art, and for generations its patriarchs, zanily decrepit and longing, only growled in whispers the name of their naughty daughter. Mexico in turn welcomed her as a logical splint to its day-to-day magic, which also sparkled from the poetic dissent of an ancient pictorial tradition.
Mexican art, indeed, along with the nation’s prosperous independence at the time (often referred to as the Mexican Miracle), had likewise shaken off subjectivized descriptivism while reclaiming the purity of expression inspired by the occult proportions of life. That contentious materiality in action, even after the quietude of death, appealed beyond resistance to the complexity and beauty of Carrington’s aesthetic anima.
Syncretized Rebellions
Mexico eased the evocations with which Carrington, upon arrival, already vented the mildewed protocols of her birthplace. At first, she had enacted this gripe by referencing the narrative elements of the Florentine Quattrocento blended with a dab lifted from Oriental mythologies. Soon afterward, her compositions in meticulous detail resonate best with those styled by the catechized native Mexican painters sent in the 16th century to Italy to study religious art.
Rather than copying from the great masters, these indigenous apprentices pulled instead models from the late Middle Ages, a time when vassals fought their feudal lords and the forfeitures of the church, and to which they further encoded “evil” signs from their original culture. Art lovers today may sample these paintings in murals from the central and central-eastern region of Mexico, as in Actopan, Epazoyucan, Huejotzingo, and Tepeaca.
Carrington at Home
A remnant, anglicized air acclimates Carrington’s living quarters and studio in Mexico City. Visitors seldom see her without a cup of tea, and when speaking in English, the accent echoes the cagey upper-class type of her country fellows. Then again, do not ask if the free spirit girl would ever return to the place of her birth, for she will nail in silence a dark look on her guest and drop her hands, as if she were going the lift up her skirt, and flash in diabolical relief.
Egberto Almenas - Egberto Almenas is a literary and art scholar, author of four books of essays and a frequent contributor in both Spanish and English ...
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