Christy Edwall explores the Surrealist legacy of Leonora Carrington
The first time I went to Farleys Farmhouse, I wore a page of my PhD as an Elizabethan ruff. What else do you do with old work? Plus I’d been obsessed with ruffs throughout the pandemic – there was nothing like lute music to make the darkness of the second lockdown feel atmospheric.
At Farleys annual Surrealist Picnic, however, the popes and fried-egg dresses showed my ruff and red kimono as embarrassingly tame. In the gardens, my partner and I ran into a raven polishing his beak with a toothbrush. A boy dressed as Magritte’s Son of Man played with his apple and bowler in the bushes. As we drank Champagne in the sculpture garden, we tried to ignore the two silent figures sitting solemnly behind us in diving suits with lobster baskets over their heads. When the time came for the host, Antony Penrose, to welcome us, he was drowned out by the breeze and the sound of traffic. His silent gestures, followed by the antics of a klezmer band, fitted the general vibes.
Bought in 1949 by Penrose’s parents, the photographer Lee Miller and painter/collector Roland Penrose, Farleys is set in the small village of Muddles Green, south of Chiddingly. The farmhouse is surrounded by ripe East Sussex countryside and is best reached by car. For those with tickets, its gardens are intimate and hospitable, with poplars at the perimeter.
For 75 years, Farleys has been the centre for Surrealism in Sussex, offering a counterweight to the Bloomsbury set around Firle and Lewes. Like Charleston, it has played host to a number of artists over the years (Breton, Picasso, Man Ray, Joan Miró, Dorothy Tanning, John Craxton); and, like Charleston, it has made space for experiments in living, and the vexing intersection of art, love, and domesticity.
Female Surrealists have long needed to negotiate their participation in the movement. Although the works of female artists were displayed alongside those of their male counterparts – the International Surrealist Exhibition at London’s New Burlington Galleries in 1936 featured work by Eileen Agar, Jacqueline Lamba Breton, Leonor Fini, Dora Maar, and Méret Oppenheim – they tended to be valued for their youth, precocity, and beauty. When Whitney Chadwick told an aging Roland Penrose that she was writing about female Surrealists, he replied, ‘They weren’t artists … Of course the women were important … but it was because they were our muses’.
A photograph taken by Penrose in 1937 confirms this perspective. In the image, four women – Lee Miller, the artist Leonora Carrington, the dancer Adrienne Fidelin, and the performer Nusch Éluard – pose with teacups in hand, apparently asleep. This ‘carefully staged scene’, as Susan L Aberth puts it, shows four sleeping beauties, four grown Alices in Wonderland. Although Surrealism valued the powers of the subconscious, this image seems less interested in elevating the artist’s dreamworld, than in framing a group of attractive women for the male gaze.
Miller’s own photographs of Carrington and her lover, Max Ernst, in Cornwall and at their home in St Martin d’Ardèche in the south of France, are more playfully and collaboratively sensuous. If it’s Carrington’s youthful body which tends to be exposed – in one image, her breasts covered protectively (proprietarily?) by Ernst’s hands – elsewhere Ernst nestles his head into her neck as she looks at the camera lens. Her expression is hard to read: proud, satisfied, a little weary.
Neither Joanna Moorhead’s biography nor Aberth’s monograph mention Leonora Carrington’s visit to Farleys in 1960, over 20 years after the trips to Cornwall and the south of France, and long after Carrington’s and Ernst’s relationship had dissolved.
Why not? Is it because her returns threaten to undercut the dominant narrative of Carrington’s life as one of protest and escape – an imaginative life carved out in response to repeated attempts to tame it?
Admittedly, Carrington’s relationship with England was strained. The daughter of a wealthy, industrial Lancashire family, educated at (or expelled from) boarding schools and convents, and brought out as a debutante, Carrington chafed against the restrictions of the society into which she was born. Her escape to France with the much older and more established Ernst horrified her parents, as did her traumatic confinement in a mental asylum in Spain, described in her account, Down Below (1944, 1983). When her father tried to transport her from Lisbon to South Africa for further treatment, Carrington slipped the net, threw in her lot with a Mexican diplomat, and later moved to Mexico City, where she spent much of the rest of her life and died in 2011.
