Paris: 1937-1938

Leonora Carrington, Down Below, 1940 Private collection. Courtesy Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco.

Editor’s Note: The following excerpt is from Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington out now from Princeton University Press. The author, Joanna Moorhead, chronicles her relationship with Carrington, her cousin This chapter is from Paris: 1937-1938.

‘I moved to Paris.’ This was Leonora’s typically understated recollection, many years later, of her relocation across the Channel in the autumn of 1937. She did indeed move to Paris, but in doing so she was effectively saying a final goodbye to her family, her country and many of her friends, not to mention a life of immense privilege.

Meeting Max [Ernst] had opened a door into a new world; their summer in Cornwall had allowed her to experience that world; and now, for the first time, she had a focus. Not for her the country house parties and hunt balls of the Lancashire gentry, nor the dizzy, see-and-be-seen London society landscape. What Leonora had longed for was a way of living that felt congruent to her, a way of being where she could learn what she needed to know, and where she would have the psychological and physical space to practise the art that was in her soul.

Some commentators and art historians have described Leonora’s flight as an elopement, but that seems to imply she was leaving for love, and there was a lot more in the mix. Although she did love Max—who, as a father figure, could hardly have been more different from her actual father, making him all the more appealing–she also loved the idea of what life with him could offer. ‘I always did my running away alone,’ she told me; but running away alone is much easier when you are heading towards someone, or something.

Max left for France soon after their return to London from Cornwall. Before Leonora could follow, there was a conversation she needed to have with her parents. She went to see them to tell them she was leaving, that she was going to live in Paris to become an artist. Her father observed that artists lived in garrets, and she would not be happy in a garret. Leonora told him she was going anyway. Harold replied that in that case, she need not return. He was speaking in anger, in the heat of the moment, but sometimes angry words shape the future.

Although Leonora knew Paris well, she was about to experience it in a completely new way. She and Max rented an apartment on the Rue Jacob, a short walk from the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where the surrealists gathered. Max had lived in the area since leaving his native Cologne in the early 1920s, when André Breton and the other Paris surrealists were working on their first manifesto, published in 1924. He was at the heart of a movement that now reads like a roll call of the great men of 20th-century art. There was Pablo Picasso—‘He looked like a Spanish shopkeeper,’ Leonora remembered—and also, ‘he thought all women were in love with him’. When I asked her whether she had been in love with him, she said absolutely not–but she had liked his art. There was Salvador Dalí, who she told me ‘certainly wasn’t extraordinary then – he looked like everyone else. It was only when he went to America that he started looking extraordinary.’ Dalí liked Leonora, calling her ‘a most important woman artist’. Joan Miró was another regular at their gatherings. ‘He gave me some money one day and told me to get him some cigarettes. I gave it back and said if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself,’ she recalled. ‘I wasn’t daunted by any of them.’

This was a movement that, for all its revolutionary talk, was dominated by a patriarchal viewpoint, and by men—most of them a great deal older than Leonora, who was still just twenty. Did she, I asked, feel nurtured by the established members of the group? ‘No, not really. They were doing their own thing. With Max I did a bit, yes. But he was doing his own thing as well. They weren’t that interested in me.’ There were a few, some women on the scene, and their presence was critical. Meret Oppenheim, who had created her Object (Breakfast in Fur) the previous year, was an important influence. The Argentine-Italian Leonor Fini, an ex-lover of Max’s who was ten years older than Leonora, would be another significant figure in her life over the next few years. Whitney Chadwick writes that after the end of Leonor and Max’s affair the two ‘had settled into a close and affectionate friendship’ and when Leonora arrived in Paris, this expanded to include her. She was dazzled by the older woman’s intelligence and independence, and Leonor made clear her respect for Leonora, whom she regarded as not truly surrealist but certainly a revolutionary. Chadwick believes Leonora had never met a woman as independent, confident and passionate as Leonor, and that Leonor saw something of herself in her young friend’s freshness and beauty—as well as in the black sense of humour that led Breton to describe Leonora as ‘superb in her refusals, with a boundless, human authenticity’.

Leonora Carrington at home in Mexico, 2000. Photo Daniel Aguilar/Reuters/Alamy Stock Photo

It was around this time that Leonora first met the American collector Peggy Guggenheim, who was in Paris trawling for new works. This search took her one day to visit Max, who, she noted, was ‘still very good looking in spite of his age’. At his feet ‘sat Leonora Carrington, his lady love. I had seen them around Paris and thought how intriguing they appeared together. She was so much younger than Ernst: they looked exactly like Nell and her grandfather in The Old Curiosity Shop.’

