Sentinel of Surrealism, in life and in creations – printed in The Gulf News

By Ruth Maclean and Rachel Rickard Straus, Special to Weekend Review, The Gulf News
Published: April 16, 2009, 22:59

http://www.gulfnews.com/weekend/interview/10304635.html

Courtesy of the Goddard Art Center, Oklahoma

Steam rises from Grandmother Moorhead’s aromatic kitchen as feast preparations begin.

The homely red room is overrun with lively domestic confusion. People bustle round the ancient English stove, chopping aubergines and strewing sweetcorn, garlic and cups of tea across the table and floor. A beautiful white goose waits in the corner for the inevitable.

Only, since this is Leonora Carrington’s painting, there is no such thing as inevitable. Nothing is quite as it seems in the world of 91-year-old English-born Carrington, the last living Surrealist.

In Grandmother Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen, the goose is the one in charge: It is twice the size of anyone else in the room. The “people” are in fact shrouded and wormily magical figures.

An enormous gazelle, his head cleft from his antlers to his nose, looms in the shadows, dressed in a bishop’s cope and carrying a witch’s broomstick.

Carrington has been cooking up strange visions and mystical creatures such as these for over seven decades.

Octavio Paz, the Mexican poet and Nobel laureate, once observed: “Leonora’s paintings sometimes seem to have been materialised in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight.”

Carrington has lived a life quite as extraordinary as her imagination but only snippets of it are well known.

Having lived in Mexico for so long, she is a Mexican national treasure, but it has been difficult for her homeland — indeed, her home continent, as she has lived in France, Spain and Portugal, as well as England — to keep track of her.

She disappeared to Mexico at the height of her 1930s Surrealist notoriety and little has been heard of her since.

Carrington receives us at her home in a quaint tumbledown area of Mexico City. Nothing from the outside betrays that this is the home of a formidable imagination.

But once ushered inside by her maid, terrifying creatures peer out of the gloom in her dark hallway, including a half human.

Layered in woollens, her hair done up in the same fashion as on her wedding day, Carrington walks down the staircase, greeting us with a smile and an impossibly English “Lovely to meet you.” She leads us into her kitchen.

It is an English domestic haven in the middle of one of the biggest, noisiest and most polluted cities in the world, complete with tea and postcards of Princess Diana.

Carrington moved out of England 70 years ago. “I do miss England. Well, I miss the idea of England, I think,” she says. “But I haven’t been back for years. I probably just miss the past.”

“I was born in 1917 in Lancashire,” she says, her aristocratic tone a far cry from the classic thick Lancashire accent.

Her father was a textile tycoon and her mother an Irish Catholic who filled her with Celtic folklore. Even as a young child Carrington was a rebel and was expelled from her convent school.

“The nuns told my parents, ‘She refuses to collaborate in either work or play’,” she remembers. She spent all her time drawing horses on the gym floor.

Carrington’s mother Maurie persisted in her battle to turn her daughter into a lady and much to the young Carrington’s disgust she had to be presented at court.

“We had to walk like this,” she tells us, walking her fingers sideways across her oilskin Liberty tablecloth. “All I could think about was how much my tiara hurt.”

Predictably, although the intention of this occasion — and the barrage of dreary debutante balls that followed — was to introduce Carrington to eligible young men, she did not find a suitable husband.

Instead, she scandalised society by eloping to Paris with the famous Surrealist painter Max Ernst. Her parents were horrified: Ernst was married, 26 years her senior and a deliberately shocking avant garde artist.

“My parents were angry with me for running off with Max,” she remembers.

Ernst and Carrington rejoined Ray, Eluard, Miro, Duchamp and the rest of the Surrealists. She was in her element and adored.

She befriended the photographer Lee Miller, mesmerised Andre Breton, the inventor of Surrealism, and even caused outrage when she turned up at one party with the soles of bother her feet spread with mustard.

Carrington’s paintings of fantastical creatures and living furniture encapsulated the essence of Surrealism.

Andre Breton recognised this and showed her work in his biggest exhibition, the International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Gallerie de Beaux Arts in Paris in 1939.

Her vision, however, was entirely her own. “I never thought of myself as a Surrealist,” she says. “I didn’t think of myself as anything. I try not to. We all have these egos.”

Carrington and Ernst ran away to a tiny village, Saint Martin d’Ardeche, in the middle of the French countryside, where they painted, wrote and created mystical alter egos for themselves.

“I was very happy there,” Carrington recalls. “I had a vine which I tended, I worked.” The strange sculptures that the couple created together can still be seen on the walls of their old house in the sleepy French village.

They lived quietly until, in the Second World War, Ernst was interned in a camp by the Nazis. Carrington, then 21, was left alone and, badly frightened, started to go mad, eating strange foods or nothing at all.

Eventually two Parisian friends picked her up and together they fled from the approaching German army. “I had to leave everything,” she says. “Imagine what the Germans would have done if they had caught me. Horrible! They didn’t like Surrealists at all.”

They drove to Spain and when they reached Madrid, she was thrown into a mental asylum.

After several months she was rescued by her old Irish nanny in a submarine. The nanny had been instructed to take Carrington home to England but Carrington had other ideas.
She needed an escape plan — and found one in keeping with the rest of her extraordinary life.

When taken out for lunch by her nanny one day, Carrington went to the toilet, climbed out the window, hopped in a taxi and said: “Take me to the Mexican Embassy.”

It was there that she met Renato Leduc, a Mexican diplomat and friend of Picasso’s, whom she married to get a passport for Mexico. Once there, Carrington divorced him.

“Mexicans are very hard to live with. He kept going off so I did too until I met someone else.”

That someone else was Emerico Weisz, a Hungarian photographer with whom she had two sons and lived until he died just a couple of years ago at the age of 94.

Separated from her Parisian Surrealist friends, she found a new group of artist friends including Remedios Varo and Leonor Fini.

Carrington may miss England but it is in Mexico that she has gained recognition and been adopted as a national treasure.
But Carrington is oblivious to the interest.

“What would anyone want to write about me for?” she exclaims at one point. “I’m just an old lady.” We say that she has had an incredible life and people are very interested.

She answers simply: “Everyone has an interesting life.”

Ruth Maclean and Rachel Rickard Straus are freelance journalists based in Mexico and the United Kingdom.