Leaving the personal body, abandoning fixed identity, and descending to the depths of anguish, evoked in Down Below as terrifying, are shamanic states that hold compulsive fascination for the uninitiated; the visions in Down Below have set Leonora Carrington in a constellation of illuminati alongside William Blake, Rimbaud, Aldous Huxley, Bob Dylan, and, most recently, Patti Smith.
In 1942, Leonora left New York for Mexico, where the socialist government, in a gesture of visionary generosity, had offered citizenship to any refugees from Fascism. Many surrealists responded and gathered in Mexico City: these refugees included the poet Benjamin Péret and his wife, the artist Remedios Varo, who were to become intimate friends of Leonora’s. Breton had visited Mexico in 1938 and declared, on his return, “La Mexique est surréaliste en elle-même” (Mexico is surrealist in itself), with its mythic past, cult of the dead, art of the fantastic, and astonishing landscapes. Leonora’s marriage of convenience to Renato Leduc, who was working as a bullfighting reporter, was amicable—“a nice man,” she once said, “neglectful, but nice”—and they soon divorced; she married Imre Weisz, known as “Cziki,” a newspaper photographer who had left Hungary with Robert Capa, scraped by with him in Paris, and then left to take part in the Spanish Civil War. On their return, as Capa became more and more successful, Weisz began running his studio in Paris; the Occupation swept him up, along with so many others, and he too took refuge in Mexico City.
With Cziki, Leonora had two sons, Gabriel (b. 1946) and Pablo (b. 1948): the experience of motherhood led her into new depths of knowledge, and far from depleting her creative powers, strengthened them: “I believe that for female animals the act of love, which is followed by the great drama of the birth of a new animal, pushes us into the biological underworld, very deeply. . . .” Bringing up her sons affirmed for her all over again the high value of the creaturely: she painted the ecstatic procession of L’Amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle in the week of her first child’s birth.
She was painting for their livelihood, including, she admitted to me cheerfully, fakes. A commission for a painting that was to appear in a film led to a famished dream of abundance: “The bald-headed girl in the red dress combines female charm and the delights of the table—you will notice that she is engaged in making an unctuous broth of (let us say) lobsters, mushrooms, fat turtle, spring chicken, ripe tomatoes, Gorgonzola cheese, milk chocolate, onions, and tinned peaches. The mixture of these ingredients has overflowed and taken on a greenish and sickly hue to the fevered vision of Saint Anthony, whose daily meal consists of withered grass and tepid water with an occasional locust by way of an orgy.”
At the time, Leonora was living mainly on ice cream, “which was the cheapest thing you could get,” so the saint’s imaginings have a certain urgency (those tinned peaches tell of scarcity very clearly). She was paid $200 for the picture, which was “a considerable fortune at that time.”
In Mexico, she encountered a culture in which the beliefs of the Indians merged with the imported Catholicism of the missionaries and the conquistadores; in the vigorous spirit of this Mexican syncretism, the artist wanted to communicate her inner visions, and a luxuriant variety of religious symbols bloom in her paintings of this period. “All religions are real,” Leonora once commented. “But you have to go through your own channels—you might meet the Egyptians, you might meet with the Voodoos, but in order to keep some kind of equilibrium it has to feel authentic to you.”
Remedios Varo was her co-conspirator during this fertile time; the two women were symbiotic in their restless inventiveness and explorings; in a feminist spirit of inquiry, they wrote fables and plays together and made paintings of dream states and mythic journeys. Varo’s intricate, extraordinary allegories of this period reveal a rare sympathy and joie de vivre in the friendship. They managed to combine seriousness with high spirits as they touched off inspiration in each other. Varo’s unexpected death at the age of fifty-four in 1963 was the hardest loss Leonora suffered, she told me, and she always spoke of it with intense distress.
Internal division, mystical affinities, shape-shifting can be fertile; the way through the stone door needs many vehicles, plural morphologies, and metamorphoses, not totemic integrity. So although her imagination is sui generis, original, and personal, Leonora repudiated the notion of a unified, artistic personality that such praise assumes as its premise. This is the paradox of her personality as well as her oeuvre. In her very denials of so many of the foundations of Western ideas about sanity and the unified self, she comes near to fulfilling deeply shared Western longings for Original Genius. Above all, she has become a beacon for women artists and writers, a model of self-willed dedication to her gifts, in the face of all the obstacles society set in her way. Carrington’s young she-beasts literally hold their heads high in Night Nursery Everything (1947), Baby Giant (1947), the sculpture Cat Woman (also known as La Grande Dame, 1951), and And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur (1953).
Widely read in alchemical writings, analyzed by followers of Jung, and loyal to a fierce and personal brand of idealism, which the art historian Janice Helland has called “esoteric feminism,” Leonora never altogether shed her wonderful spirit of irreverent mischief. Her great friend and collector Edward James wrote above her door in Mexico, “This is the house of the Sphinx.” A sphinx, yes, but a sphinx who sets riddles not to confound or destroy but to provoke laughter and open doors in the chambers of the mind, where love and fear and the other passions have their seat. She has said, “I try to empty myself of images which have made me blind.” In many ways she was breaking spells that blind others’ sight too. “Ironic sorcery”: Carlos Fuentes’s fine phrase captures well the sustained mixed tone of her vision—and her voice.
