Leonora Carrington never got her dues. While Salvador Dali, Andre Breton and others are widely recognised as the Surrealist masters, the women are often sidelined, reduced to mere muses. This 2017 documentary from BBC 4 directed and narrated by Teresa Griffiths, focuses on this oversight, with a haunting and insightful study of the artist and writer, whose work is only now becoming a vital piece of Surrealism, as far as gallery owners and art collectors alike are concerned.
Carrington, born in Lancashire in 1917, had plenty to rebel against. Her father, a stern disciplinarian, ruled the household with an iron fist, so when his daughter displayed a natural aptitude for drawing and painting, art school was the obvious choice, and a means of escape. Unfortunately, the family cut her off entirely when she became romantically involved with the older, married artist Max Ernst in her late teens.
Her work is gorgeous but creepy, often featuring wispy, spectral figures who appear as from nightmares. Places from her youth often feature, alongside nannies or other authority figures, rendered grotesque or threatening. Carrington had been kicked out of school for refusing to work or play in an acceptable manner. Little wonder her work seems so troubled, or that she had a breakdown when Ernst was sent off to war, subsequently arrested as “an undesirable foreigner” during the reign of the Nazis. She fled from Paris to Spain, and sadly was given electroshock treatment, which greatly traumatised her.
When she eventually met and fell in love with photographer Emerico ‘Chiki’ Weisz, they had two children, Gabriel and Pablo, and she continued to work, finally resting in Mexico City, where her art was revered. But it seems her demons never really left her and England, unlike Paris, was slow to accept her genius.
This film is poignant and brilliant: paintings seem to levitate, as the imagery is animated and projected onto buildings, and there’s an emphasis on both her own personal archive and the Day Of The Dead festival in Mexico, where the locals took Carrington and her mysterious, rich artwork to their hearts in ways the British didn’t during her lifetime. She died in 2011, aged 94, and her legacy is vast.
Available to watch on BBC I Player.
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