A comprehensive retrospective of surrealist painter Leonora Carrington's work is currently captivating visitors at the Katonah Museum of Art, just an hour outside Manhattan. The exhibition, titled "Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver," showcases the strange and ceaselessly inventive artwork of an artist who once declared, "I didn't have time to be anyone's muse. I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist."
Carrington, who died at age 94 in 2011, lived an extraordinarily unconventional life that took her from wealthy English society through wartime France to her adopted home in Mexico. Her artistic legacy has proven remarkably valuable, with her 1945 masterpiece "Les Distractions de Dagobert" selling at auction for $28.5 million last year, surpassing the previous record price of $24.4 million set by her former lover Max Ernst in 2022.
The compact but powerful exhibition reveals the full range of Carrington's artistic vision, packed with drama, trauma, mystical symbolism, technical virtuosity, and pure eccentricity. Visitors can move from the gaudy and grotesque "Rabinos (The Rabbis)" from 1960 to the tender "Portrait of Gooky" from 1933, or admire the pencil drawing "Girl, Horse, Tree" (circa 1940), where the three subjects merge into a vaporous interspecies creation. The complex tableau "Pastoral" from 1950 shows creatures, spirits, and humans picnicking in a dappled wood, evoking classical works by Giorgione and Manet while maintaining Carrington's distinctive ethereal touch.
Carrington's fierce artistic eye could transform even the most ordinary objects into something extraordinary. Her 1987 painting "Cabbage" presents not merely a vegetable, but what she called "the alchemical rose" – a sanguinary red cabbage with crimson leaves edged in papery grey, rendered with such sentient vitality that it appears almost alive. To Carrington, this wasn't simply food waiting to be prepared, but a sacred talisman capable of inducing mystical experiences and even screaming when "dragged out of the earth and plunged into boiling water."
While some viewers might find her eclectic blend of Tibetan Buddhism, Kabbalah, alchemy, shamanism, Celtic legends, and Mayan mystical traditions overwhelming, Carrington's art itself remains ceaselessly inventive and appealingly strange. Edward James, a surrealist promoter who championed Magritte and Dalí, noted that "she has never relinquished her love of experimentation," allowing her to "diversify and explore a hundred or more techniques for the expression of her creative powers."
Born in 1917 in Lancashire, northwest England, into a wealthy Catholic family living in the aptly named Crookhey Hall, Carrington spent her early years antagonizing her parents and a series of convent school nuns who repeatedly expelled her. She later took revenge in works like "Nunscape at Manzanillo" (1956), depicting a boatload of nuns foundering on rocks, with some singing in the surf, others dancing on the beach, and one sister's underclothes hanging from an improvised line, suggesting mysterious activities.
After seeking education in Florence, Carrington arrived in London in 1935 and studied with French modernist painter Amédée Ozenfant in 1936. That watershed year saw Herbert Read publish his influential book "Surrealism," which Carrington's perceptive mother gave her as a gift. The young artist also attended London's first surrealism exhibition, where she encountered Max Ernst's "Two Children are Threatened by a Nightingale" – an experience that would change her life forever.
At age 19, Carrington met the 45-year-old Ernst, who was twice married and involved in a complex relationship with poet Paul Éluard and his wife Gala. Despite the age difference and Ernst's complicated romantic history, the pair fell into mutual infatuation and settled together in an old farmhouse in Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche in France's Rhône Valley. Carrington later described this period as "an era of paradise," during which they decorated their home's interior with equine women and whimsical lizards, placing a monumental mermaid to guard the terrace.
This idyllic period ended abruptly with World War II. Ernst was arrested twice – first by the French for being German, then by the Germans for being a "degenerate artist." While Ernst eventually fled to the United States with art patron Peggy Guggenheim (who became his third wife), Carrington escaped to Madrid, where she suffered a psychotic episode and was confined to an asylum in Santander, northern Spain.
Following her release, Carrington met Mexican poet and journalist Renato Leduc, who married her and brought her first to New York and then to Mexico City in 1942. Although this marriage dissolved, Carrington fell deeply in love with Mexico City, finding that it perfectly suited her eclectic sensibility. The city became her permanent home for the remainder of her life, where she enjoyed a long, stable marriage with photographer Chiki Weisz.
The 1950s marked the pinnacle of Carrington's artistic career, when she could finally focus on her past experiences and imagination without the distractions of war or tumultuous relationships. Her stunning 1957 work "Country House" depicts a castle reminiscent of her childhood home, veiled in extravagant greenery and watched over by charmingly sedate monsters. This uncharacteristically misty painting, rendered in the style of ancient Roman Villa Livia frescoes, creates an atmosphere of bucolic retreat from stress and time.
Demonstrating her technical versatility, Carrington employed contrasting methods with equal mastery in works like the fearsome "Bird of Prey." This supremely elegant drawing, executed with ruthless precision in white chalk lines on black card and finished in gouache, shows an avian predator gazing at a rodent writhing in its talons. The bird's eye appears as a black circle with radiating spokes of light, while the victim's eye is rendered as a white disc of pure terror.
Like so many of her busy paintings and quick sketches, this drawing exemplifies Carrington's mastery of what she knew best: the eerie fusion of cruelty and beauty that permeates the natural world. The exhibition continues through October 5 at the Katonah Museum of Art, offering visitors a comprehensive look at one of surrealism's most enigmatic and accomplished practitioners.