Leonora would remain in Mexico until her death in 2011, in her house in Cuernavaca, with only occasional longish periods in New York (she would never fly but always took the bus). She had left behind the confusions of her English and French lives. Penelope (1946), a stage play, ends on a new note of savage optimism, with the heroine’s escape on her horse, Tartar, and the suicide of her repressive father. Leonora once told me that her favorite story from the Bible was Jacob wrestling with the angel. “We have to hang on,” she said. “Even if the angel cries, ‘Let me go, let me go.’ We don’t listen. No. We have to hang on.” There’s a ladder there, in the background of the biblical account, waiting to be climbed to heaven, but for the moment the here and now on the ground demands struggle. Through the journeys and the sufferings that her writing transcribes and transforms, Leonora Carrington held on, sometimes laughing wickedly, sometimes fighting mad.
—MARINA WARNER
Kentish Town, London, 2017
NOTES AND FURTHER READING
All quotations when not otherwise attributed are from conversations with Leonora held from 1986 to 1988, when she was living in New York. I was writing a filmscript inspired by her life and work for the director Gina Newson, and though nothing came of the project, those days I spent with Leonora, walking through the streets of Manhattan and all around Central Park, and the hours we spent talking, count among the most inspiring experiences of my life. Some of this material, reprised here, appeared in the introductions to two volumes of her collected stories, The House of Fear and The Seventh Horse.
I should like to express my thanks to the late David Cardiff, my contemporary at university who introduced me to Leonora’s paintings through the collection of his father, Maurice Cardiff, who had been the British consul in Mexico City and, along with his wife (also called Leonora), was a close friend and associate. I also owe thanks to many scholars, especially Whitney Chadwick.
Aberth, Susan L. Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art. Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2010.
American Federation of Arts et al. The Temptation of St. Anthony: An Exhibition of Eleven Paintings by Noted American and European Artists. Washington, DC: American Federation of Arts, 1947.
Arcq, Teresa, Joanna Moorhead
, and Stefan von Raaij, eds. Surreal Friends. Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna. Burlington, VT: Lund Humphries, 2010.
Breton, André, ed. Anthologie de l’ humour noir. Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1950.
Breton, André, and Marcel Duchamp, eds. First Papers of Surrealism. New York: Coordinating Council of French Relief Societies, 1942.
Carrington, Leonora. The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below. Translated by Kathrine Talbot with Marina Warner. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988; London: Virago, 1988.
———. The Seventh Horse and Other Tales. Translated by Kathrine Talbot with Marina Warner. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988; London: Virago, 1989.
Carrington, Leonora, and Juan García Ponce. Leonora Carrington. Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1974.
Carrington, Leonora, and Annie Le Brun et al. Leonora Carrington. La mariée du vent. Paris: Gallimard, Maison de l’Amérique latine, 2008.
Carrington, Leonora, and Mexican Museum. Leonora Carrington—the Mexican Years: 1943–1985. San Francisco: Mexican Museum, 1991.
Chadwick, Whitney. Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement. London: Thames & Hudson, 1986.
Ernst, Jimmy. A Not-So-Still Life: A Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s/Marek, 1984.
Guggenheim, Peggy. Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict. New York: Universe Books, 1979.
Helland, Janice. Daughter of the Minotaur: Leonora Carrington and the Surrealist Image. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1984.
———. “Surrealism and Esoteric Feminism in the Art of Leonora Carrington.” Canadian Art Review 16, No. 1 (1989), 53–104.
James, Edward. Leonora Carrington: A Retrospective Exhibition. New York: Center for Inter-American Relations, 1975.
Kaplan, Janet A. Unexpected Journeys: The Art and Life of Remedios Varo. London: Virago, 1988.
Noël, Bernard. La Planète affolée: Surréalisme, dispersion et influences 1938–1941. Paris: Musée de Marseille, 1986.
Orenstein, Gloria Feman. “Hermeticism and Surrealism in the Visual Works of Leonora Carrington as a Model for Latin American Symbology.” Proceedings of the 10th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association. Edited by Anna Balakian. New York: New York University, 1985.
Poniatowska, Elena. Leonora. Translated by Amanda Hopkinson. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2014.
Rudenstine, Angelica Zander. The Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice. New York: Harry Abrams, 1985.
Suleiman, Susan Rubin. Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.
Walsh, Joanna. “‘I have no delusions. I am playing’—Leonora Carrington’s Madness and Art.” Verso (blog). Posted October 9, 2015 at www.versobooks.com/blogs/2275-i-have-no-delusions-i-am-playing-leonora-carrington-s-madness-andart and accessed February 10, 2017.
Warner, Marina. “Leonora Carrington: Brewster Gallery, New York.” Burlington Magazine 130 (October 1988), 796–97.
———. “The Spirit Bestiary of Leonora Carrington.” In Leonora Carrington: Paintings, Drawings and Sculptures, 1940–1990. Edited by Andrea Schlieker. London: Serpentine Gallery, 1991.