Her painting Green Tea (La Dame Ovale, 1942) offers a suggestive reading of her ambivalence towards her origins. Set against a vivid, pastoral landscape of English hills and valleys, a sleeping woman (another one!) is swaddled upright in cow-coloured fabric. In the right foreground, a horse – often, in Carrington’s work, a symbol for the artist herself – is tied tightly to an idealised, medieval-ish tree on a short-collared leash. As with Penrose’s photograph of the four women, it’s the serenity of Surrealism that disturbs, not the chaos. Seething below the turf, bats, black birds, and cocooned figures suggest an underworld which either lurks beneath the apparent quietude, or promises the existence of a freer, weirder, liminal life.
Whatever her misgivings about returning to England, Carrington’s name appears in Farleys’ octavo guest book just before Christmas, 1960. The inscription reads, ‘O cortejo/ o cortigo/ [‘In homage to the farmhouse’] Leonora/ 17-21 December 1960’. Her sons Gabriel and Pablo signed the guest book, too, adding ‘TOENAILS’, in a mischievously Surrealist flourish.
The archives at Farleys hold several works by Carrington: in particular, seven drawings and a lithograph from her 1974 series, Mixografia. When I visited at the end of July, it was a busy time in the archives. The cataloguer, Tom, had his hands full; work continued to be discovered. And where would it go? You could hardly move without knocking over a case. On a rail along the back of the air-conditioned room – a relief given the extraordinary heat outside withering the poppies – Lee Miller’s clothes hung in white sacks. They looked like body bags, and were labelled, with tantalising terseness, ‘Military Costume’, ‘Romanian Coat’, ‘Pink and White Tea Dress’.
Given an hour to look at work by Carrington and Agar, I was invited to take notes but not photographs, which are protected by the estate. As it turns out, trying to capture Surrealist images in words is as bizarre and entertaining a game as Exquisite Corpse. One eye on the clock, I tried to catch Carrington’s drawing of a cow with full udders, the knobbed bosses along the spine of its back, the mystical symbols tattooed on its chest and haunches, and horns like cactuses. (Its title: Cactus Cow.) The question of whether or not I liked the image was secondary to getting it down: I could think about liking later.
I did like, immediately, the lithograph showing a ferocious bird-machine with serrated beak, mailed claws, and an aerial on its head. Made up of cross-hatching lines, with tail-feathers like the lines of a musical stave, the Steel Bird is caught midstride. A woeful human face (mask?) appears behind a cage (or harp?) at its breast, while a fretted pin sticks out of his belly, like a stiletto, or a wind-up key, from which hangs a chain.
As soon as one tries to describe a surreal image, one runs into difficulty. As Carrington wrote in her novel, The Hearing Trumpet, ‘It was all so very strange that I for once doubted the accuracy of my observation’. When I asked Tom whether there was a working vocabulary among art historians to make sense of these images, he demurred. There are so many kinds of describing, he said, from the most basic summary, designed to be flagged up by a search engine – e.g. lithograph, mechanical bird – to the language used to describe works of art for the visually impaired. Tom drew my attention to the space around the Steel Bird, the luxury of white paper, which makes the bird look alienated, even more of a lonely monster.
Even before the description, how ought one to look at a work by Carrington? Do you take it in all at once? Or break it into fragments? (Google Carrington’s ‘Stag at Mourn’ and you’ll see what I mean.) Confronted with her drawing, Cocodrilos (Magic Carpet), one’s eye is divided between the woman with streaming hair on a flying carpet, her griffin companion, the three-pointed Leviathan jaws poke out of the ice, waiting for her to fall, and the nearby vulture, pecking at a brain pan (or cracked eggshell?). The image is half-Blake, half-Edward Lear, all Carrington, whose instincts are productively maximalist.
The lithographs from Mixografia are also on show at Newlands House Gallery in Petworth in their show, Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary (on until October 26). Avoiding the oil paintings that have made Carrington famous – and the highest-selling British female artist to date – the exhibition explores the sheer variety of her work in different mediums, including drawings, watercolours, ephemera, sculptures, tapestries, jewellery, and masks.
I was particularly drawn to a coloured lithograph of her earlier painting, And Then we Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur. In the painting, two cloaked boys look across a table at the white daughter of the minotaur. Sitting under a stone canopy, beneath a nocturnal roof of silvery clouds, the redcloaked daughter of the minotaur looks out at the viewer. Like Carrington in Miller’s photograph, her expression is hard to read: apprehensive, alarmed, self-conscious. Meanwhile, standing at the head of the table, a starched, flower-faced figure rolls glowing crystal balls across the slanting table, like a fantastical croupier.
