Milan
Leonora Carrington’s grandmother is making tortillas in Milan. Or rather, in one of Palazzo Reale’s dimly lighted galleries, “Grandmother Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen” (1975) has been installed like a small, glowing altarpiece: A fiery red interior crowded with mysterious, hooded figures grinding corn, stirring pots and chopping vegetables is presided over by a colossal white goose and a gazelle in a priest-like robe holding a broom. It is a vision of the domestic sphere as temple, a place where women wield power through recipes and spells.
The scene recalls the judgment of Edward James, the eccentric Englishman and great patron of the Surrealist movement: “The paintings of Leonora Carrington are not merely painted. They are brewed. They sometimes seem to have materialized in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight.”
That canvas hangs in the final gallery of “Leonora Carrington,” the artist’s first full retrospective in Italy. It brings together more than 60 works—mostly paintings, but also documents, furniture and sculptures—from collections throughout Europe and the Americas. The Dallas Museum of Art and the Art Institute of Chicago are lenders to the show. But most of the works—including many of Carrington’s most startling and accomplished paintings—are drawn from private collections, the result of the Anglo-Mexican Surrealist’s traditional exclusion from museums and the mainstream narrative of 20th-century art.
Curators Tere Arcq and Carlos Martín set out to remedy this in a quietly luminous exhibition that unfolds over six labyrinthine galleries, whose low lighting and muted wall colors allow Carrington’s incandescent works to both breathe and vibrate.
Born in 1917 to a conservative Catholic family in Lancashire, England, Carrington rebelled early, was sent to Florence to study art, and later encountered Surrealism in Paris. In 1937 she met Max Ernst. Her brief but intense relationship with the much older German painter produced a shared “total work of art” in their richly decorated home in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, in the south of France. (In the show, Carrington’s distinctive human-animal hybrids stare out from the wood panels of a cupboard salvaged from that short-lived artistic and romantic idyll.) War, abuse and mental collapse followed. She was raped by Spanish soldiers, confined in an asylum in Santander, Spain; and then fled to Mexico City, where she lived, on and off, until her death in 2011.
Over the course of her long and peripatetic life, Carrington never stopped creating, producing hundreds—possibly thousands—of paintings. Despite its compact presentation, the Palazzo Reale show gives a surprisingly full account of the artist’s aesthetic preoccupations and her creative development. And while her work is animated by a feverish restlessness, it’s remarkable how consistent and inimitable her artistry remained over three quarters of a century. One of her earliest works in the show is “Sisters of the Moon” (1932-33), a series in watercolor, graphite and ink on paper, in which women with elongated limbs and inscrutable faces preside over lunar landscapes. Already, at age 15, we find her constructing a female cosmology that draws on both Renaissance painting and the Celtic fairy tales she grew up with.
A dozen years later, the fecundity of her imagination, wedded to Surrealism, produces works of astounding technical deftness, such as “Las Tentaciones de San Antonio” (“The Temptations of St. Anthony,” 1945), which turns Boschian torments on their head by restaging them as life-giving sources of feminine energy. Enchanted creatures cavort in a meticulously rendered blue- and white-hued landscape of sky, mountains and water that is dominated by the monumental figure of the ascetic saint, whose three bearded heads are encased in the eggshell-like hood of a tattered robe. Her impossible, dreamlike vistas put a trippy, esoteric spin on familiar devotional motifs while entering into a conversation with the history of art.
Because her oeuvre is both so vivid and confoundingly strange, the interpretive frame proposed by the curators often feels frustratingly timid. The wall texts present her paintings as reflections or symptoms of biographical episodes. Yet her art clearly does more than just illustrate those experiences, which the curators repeatedly suggest hold the key to unlocking the works’ mystery. This risks presenting Carrington as an inspirational heroine and mere illustrator rather than the unsettling and potent artist she was.
Luckily the works themselves keep slipping this interpretive leash. Moving from the cool, acidic greens of the early European paintings to the lush ochres and reds of the Mexican canvases, from moonlit stables to ecstatic kitchens, we journey deeper into Carrington’s vibrant universe of dreams and metamorphoses. “If I am my thoughts, then I could be anything from chicken soup to a pair of scissors, a crocodile, a corpse, a leopard or a pint of beer,” she wrote in the 1970 essay “What Is a Woman?”
The Palazzo Reale show, which will travel to the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris next year, comes on the heels of Carrington exhibitions in Madrid, Copenhagen, Dublin, Mexico City, and Liverpool and Sussex in England. Carrington’s growing reputation as a singularly visionary painter neatly repudiates the earlier view of her as a figure on the periphery of the Surrealist movement, best known for her relationship to Ernst, some of whose works she helped inspire. Nearly 15 years after her death, it seems that the art world is finally ready to regard Carrington as she saw herself. “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse,” she once said. “I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”
