Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington (April 6, 1917 – May 25, 2011) was an English-born Mexican Surrealist artist and writer known for her haunting, autobiographical, and somewhat inscrutable paintings that incorporate images of sorcery, metamorphosis, alchemy, and the occult.

Born into a wealthy Lancashire family, she was a rebel from the start — expelled from two convent schools before being sent to study art in Florence, where she was surrounded by some of the world's great museums. In 1937 she met the German Surrealist Max Ernst at a party in London, and the two became lovers and creative collaborators, living together in southern France until World War II tore their world apart. After Ernst was arrested by the Nazis, Carrington suffered a breakdown and was institutionalized in Spain — an experience that left a deep mark on her work and her writing.

She eventually made her way to Mexico City, where she would spend most of the rest of her life. There she connected with a vibrant community of European artists in exile, forging an especially close friendship and working relationship with Spanish Surrealist Remedios Varo. Mexico gave her work a new depth: to her existing influences — Celtic folklore, Renaissance painting, medieval alchemy, and Jungian psychology — she added Central American folk art and the mythologies of her adopted country.

Her paintings depict narrative scenes inhabited by mysterious figures and spirits participating in curious rituals — horses, hyenas, witches, and hybrid creatures populate dreamlike interiors and otherworldly landscapes. Themes of metamorphosis, magic, and whimsy run throughout her work, giving it an enduring, universal appeal even as the symbolism remained deeply personal.

Beyond painting, she was a novelist, sculptor, and activist. She was a founding member of the Women's Liberation Movement in Mexico in the 1970s, and famously declared: "I didn't have time to be anyone's muse — I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist."

She died in May 2011 at the age of 94 in Mexico City, one of the last living links to the original Surrealist movement. Her legacy has only grown since — in May 2024, her painting Les Distractions de Dagobert sold for $28.5 million at Sotheby's, a record for a British-born female artist. Today her works are held in the collections of MoMA, the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, and the Tate in London, among others.