Peggy wanted to buy a painting by Max, but the one she liked belonged to Leonora and was not for sale. However, she didn’t leave empty-handed—another work, Leonora’s The Horses of Lord Candlestick, took her fancy. This exchange was notable for both buyer and seller: it was the first painting Leonora ever sold, and the first by a female artist ever purchased by Peggy (who would include Leonora in one of the first all-women shows at her New York gallery, Guggenheim Jeune, a few years later). Peggy wrote that the work ‘portrayed four horses of four different colours in a tree’; Leonora was ‘not very well known but very good and full of imagination in the best Surrealist manner and always painted animals and birds’.

Its title, like The Meal of Lord Candlestick (both 1938, uses Leonora’s nickname for her family. The latter is a shocking composition featuring an orgiastic feast in which a human baby (is he the Christ child, whose real body Catholics believe is being consumed at mass?) is offered as a dish alongside a roasted bird. The diners are five bourgeois dames who seem to be gesturing and chatting among themselves as though at a perfectly normal dinner party. This is Leonora at her most surreal, and its themes aim at the heart of her family. The genteel ladies are cannibals, and their dark dresses contrast with the colourful array of bizarre foodstuffs on offer. Food would continue to be a theme in Leonora’s paintings throughout her career.

But another ongoing theme was horses, and the painting Peggy bought heralded Leonora’s identification with these animals, which she had drawn obsessively from a young age and saw as her alter ego. As Whitney Chadwick notes, ‘The horse…became for her a metaphor for transcendent vision and a symbolic image of the sexual union which the surrealists believed would resolve the polarities of male and female into an androgynous creative whole.’ Chadwick believes Leonora was refocusing the lens: while male surrealists had seen women as ‘the mediating link between men and the Marvellous’, here she explored the powerful role of nature in the female artist’s creativity.

…

From the beginning, Leonora’s strongest motivation had been a longing to communicate her own interior reality–her experience of the different worlds jostling for space within her psyche—to something outside of herself. And apart from that desire to communicate, the experiences themselves demanded detachment from her in some way. That is what she meant when she told me that for her, art was not a choice; it was a need, which manifested itself not only in painting, drawing and works of visual art but in her writing. From childhood, as her adolescent notebooks show, Leonora had been using words as well as images to explore the world inside herself. Now, in Paris, she became for the first time a published author, with her short story ‘The House of Fear’.

Leonora Carrington, The Bird Men of Burnley, 1970 Oil on canvas, 44.5 × 66 (171⁄2 × 26). Private collection. Courtesy Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco

‘The House of Fear’ was published in 1938 with a preface by Max – a preface that exposes the deeply patronizing attitude of this established artist, in his late forties, towards his partner, an emerging artist barely into her twenties. The story is Leonora’s but the first character Max introduces is himself (‘behold this man…he stands proudly upright’). The man has no fear; he has left the house of fear behind. With him is a woman, ‘none other than the Bride of the Wind’, who is acknowledged by the horses that stand in the windows of all the houses in the street along which they are walking. She ‘has read nothing, but drunk everything’. She cannot read, and yet she has written ‘The House of Fear’, ‘truthful and pure’.

The debt Leonora the artist owes to Max Ernst has been much discussed, especially since the 1980s, when the women of surrealism were brought to centre stage by Chadwick and other feminist art historians. Some have expressed discomfort about his role in Leonora’s development, but she herself was quite open about it. She often acknowledged that their relationship had opened up her path to a new future. But she also made it very clear that when it came to her work, she had found everything she wrote and painted within herself: ‘It is obvious that I did not write my books under the influence of Max. It is obvious, I expressed in them my own way of thinking. I do not understand why people want to think that I was a little girl under Ernst’s spell. It is true, I learned much from him, I liberated myself and I became free, but I painted and wrote since I was five years old, surely horrible things, but finally I was born with my vocation and my works were only mine.’

As in all truly creative relationships, the connection between Leonora and Max was a two-way street. There is plenty of evidence of her influence on his work as well as vice versa, and this dynamic would become increasingly evident as their affair played out.

For now, though, they were about to make a move. Paris was fascinating in so many ways, but it had its problems. First and foremost, the presence in the city of Marie-Berthe, which wasn’t a happy arrangement given that her husband and his new lover were living together openly, down the road. Then there were the issues between Max and the surrealists. Jimmy Ernst recalled that his father ‘was tired, he told, that minor squabbles within the group were constantly being blown up into major confrontations with their conscience, André Breton’. There was also disagreement over Russia’s leadership, with Paul Éluard far less enthusiastic about Trotsky than was Breton. ‘All I want to do,’ Max told Jimmy, ‘is to leave Paris for a long time and live with Leonora in the Ardèche…and to love her…if only the world will allow it.’

For a while, it would. The next–and most fulfilling–chapter of the relationship between Leonora and Max was about to begin.

To read more from Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington click here.