DOWN BELOW
Lee Miller, portrait of Leonora Carrington, Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, 1939. Photograph © 2017 by Lee Miller Archives, England.
MONDAY, 23 AUGUST 1943
Exactly three years ago, I was interned in Dr. Morales’s sanatorium in Santander, Spain, Dr. Pardo, of Madrid, and the British Consul having pronounced me incurably insane. Since I fortuitously met you, whom I consider the most clear-sighted of all, I began gathering a week ago the threads which might have led me across the initial border of Knowledge. I must live through that experience all over again, because, by doing so, I believe that I may be of use to you, just as I believe that you will be of help in my journey beyond that frontier by keeping me lucid and by enabling me to put on and to take off at will the mask which will be my shield against the hostility of Conformism.
Before taking up the actual facts of my experience, I want to say that the sentence passed on me by society at that particular time was probably, surely even, a god-send, for I was not aware of the importance of health, I mean of the absolute necessity of having a healthy body to avoid disaster in the liberation of the mind. More important yet, the necessity that others be with me that we may feed each other with our knowledge and thus constitute the Whole. I was not sufficiently conscious at the time of your philosophy to understand. The time had not come for me to understand. What I am going to endeavor to express here with the utmost fidelity was but an embryo of knowledge.
I begin therefore with the moment when Max was taken away to a concentration camp for the second time, under the escort of a gendarme who carried a rifle (May 1940). I was living in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche. I wept for several hours, down in the village; then I went up again to my house where, for twenty-four hours, I indulged in voluntary vomitings induced by drinking orange blossom water and interrupted by a short nap. I hoped that my sorrow would be diminished by these spasms, which tore at my stomach like earthquakes. I know now that this was but one of the aspects of those vomitings: I had realised the injustice of society, I wanted first of all to cleanse myself, then go beyond its brutal ineptitude. My stomach was the seat of that society, but also the place in which I was united with all the elements of the earth. It was the mirror of the earth, the reflection of which is just as real as the person reflected. That mirror—my stomach—had to be rid of the thick layers of filth (the accepted formulas) in order properly, clearly, and faithfully to reflect the earth; and when I say “the earth,” I mean of course all the earths, stars, suns in the sky and on the earth, as well as all the stars, suns, and earths of the microbes’ solar system.
For three weeks I ate very sparingly, carefully eschewing meat, and drank wine and alcohol, feeding on potatoes and salad, at the rate perhaps of two potatoes a day. My impression is that I slept pretty well. I worked at my vines, astonishing the peasants by my strength. Saint John’s Day was near at hand, the vines were beginning to blossom, they had to be sprayed often with sulphur. I also worked at my potatoes, and the more I sweated, the better I liked it, because this meant that I was getting purified. I took sunbaths, and my physical strength was such as I have never known before or afterwards.
Various events were taking place in the outside world: the collapse of Belgium, the entry of the Germans in France. All of this interested me very little and I had no fear whatsoever within me. The village was thronged with Belgians, and some soldiers who had entered my home accused me of being a spy and threatened to shoot me on the spot because someone had been looking for snails at night, with a lantern, near my house. Their threats impressed me very little indeed, for I knew that I was not destined to die.
After three solitary weeks, Catherine, an English-woman, a very old friend of mine, arrived, fleeing from Paris with Michel Lucas, a Hungarian. A week went by and I believe they noticed nothing abnormal in me. One day, however, Catherine, who had been for a long time under the care of psychoanalysts, persuaded me that my attitude betrayed an unconscious desire to get rid for the second time of my father: Max, whom I had to eliminate if I wanted to live. She begged me to cease punishing myself and to look for another lover. I think she was mistaken when she said I was torturing myself. I think that she interpreted me fragmentarily, which is worse than not to interpret at all. However, by doing so she restored me to sexual desire. I tried frantically to seduce two young men, but without success. They would have none of me. And I had to remain sadly chaste.
The Germans were approaching rapidly; Catherine frightened me and begged me to leave with her, saying that if I refused to do so, she too would remain. I accepted. I accepted above all because, in my evolution, Spain represented for me Discovery. I accepted because I expected to get a visa put in Max’s passport in Madrid. I still felt bound to Max. This document, which bore his image, became an entity, as if I was taking Max with me. I accepted, somewhat touched b
y Catherine’s arguments, which were distilling into me, hour after hour, a growing fear. For Catherine, the Germans meant rape. I was not afraid of that, I attached no importance to it. What caused panic to rise within me was the thought of robots, of thoughtless, fleshless beings.
Michel and I decided to go to Bourg-Saint-Andéol to secure a travelling permit. The gendarmes, totally indifferent and uninterested, kept on smoking cigarettes and refused to give us the bit of paper, barricading themselves behind phrases like “we can’t do anything about it.” We were unable to leave, yet I knew that we would leave the following day. We went to the notary, where I made over to the proprietor of the Motel des Touristes of Saint-Martin my house and all my goods. I returned home and spent the whole night carefully sorting the things I intended taking along with me. All of them got into a suitcase which bore, beneath my name, a small brass plate set into the leather, on which was written the word REVELATION.
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