Messenger to the Deep

Today (June 3) was a day I will never forget. At her home in Mexico City I visited Leonora Carrington (b. 1917), a living legend of surrealism and my favourite 20th-century painter. As if in a dream, I found myself sitting in her kitchen for hours, drinking many cups of black tea without sugar (that´s how she likes it), and marveling that the kind 91-year-old lady across the table was the very same one who had once been Max Ernst´s lover and embodied (much against her liking) the surrealists´ very ideal of the "femme-enfant".
Leonora Carrington was born to wealthy parents in England but proved a born rebel and nonconformist from her early years on. Painting was all she wanted, and when one day she came across a reproduction of Max Ernst´s Deux enfants menaces par un rossignol, this sealed her destiny: it touched her like a lightning-bolt, with a sensation that felt like a burning in her body. Soon after, Ernst himself came to England and Leonora (then nineteen years old) had an opportunity to meet the famous artist. The two fell in love instantly, and ran off to France together, where the brilliant and beautiful Leonora became a kind of muse to the surrealist movement. There are many delightful stories about her indomitable spirit and unconventional behaviour (for example, invited to a constume party, Leonora once decided to impersonate Eve). For an idyllic year or so, Ernst and Carrington lived and worked together in a village in Southern France, but this ended in 1939, when Ernst was arrested because of his German ancestry. Leonora herself had to flee to Spain, where the sorrow and stress proved too much for her: in her Down Below, she describes in chilling detail what happens when one descends into a severe psychosis, and how she spent a period in a Spanish sanatorium for the incurably insane. But she did find her way back to sanity, and eventually emigrated to Mexico, where she married and had children, while continuing to produce a stream of incredibly impressive paintings (for a good sample, see here) that has not fallen dry up to the present day: high up in her atelier, reached by a steep and gothic-looking circular staircase attached to the outside wall, she showed me two canvases on which she is working right now.
Very unfairly, many art historians still seem to perceive Leonora Carrington primarily as "the lover of", instead of recognizing her as an important artist in her own right, and she is not very well known to the broader public. But I consider her one of the greatest painters of the 20th century, and deeply admire her for her free and nonconformist spirit. Moreover, she is the real thing: an authentic Twilight Traveler whose work is all about exploring boundaries. So you can imagine I was somewhat nervous about meeting her in the flesh. I had been told that it was useless to try and make an appointment, and my best bet was just to turn up and hope to be lucky. This proved to be good advice. Since I could not find a doorbell I called her with my cell phone, and she right away agreed to a meeting later the same afternoon. When I arrived, she stood in front of her door talking with workers who (as I found out later) had been assisting her with a sculpture. I had been told that she could be difficult at times, but she flashed a big smile at me and I knew right away that we would be alright. And so we were.
We talked about everything you can imagine, and more: painting and sculpture, hermeticism and alchemy (a major influence on her work), her years with the surrealists and the other great visual artists of her time (but as noted by Marina Warner in an essay on Carrington, she is not given to reminiscing, and does not go into details), her deep horror of Hitler and Nazism (a theme to which she returned again and again), her even deeper love of animals (her favourites are cats, horses, elephants and, interestingly, hyenas), the experience of growing very old and losing one´s memory (but otherwise her mind remains sharp as before), the mystery of death (as to whether there is anything after death, she professes to be agnostic: we simply do not know), and more generally, the mystery of existence itself. As could be expected, given the nature of her work, she struck me as wholly unsentimental: what ultimately matters most in life, she stated with great emphasis at one point in the conversation, is honesty to oneself and others.
What I had already learned from the literature about Leonora Carrington was confirmed in my conversation with her: one will not learn anything from her about the deeper motifs of her work or what its arcane symbolism and hermetic references mean to her. She insists that she does not consciously plan or design her paintings, and there are no hidden messages for the initiated: "it just happens to me", she says, and she has no idea where the content comes from. This is true even of the intriguing titles that she gives to some of her paintings. One of them (a vertical triptych that evokes shamanic associations) is called "Took my way down, like a messenger, to the deep", but here too, Leonora Carrington will not tell you why she painted it or where that title came from. Above the door of her house there used to be a text (I could not find it anymore) put there by an artist friend: "This is the house of the sphinx". It is indeed. But what a lovely sphinx, and what a privilege to have met her!