When Carrington painted the original, in 1953, the cloaked boys would have been roughly the same age as her own sons, Pablo and Gabriel. As with all of Carrington’s images, questions multiply the longer you look. Is it – as Elba Rodriguez says – an interrupted fortune-telling? What might it suggest about motherhood? Is the viewer left to read the painting the way you might read a spread of tarot cards? (‘The daughter of the minotaur is the artist/mother: halfhuman, used to labyrinths, half-tame, reclusive, sensitive to invasion…’).
‘You’re trying to intellectualise it desperately,’ Carrington might say in response, as she told her cousin Joanna Moorhead in a filmed interview from 2009. ‘And you’re wasting your time. To make into something, a little mini logic.’ Carrington herself refused to explain her work, believing the images ought to speak for themselves.
The daughter of the minotaur reappears in a bronze sculpture from 2010, the year before the artist’s death. Here, her neck is longer and thinner, more giraffe than ox, and her tapered human hands are just a little more outstretched, in apprehension or in prophecy, braced as if to keep her cloak from slipping.
Elsewhere, the Newlands House Gallery exhibition confirms that Carrington’s heads often draw out her sharpest imaginative powers. Take the sharp spiked aureole of her sculpture Woman with Fox (Mujer con Zorro), or the webbed fan of the beaked Palmist. (Together with her friend, the Spanish painter Remedios Varo, Carrington seems to have absorbed all the headdresses and wimples of the history of the Church. They are reborn across the length of her work with fantastic inventiveness.)
But go to Newlands House for the masks alone. Oxidised in a ghostly, powdery blue, the bronze masks are ribbed like the husks of walnuts. The masks are both arboreal and planetary, a mixture of the mask of Agamemnon and Tolkien’s Ents: guardians of the underworld with eye holes puckering like mouths, spiny noses, and claws for teeth. As with much of Carrington’s work, the sense of the sacred lingers: one is left somewhere between apprehension and mystery, benevolence and menace.
Before I left Farleys, Tom took me to see the painting by Carrington which hangs in the farmhouse. She finished The Night of the 8th 15 years after the drawings from Mixografia; by 1987, Lee Miller had been dead for over a decade, and Carrington herself was 70.
In bright chalky streaks against a black background, the painting shows an old woman extending her hands to a long-legged chameleon-like spirit with an open mouth and a haggard eye. Overhead, birds fly like seals, a skull is suspended in a bell jar, a young woman – with the same unblinking fisheye as the old woman, a ‘rhyming image’ as Carrington might call it – droops, or bows, like a puppet hanging on an invisible hook.
The experience of the painting is serene and watchful. There is an air of carefulness and propitiation, even of communion. While the significance of the date in the title is obscure, it’s hard not to see the painting as a negotiation with the rich multi-dimensionality of the process of ageing.
According to Joanna Moorhead, Carrington was ‘fascinated by later life’. In The Hearing Trumpet – written when Carrington was in her forties – the delightfully unconventional 92-yearold narrator, Marian Leatherby, sports a beard (‘Personally I find it rather gallant’) and dreams of Lapland. After being packed off by her family to a sinister institution called Lightsome Hall, Marian survives various plots, eventually inaugurating an apocalyptic new ice age with the help of an ‘army of bees, wolves, six old women, a postman, a Chinaman, a poet, an atom-driven ark, and a werewoman’.
Evidently, for Carrington, ageing opened portals. Elsewhere in her work, the figure of the crone, or ‘Magdalen’, carries a furtive sense of inner freedom. For Susan Aberth, Carrington’s older figures ‘exude a sense of the wonderment they still hold for the world around them’.
This ‘wonderment’ is contagious. Leaving Farleys, I set off down the lane to catch my bus. After the hour’s immersion in Carrington’s images, the world was weirdly transfigured. The titanic John Deere tractor that rolled out in front of me on its ten-foot wheels, the hay-tedding truck with its fanned forks and concentric spikes – everything seemed alive, halfanimal, humming with machine consciousness. Something quick I have no words for, but which Leonora Carrington might have understood.
Christy Edwall is the author of the novel History Keeps Me Awake at Night (Granta 2023).