CURIOUS ABOUT CARRINGTON?

This painting by Leonora Carrington features in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s exhibition of British Surrealist art. Its curator, Arts Society Lecturer David Boyd Haycock, reveals the key facts behind it.

© Estate of Leonora Carrington/ARS, NY and DACS, London. 2019, UEA 27. Sainsbury Centre For Visual Arts, University Of East Anglia. Photographer: James Austin 

This curious oil painting is called The Old Maids. 

Carrington was born in Lancashire in 1917 and died in Mexico City in 2011. She lived an exciting life. Her parents were wealthy and expected their daughter to be a debutante socialite. But she wanted to be an artist and a writer. In 1937, she ran away to France with the German Surrealist, Max Ernst. In 1943, she moved to Mexico, where she later married Hungarian photographer Emérico Weisz. Their first child was born a year before she made this painting in 1947. Parenthood didn’t slow her down. She worked with ‘the baby in one hand, and the paintbrush in the other’. 

In the year that it was made... 

...Carrington was mentioned in the London periodical Horizon by writer Victor Serge. In his ‘Letter from Mexico’, Serge revealed how she painted ‘in a narrow little room in old Mexico City, the most dream-saturated place I know here. Her present work... is, in my opinion, an astonishing example of the direct projection onto canvas of an intense, anguished, yet luminously adolescent inner life.’ 

‘Do you think anyone escapes their childhood?’

Carrington asked this question in her old age, adding: ‘I don’t think we do. That
kind of feeling you have in childhood of being very mysterious.’ She grew up in a large, imposing Victorian manor house, exposed to her Irish mother’s Roman Catholicism and tales of ghosts, fairies and witchcraft. She read the works of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, who were also big influences on other British Surrealists. 

Carrington’s role as a mother and wife led her to explore ideas around the traditional feminine domestic space, as seen here.

That domestic space became a site of magical power. Her works explore fantasy, myth, fairy tales, alchemy and the occult, as well as gender roles. To Carrington, cooking and meal-making were analogous to alchemy and the act of painting, as
well as to pregnancy and childbirth. It’s no surprise that her acquaintances included the Mexican Surrealist Frida Kahlo, who explored similar themes. 

Mexico brought her closer to older ideas of magic, religion and witchcraft. 

Carrington was interested in ancient Mexico and its Aztec past. As she observed, ‘Once you cross the border and you arrive in Mexico, you feel that you are coming to a place that’s haunted.’ 

‘I don’t really think in terms of explanations.’

That’s how Carrington looked on her work, and it is key to appreciating all Surrealist creations. As another British Surrealist, Conroy Maddox, explained: ‘A Surrealist does not know what he is doing. Dalí didn’t know what he was doing. I don’t know what I’m doing. Something happens and it develops, but you don’t analyse it. By doing that you destroy a Surrealist image.’ 

We can read whatever we want into this artwork.

The tall figure on the left makes me think of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Alice in Wonderland – a story we know Carrington loved. Alice drinks a potion that makes her small, and she eats foods that make her grow. The old maids might be witches – note the black cat slipping down the corridor – and the birds and monkey are perhaps their familiars. But the interpretation is there for you to make. It’s both fascinating and frustrating. That’s the wonder. There’s no one, clear meaning. 

SEE 

British Surrealism, Dulwich Picture Gallery, 26 February–17 May dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk