Leonora Carrington’s Feminist, Surrealist Legacies

“She expired and the world seemed to shift on its axis.”1 Catriona McAra’s The Medium of Leonora Carrington: A Feminist Haunting in the Contemporary Arts opens at a point of closure—the death of an artist who would, after years of relative obscurity, affect the lives of many writers, artists, directors, and curators through her inspiring and extensive oeuvre.

Carrington grew up in England and spent her formative years in the inner circles of the surrealist movement. After the Second World War, she emigrated to Mexico before dying in 2011 at the age of 94. Encompassing the ways in which Carrington’s work has resonated with the world of the creative arts—anything from fashion to choreography, film making, puppet shows and performance—McAra describes this project as one of “feminist and curatorial” focus, operating at “the point of overlap between creativity and scholarly historiography.”2 The book (which is divided into six thematic chapters: Archaeology, Another maybe, Esoteric conceptualism, Hibernation, Menagerie and Edgework) critically explores Carrington’s painting, drawing and writing, and its continuing influence on art today.

Through essays and interviews, McAra highlights the way in which Carrington’s work has consciously become not only a “starting point, cameo or catalyst” but “a necessary blueprint” for figures such as Ali Smith, Lucy Skaer, Fernando A. Flores, China Miéville, Chloe Aridjis, and Heidi Sopinka in re-examining and re-evaluating their own practices. McAra makes the case for Carrington’s enduring legacy, which she argues provides “a productive site for feminist investigations” into anything from alchemy, female friendship, and ageing bodies, to “ecocritical concerns such as animal rights and climate change.”3 These very contemporary issues—in tandem with the rapidly growing interest in surrealist women and non-binary artists—has resulted in a wealth of new and exciting scholarship on these and other contemporary artists’ works.

Over the last decade, this has been evident in the publication of a number of books on the artist’s life, and her inclusion in major international exhibitions. In 2015, Tate Liverpool held the first solo show in the UK of Carrington’s work for over twenty years. In 2017, to coincide with the centennial of Carrington’s birth, new texts appeared on library shelves and gallery shops, as well as reprints of the artist’s own short stories and novellas. These included The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington (2017) by Joanna Moorhead, Leonora Carrington and the International Avant-Garde (2017) by Jonathan P. Eburne, and Catriona McAra, and The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (2017). In 2019, Gallery Wendi Norris held the exhibition Leonora Carrington: The Story of the Last Egg in New York, and in 2020, Carrington’s work was an integral part of Fantastic Women: Surreal Worlds from Meret Oppenheim to Frida Kahlo at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. This year, the exhibition Leonora Carrington: Revelación, organized by the MAPFRE Foundation, opened in Madrid to much acclaim.

Most relevant, perhaps, to the focus of The Medium of Leonora Carrington, was the opening of the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, in 2022. The exhibition took its title from Carrington’s book The Milk of Dreams, a selection of fairytale-like vignettes and illustrations, which the Biennale’s curator, Cecilia Alemani, described as forming “a magical world where life is constantly re-envisioned through the prism of the imagination.”4 The exhibition celebrated the other-worldly and the liminal, and captured the ways in which Carrington’s own artistic and intellectual endeavors—spiritual, political, social, and environmental—still hold relevance for contemporary artists. It is perhaps what Whitney Chadwick has described as Carrington’s “search for enlightenment, spiritual development, and for a uniquely female visionary language” that remains significant for many to this day, spanning across countries and throughout the decades.5

McAra’s research charts Carrington’s shift from cult figure to popular artist, eventually becoming a more mainstream cultural icon whose work regularly graces twitter feeds and Instagram grids. She details the experiences of artists and writers who have flocked to Carrington’s Mexico home, nestled away on Chihuahua Street, describing the way in which such pilgrimages to meet “a self-exiled, English avant-gardist in a faraway land” became a process of self-mythologization for the pilgrims themselves, a “project of fandom for those seeking so-called enlightenment and personal growth.”6

Carrington herself has been mythologized for decades, by scholars and artists alike. In 2015, a description on Tate Liverpool’s website reductively describes her as “[a]rguably more famous for her personal life than her art.”7 Certainly, as McAra notes “her progressive femininity and eccentric persona have often been presented in the scholarship as more mythical than her own pictures.”8 However, as McAra demonstrates, it is the demythologization of Carrington that is crucial to our understanding of her influence on art and culture today. Carrington’s magical and mercurial, transformative and ever-shifting painting and writing have more to offer than a glimpse into the—albeit complex—inner world of the female artist.

Regarding Carrington’s rise to popular appeal over the last decade, McAra stipulates that the artist’s feminist, surrealist approach to storytelling and myth-making has drawn more recent respondents to her work. However, the genre does not define her, nor does it restrain her artistic investigations; “surrealism was important, yes, but it was only ever the beginning of her creative adventure.”9 Carrington’s work stretches forwards, upwards, and outwards, rooted in surrealist imagery but influenced by magic realism, ecofeminism, ancient myth, and those archetypes of the “Wild Woman” (which were so gracefully explored by Jungian analyst Clarissa Pinkola Estés in her seminal book Women Who Run with the Wolves).

Whilst contemporary artists are deeply influenced by the culture of Carrington, Carrington was in turn influenced by the culture of everywhere and everything, digging deep into what McAra describes as the “archaeology” of her imagination. She quotes Jonathan Eburne’s description of what he refers to as Carrington’s “virtual collecting habits”—effectively the ability to lift images, cultural references, the tangible and intangible, and reimagine their purpose or meaning in a world of her own making.10 In 2020, McAra referred to Carrington as a “magpie,” conjuring an image of that superstition-inducing-avian-omen, one that carefully picks glittering pieces of desiccated foil and horses’ hairs from forest paths and the upturned soil of back gardens.11

The importance of a “feminist intertextuality” is drawn on often in this text, referring to the work of Susan Rubin Suleiman (and within surrealist scholarship, Whitney Chadwick, Natalya Lusty, and Anna Watz), whose research on the embedding, appropriation or extraction of feminist narratives, literature, and imagery is crucial to the work of contemporary female and non-binary artists. McAra argues that it is Carrington’s ability to represent a new kind of art history, one removed from the male domination of the past, that allows contemporary artists to be “enabled through her as an epistemological force, and as an embodiment of intellectual history.”12 This is a new “intellectual history.” A relatable, complex, and nuanced one. One with a distinctly feminine voice, that invites response as much as it demands attention.

Whilst the text celebrates Carrington’s influence on the contemporary arts, McAra still poses the question: does repetition and mimicry in contemporary response have the potential to obscure the meaning of Carrington’s work, or to undermine its importance? This reader would argue that Carrington’s work is so singular, and so rooted to a certain time, place, and cultural moment, so much an outpouring of a uniquely obscure and brilliant imagination, that it would be difficult to remove its message entirely—one that speaks to what McAra calls the “feminist marvellous.” An exercise in the liminal and transfusive, Carrington’s writing and painting are open to many interpretations, which serve to build a new histography as diverse as it is relevant.

The Medium of Leonora Carrington: A Feminist Haunting in the Contemporary Arts provides a new way of understanding Carrington’s work—one that is removed from biographical or traditional art-historical approaches, and examines the importance of a strong female intellect and aesthetic as it emerges from a phallocentric past. As Chloe Aridjis declares in Female Human Animal (2018), Carrington “didn’t accept the world she was given as a woman, she didn’t accept the world as it superficially appeared.”13 It demands we look at art and creativity through fresh eyes, and reject those male-dominated, traditional ways of producing, understanding, and experiencing visual culture—much like Carrington herself. McAra’s text is the largest and most comprehensive on this subject to date, and indispensable for those researching surrealist and feminist art—both modern and contemporary.

Tor Scott is a Collection & Research Assistant at the National Galleries of Scotland. She is undertaking an AHRC-funded doctorate at the University of Edinburgh, focusing on the surrealist artist Edith Rimmington. Working in museums and galleries for almost a decade, Tor is passionate about intangible and esoteric cultural heritage, folklore, spiritualist and surrealist art, contemporary feminist art and art of the Celtic Revival. Her current research focuses on violence, ecology, and spiritualism, and she has lectured and published on British Surrealism.