Mythmaking and Leonora Carrington, an Exquisite Corpse

As a side-earner, the writer and artist Leonora Carrington painted fakes. At least, that’s what she once stated in an interview, daring her admirers to doubt her artistic authenticity. To inquire further, I contacted Carrington’s son Gabriel, who has helped to answer various questions regarding the artist’s estate. In this case, I received a single line reply:

This is not true.

It’s a believable untruth–that Carrington may have lied about creating fakes is wholly in keeping with her self-made mythology. Her story is a patchwork of apocrypha and implausible facts: she was the English debutante who outdid the Surrealists, the woman who made caviar from squid ink and tapioca, the asylum escapee who became one of Mexico’s most prominent female artists. Her life would permit the cliché “stranger than fiction” if we didn’t have her own writing to compare it to. The novellas and short stories are as fantastical as her paintings, populated by stooping crones, carnivorous spirits and human-animal hybrids; in her memoir Down Below, dream and reality intertwine to form an account of her brutal treatment in a Spanish psychiatric hospital during the Second World War. These texts have now been republished to mark the centenary of her birth: Down Below has been brought back into print, and her short stories are now available for the first time as a complete collection.

Leonora Carrington died in 2011 at the age of 94; in her absence, the storytellers of her centenary are the women who knew her, including the feminist mythographer Marina Warner, the novelist Chloe Aridjis and Carrington’s cousin and biographer Joanna Moorhead. For these women she is always Leonora, never cold “Carrington”, and there’s element of competition to their anecdotes. Who was trusted to serve the tea? The tequila? Who accompanied her shopping? Varying degrees of intimacy are listed in an ongoing game of one-upmanship. Not to be outdone, I have also decided to be on first name terms with Leonora, and I watch from the sidelines as my compatriots go about their crusade: together they defend Leonora’s posthumous reputation, arguing that her artistic practice extended far beyond her association with the European Surrealists.

It’s an argument worth making. In the past, Leonora’s artistic autonomy has been overshadowed by her youthful relationship with the painter Max Ernst (26 years her senior), who painted and presented her as the “bride of the wind”, his spirited femme-enfant. For the founder of the Surrealists André Breton, she was the madwoman muse, the femme-sorcière, his Nadja incarnate. These men are the villains of the story: for them, Leonora served as a source of vitality and the living incarnation of...