|
Page 3 of 12
Leonora Carrington: A New Book On The Artist
April 2009
As expats living in Mexico go the life of Leonora Carrington is as unique and full of adventure as one can imagine. That she eventually ended up here is thanks to a friend and some quick thinking. Now, aged 91, she lives with her husband - who is also a nonagenarian - in Mexico City and still remains active in the art world. A new book about her relationship with fellow Englishman Edward James - the highly eccentric art collector who bought a lot of Carrington's work - has just been published by her son Gabriel Weisz.
So how did the daughter of a wealthy Yorkshire industrialist, who was born in 1917 during the First Great War, end up living on the other side of the globe? A rebellious creature since she was a young girl - she was expelled from various schools - Carrington refused to conform to her father's wishes of being a lady of polite society. Carrington senior, who was a bourgeois textile magnate, saw his daughter marrying into blue blood which his English northern roots had denied him despite the huge amounts of money he had amassed.
It was to this end that Leonora Carrington was presented to King George V in her late teens at an extravagant debutante ball organized by her father at the London Ritz to mark her entry into high society. Carrington hated it. The last thing on her mind was to sit pretty by her aristocratic husband's side and whither away playing the docile hostess. She needed to escape from this impending prison sentence but where?
In 1936, London staged its first ever surrealist exhibition which left the young Carrington with an everlasting impression. There she saw the work of German artist Max Ernst and, according to her, experienced "an epiphany". A year later she met Ernst at a dinner and in a whirlwind romance fled with the married artist to mainland Europe. She was only 21.
What followed was the development of Carrington's artistic temperament as she and Ernst produced countless works of art while living a rich, bohemian life in Provence, France. Unfortunately, the looming Nazi invasion would soon destroy the couple's happy existence and lead them to take flight across Europe. The strain of the Nazi pursuit and the couple's separation led to Carrington suffering a nervous breakdown in Spain and she ended up in a psychiatric hospital in Santander. Meanwhile Ernst, who the Nazis had listed as an enemy alien, was being helped by the art collector Peggy Guggenheim - niece of Solomon Guggenheim, founder of the modern art museums of the same name - to flee Europe. Ernst would end up marrying Guggenheim in the United States but their relationship would be short-lived and eventually he would return to France in the early fifties.
After Carrington's release from the psychiatric hospital, she traveled to Lisbon, Portugal, in the hope of securing safe passage out of Europe. However, when Carrington's father got news of his daughter's precipitous mental health he sent an envoy to Lisbon to get her on a ship to South Africa and admit her to a sanatorium there. Once again Carrington felt her father trying to control her life despite his well-meaning concern. With the thought of her father's will pressing on her mind, Carrington gave slip to her escort by escaping through the back door of a cafe and took a taxi to the Mexican Embassy where a friend - Renato Leduc - helped her travel to the United States as his wife. It was purely a marriage of convenience and was dissolved a few months later and soon after she came to live in Mexico - her adopted home.
Mexico introduced Carrington, at firsthand, to the works of Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and David Alfaro Siqueiros who had established the Mexican Mural Renaissance which was infused with mysticism and rural imagery. A lot of Carrington's work is scored with surreal, dream-like images although the artist herself is loathe to comment on what her work represents or means. After a few years living in Mexico she met and married Csizi Weisz, a Hungarian photographer, and they are still together to this day. They have two sons: Gabriel Weisz, an intellectual and a poet and Pablo Weisz, a surrealist artist and a doctor.
Edward James and a Mural
Gabriel Weisz's book on his mother's relationship with the art collector Edward James focuses principally on the time James commissioned Carrington to produce a mural at his opulent hacienda in Xilitla in the state of San Luis Potosi during the sixties. The book, entitled "A Mural in the Jungle", recalls Weisz's time as a young child and the experience of living in the fantastic world James had created for himself in Xilitla while watching his mother work on a mural that took her three years to complete.
James, who was a financial benefactor of Surrealist artists such as Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte, had moved to Mexico in the early 1940s after he decided it was the best place to create his "Garden of Eden" and that Mexico was "far more romantic and had far more room than Southern California" where he had previously been living.
In 1945, James hired a young manager of a telegraph office in Cuernavaca to help with the search of building his dream home. The two found Xilitla in November of that year and Las Pozas was consequently born. Spanning over 80 acres of natural waterfalls and pools interlaced with Surrealist sculptures in concrete, Las Pozas is a tropical rain forest in the mountains of Mexico. Here James made his vision come to reality by spending more than US$5 million of his personal fortune and commissioning thirty-six concrete follies. The garden also included thousands of varieties of flora and fauna.
Between 1964 and 1967, Carrington would make repeated trips to Xilitla to work on the mural that James had asked her to paint which was entitled “Mujer Perra” or “Dog Woman”. Weisz recalls that seeing the mural recently had compelled him to put pen to paper and recount the days spent in Xilitla with his mother and the eccentric James. The book, published by the editorial Xul Servicios, also includes thirty-four pages of detailed illustrations and lends a fascinating insight into the relationship between a great artist and her benefactor told through the eyes of a young child under the backdrop of a garden wonderland.
Return to top
|
