Horna's Leonora Carrington in her studio
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A new exhibition shows Mexico was a fruitful refuge for women artists fleeing conventionality and conflict.
By Richard Dorment
A new exhibition shows Mexico was a fruitful refuge for women artists fleeing conventionality and conflict.
By Richard Dorment
Miracles, magic, witchcraft, and alchemy vanished from Western Europe centuries ago, but in Mexico the miraculous is part of everyday life. It is the perfect country for a Surrealist.
Surreal Friends at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until September 12, looks at three European surrealists who fled the madness of war-torn Europe to find safety, friendship, and mutual support in Mexico. The two painters, English-born Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo from Spain, used enigmatic symbolism and irrational narrative to construct personal mythologies so intensely private that at times their art feels like a form of protection against a hostile world. The Hungarian Kati Horna’s photographs convey both the joy and terror of a world set free from the restraints of rationality.
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Leonora Carrington: last of the great Surrealists By grouping all three together, the show makes us aware of how isolated the three women were from their European contemporaries, and of how profoundly each was affected by living in a place of exile André Breton called the “surreal country par excellence”.
The story of Carrington’s life could have been lifted from a best-selling novel. Now 93 years old, she was born in Lancashire into a wealthy upper middle class family. At the age of 20, she rejected a life of stifling conventionality by running off with the handsome German Surrealist Max Ernst who, at 46, already had a wife and child. Estranged from her family, for the next few years Leonora rattled round France and Spain, a bit player in Surrealist circles where her lover was a star.
When Germany invaded France and Ernst was interred, she fled to Spain. A nervous breakdown followed by confinement to a psychiatric hospital so traumatised her that, although she refers to these events in her paintings, she was never able to speak of them again. In 1939 she made her way to the US (without Ernst, who had moved on to Peggy Guggenheim) before settling in Mexico City in 1942.
From the mid-1940s, Carrington painted faux-naïf surrealistic confabulations. Heavily indebted to the fantastical landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch and to domestic interiors you find on 15th-century Florentine cassone and predella panels, her imagery is overlaid with references to Babylonian, Egyptian or Hindu mythology. To someone who knew nothing of her life story, the esoteric imagery of her pictures would be virtually incomprehensible. Themes of flight and confinement are enacted by a cast of humanoid figures abetted by owls, unicorns, horses, dogs and lizards (often decked out in medievalised fancy dress), while pictorial space is irrational, and changes in scale feel arbitrary.
But to those who know what to look for, these early pictures are full of oblique references to specific places and events in Carrington’s unhappy childhood.
In picture after picture, she makes it clear that for a free spirit like hers, life in England had been a living death. In the The House Opposite, for example, she re-imagines her childhood home as a kind of doll’s house where creatures both human and android pass through walls or slip through the floorboards. In a rabbit warren of rooms connected by winding staircases and rickety ladders, a trio of female alchemists brews a bubbling potion in the kitchen, while a well-behaved little girl lies tucked up in bed in the attic. Adult figures busy themselves downstairs, but the child dreams only of escape and of feeling abandoned.
Having seen Carrington’s work on its own, I’ve always found its fey side – the giantesses and witches, bird-women and goblins — easy to resist. But the Mexican context in which they are shown here helped me to see how she uses Surrealist distortion and fantasy not as ends in themselves, but to evoke the disorder and sorrow of a blighted childhood. Then too, her painting technique is always refined, especially when she is working in oil or tempera on panel, or illuminating the picture’s surface with gold leaf like a medieval manuscript.
Varo is technically even more proficient than her close friend Carrington, having studied in Salvatore Dalí’s alma mater, the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid. But in her paintings, autobiographical references are largely replaced by mystical, philosophical, cabalistic claptrap. Though her imagery is more intelligible than Carrington’s, she uses whimsy in a way that all too often reminded me of children’s book illustration. This show makes it clear that she followed where Carrington led.
The real re-discovery of the exhibition is Horna, who, as a Left-wing Jewish intellectual living in Berlin in the 1930s had every incentive to flee to Mexico in 1939.
Horna began as a more or less conventional flâneur, bringing a formal clarity to her photos of Berlin street scenes that reminds you of the work of her fellow countryman Brassai. By the time she covered the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Surrealism had become an important influence on her work. In powerful photos of a model prison in Barcelona, she uses double exposure to superimpose the crazed faces of the prisoners over their cells. But none of this prepares you for the power and beauty she found in Mexico. In her greatest work, a series about the mental hospital at Castaneda, her close-up studies of the faces of patients suffering from dementia and delusion have the compassion of Géricault’s portraits of the insane.
Surreal Friends at the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until September 12, looks at three European surrealists who fled the madness of war-torn Europe to find safety, friendship, and mutual support in Mexico. The two painters, English-born Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo from Spain, used enigmatic symbolism and irrational narrative to construct personal mythologies so intensely private that at times their art feels like a form of protection against a hostile world. The Hungarian Kati Horna’s photographs convey both the joy and terror of a world set free from the restraints of rationality.
Related Articles
Leonora Carrington: last of the great Surrealists By grouping all three together, the show makes us aware of how isolated the three women were from their European contemporaries, and of how profoundly each was affected by living in a place of exile André Breton called the “surreal country par excellence”.
The story of Carrington’s life could have been lifted from a best-selling novel. Now 93 years old, she was born in Lancashire into a wealthy upper middle class family. At the age of 20, she rejected a life of stifling conventionality by running off with the handsome German Surrealist Max Ernst who, at 46, already had a wife and child. Estranged from her family, for the next few years Leonora rattled round France and Spain, a bit player in Surrealist circles where her lover was a star.
When Germany invaded France and Ernst was interred, she fled to Spain. A nervous breakdown followed by confinement to a psychiatric hospital so traumatised her that, although she refers to these events in her paintings, she was never able to speak of them again. In 1939 she made her way to the US (without Ernst, who had moved on to Peggy Guggenheim) before settling in Mexico City in 1942.
From the mid-1940s, Carrington painted faux-naïf surrealistic confabulations. Heavily indebted to the fantastical landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch and to domestic interiors you find on 15th-century Florentine cassone and predella panels, her imagery is overlaid with references to Babylonian, Egyptian or Hindu mythology. To someone who knew nothing of her life story, the esoteric imagery of her pictures would be virtually incomprehensible. Themes of flight and confinement are enacted by a cast of humanoid figures abetted by owls, unicorns, horses, dogs and lizards (often decked out in medievalised fancy dress), while pictorial space is irrational, and changes in scale feel arbitrary.
But to those who know what to look for, these early pictures are full of oblique references to specific places and events in Carrington’s unhappy childhood.
In picture after picture, she makes it clear that for a free spirit like hers, life in England had been a living death. In the The House Opposite, for example, she re-imagines her childhood home as a kind of doll’s house where creatures both human and android pass through walls or slip through the floorboards. In a rabbit warren of rooms connected by winding staircases and rickety ladders, a trio of female alchemists brews a bubbling potion in the kitchen, while a well-behaved little girl lies tucked up in bed in the attic. Adult figures busy themselves downstairs, but the child dreams only of escape and of feeling abandoned.
Having seen Carrington’s work on its own, I’ve always found its fey side – the giantesses and witches, bird-women and goblins — easy to resist. But the Mexican context in which they are shown here helped me to see how she uses Surrealist distortion and fantasy not as ends in themselves, but to evoke the disorder and sorrow of a blighted childhood. Then too, her painting technique is always refined, especially when she is working in oil or tempera on panel, or illuminating the picture’s surface with gold leaf like a medieval manuscript.
Varo is technically even more proficient than her close friend Carrington, having studied in Salvatore Dalí’s alma mater, the San Fernando Academy of Art in Madrid. But in her paintings, autobiographical references are largely replaced by mystical, philosophical, cabalistic claptrap. Though her imagery is more intelligible than Carrington’s, she uses whimsy in a way that all too often reminded me of children’s book illustration. This show makes it clear that she followed where Carrington led.
The real re-discovery of the exhibition is Horna, who, as a Left-wing Jewish intellectual living in Berlin in the 1930s had every incentive to flee to Mexico in 1939.
Horna began as a more or less conventional flâneur, bringing a formal clarity to her photos of Berlin street scenes that reminds you of the work of her fellow countryman Brassai. By the time she covered the Spanish Civil War in 1937, Surrealism had become an important influence on her work. In powerful photos of a model prison in Barcelona, she uses double exposure to superimpose the crazed faces of the prisoners over their cells. But none of this prepares you for the power and beauty she found in Mexico. In her greatest work, a series about the mental hospital at Castaneda, her close-up studies of the faces of patients suffering from dementia and delusion have the compassion of Géricault’s portraits of the insane.
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