Leonora Carrington (1916-2011)

We are sad to note that surrealist painter, sculptor, poet, and writer Leonora Carrington has died at the age of 94 in her longtime home of Mexico, as the Washington Post reports.

Once the lover of German artist Max Ernst, Carrington was also part of a famous wave of artistic and political emigres who arrived in Mexico in the 1930s and ‘40s. In the male-dominated realm of surrealism, she was a member of a rare trio of Mexico-based female surrealists along with Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo.

“She was the last great living surrealist,” said longtime friend and poet Homero Aridjis. “She was a living legend.”

Friend and promoter Dr. Isaac Masri said she died Wednesday of old age, after being hospitalized. “She had a great life, and a dignified death, as well, without suffering,” he said.

“She created mythical worlds in which magical beings and animals occupy the main stage, in which cobras merge with goats and blind crows become trees,” the National Arts Council wrote, adding, “These were some of the images that sprang from a mind obsessed with portraying a reality that transcends what can be seen.”

An obituary in The Telegraph today is more anecdotal, to say the least:

Their life was complicated—Ernst was still spending time with his wife—but Leonora plunged recklessly into Surrealist Paris life. At one smart party she arrived wearing only a sheet, which she dropped at an opportune moment; she sat at a restaurant table and covered her feet with mustard, and served cold tapioca dyed with squid ink to guests as caviar. Visitors to the rue Jacob might wake up in the morning to a breakfast of omelette full of their own hair which she had cut while they slept.

She got to know Picasso and Bunuel (“uncouth Spaniards”), Dali, Man Ray, Miro, Breton, Tanguy, Peret, Belmer, Arp and many others. With her wild, dark beauty she looked the perfect submissive “femme enfant”, but she rejected the notion of being anyone’s muse (“all that means is that you’re someone else’s object”) and was quick to snap if anyone took her for granted.

When Joan Miro gave her some money and told her to get him some cigarettes, she told him to “bloody well” get them himself. Dali won her approval by calling her “a most important woman artist”, and her work was shown at exhibitions along with the work of Meret Oppenheim, Remedios Varo, Eileen Agar and other women.

Carrington was also the author of short story collections, novels, and poetry. Cult publisher Exact Change published Carrington's The Hearing Trumpet in 2004. An excerpt is here.