Happy Birthday Leonora Carrington!

BY RUTH MACLEAN AND RACHEL RICKARD STRAUS

Special to The News

Leonora Carrington, one of Mexico’s greatest artists and a foremost surrealist, turns 92 today. This is a special year for the English painter, sculptor and writer who has lived in Mexico City for over 60 years. Today she reaches the same age as Marian Leatherby, the heroine of her only novel, “The Hearing Trumpet.”

Leonora Carrington, photo by Ivan De La Luz

 

“Oh yes, I know why it’s a special birthday,” she said in an interview. Her smile radiated youthfulness and aged wisdom at once.

And in an odd way, her own life has mirrored that of the protagonist of “The Hearing Trumpet.” Carrington’s 92 years have been full of adventure, creation and unconventional playfulness.

From English debutante to surrealist wild child, from Max Ernst’s lover to Mexican national treasure, her life has spanned five countries and 10 decades. She is best known in Mexico for her deeply imaginative paintings, a constant throughout her life. She paints the same strange creatures, cloaked in the same mystery, as she did 70 years ago. Her friend Octavio Paz once observed in a 2004 article in The Times, an English publication, that “Leonora’s paintings are not merely painted. They are brewed. They sometimes seem to have been materialized in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight.” Paintings such as the enigmatic “Grandmother Moorehead’s Aromatic Kitchen” are travelling from all over the world to the Pallant House Gallery in England where they will be exhibited next year.

AN UNCONVENTIONAL LIFE

Carrington has lived a life as extraordinary as her imagination. “I was born in Lancashire where I went to a convent school until the nuns expelled me,” she said. “They said, ‘Leonora refuses to collaborate at either work or play.’ ” She went to finishing school in Florence, Italy and to the cutting-edge Amedee Ozenfant art school in London before meeting and falling in love with the already famous avant-garde artist Max Ernst. She was just 19 and he 45 when they eloped to Paris. “My parents were so angry with me for running off with Max,” she said. First they went to Paris to join the blossoming surrealist movement there. They then went to St. Martin d’Ardeche, a tiny village in the south of France. There they painted, created alter egos for themselves and Carrington wrote.

When World War II arrived, Ernst was taken by the Nazis to a concentration camp, and Carrington fled to Madrid where she was put in an asylum. “It was a very traumatic time,” she said. She escaped to the Mexican Embassy through a bathroom window and married a Mexican diplomat in order to get out of Europe.

LIFE IN THE D.F.

These days Leonora lives in the D.F. with her “abominable snowman,” an overgrown Maltese terrier called Yeti. She continues to work in Mexico City, where she wrote “The Hearing Trumpet,” her well-known mural “The Magical World of the Mayas,” and her latest work, a series of enormous bronze sculptures exhibited on Paseo de la Reforma, which was headed up by the treetop-skimming “Fisher King.” “I live in the fear that they will give those sculptures back to me,” she said. “Where on earth would I put them?”

‘THE HEARING TRUMPET’

Marian Leatherby of “The Hearing Trumpet” was Leonora’s first exploration into being a nonagenarian. There is some discrepancy as to when it was written – Carrington believes it was somewhere between the 1950s and ’60s – but it was first published in 1974. Marian is an elderly, deaf English lady who lives with her unpleasantly conventional family, collecting her cats’ fur to be made into a cardigan and concocting fantastical letters to imaginary people with her best friend Carmella. With Carmella’s gift of a giant mother-of-pearl hearing trumpet, Marian first learns of her family’s plot to put her away in a decrepit retirement home.

Forced to exchange Carmella, her pet cactus and occasional treat of tinned tomato soup for neighbors even crazier than she is, Marian retains her English common sense. “What shall I do?” she says. “It seems a pity to commit suicide when I have lived for 92 years and really haven’t understood anything.”

Although Leonora has never explicitly said “The Hearing Trumpet” is autobiographical, great swaths of Marian’s life overlap with her own. A Marian has lived in a Spanish-speaking country for 50 years, before which she was buying tin trunks in New York and lived in Paris. This was exactly Leonora’s journey. And Carmella was legendarily based on Remedios Varo, Leonora’s best friend and fellow surrealist painter.

And like Leonora, Marian floats a little above the ground and makes unexpected, loopy comments. On the subject of age, Marian notes “People under 70 and over 7 are very unreliable if they are not cats.”

Meanwhile, Leonora is unconcerned about it being her birthday. “I don’t have birthday parties. I’m too old to remind myself how old I am. If you feel all right, it’s all right to be old, but there are disadvantages. You get very forgetful and there are things you can’t do any more.”

When a person gets to 90, people start to wonder about the secret behind their longevity. The answers are invariably rather boring: walking, plenty of olive oil, regular gin-and-tonics. Leonora let on her strategy many years ago, and in a 1991 catalogue to her works pronounced: “I am armed with madness for a long journey.”