Leonora
Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art
by Susan L. Aberth
Lund Humphries, Burlington, VT, 2004
160 pp., illus. 25 b/w, 95 col. Trade,
$60.00
ISBN: 0-85331-908-1
Reviewed by Roy R. Behrens
Department of Art, University of Northern
Iowa
ballast@netins.net
Reproduced in this book is a famous group
photograph, taken in New York in 1942,
of a group of mostly European artists,
in "exile" in the U.S. They
are arranged in three rows, in a quietly
comical manner: Everyone in the back row
faces left, those in the center face right
(with one exception), and those in the
front row face whatever direction they
like. Of the 14 artists in the photograph,
11 are men, but, as if to anticipate recent
concerns about gender inequality, each
row contains one woman, including Peggy
Guggenheim (of Guggenheim Museum fame),
Berenice Abbott (the famous photographer),
and a largely obscure painter named Leonora
Carrington. While everyone else in the
photograph has died, this third woman,
whose life and work this book concerns,
is the only one still living. Born in
the north of England in 1917 to a family
of wealthy industrialists, she is less
known in part because she is so easily
confused with another person, of the same
time period, named Dora Carrington (unrelated),
who was closely linked with the London-based
Bloomsbury artists and writers; and because
her fame initially grew from having been
romantically tied with the handsome German-born
Surrealist Max Ernst (Dada Max), whose
artistic celebrity eclipsed nearly everyones,
and, as this book suggests, whose conquests
of women were many. In addition, after
World War II, Carrington finally settled
with other Surrealist émigrés
in Mexico City, which was then and still
is, too distant from the molten core of
the New York "art world." So
while she certainly became prominent and
admired in Mexico City (among her friends
were Luis Bunuel, Octavio Paz and others),
there is no reason to expect that her
work will ever be lauded at the level
of such superstars as Frida Kahlo and
Georgia OKeeffe. Biographies and
films about those two famous women are
premiered almost weekly, while this is
the first and only English book about
the art and writings of Carrington.
Reproduced throughout this book are many
finely detailed plates of her paintings,
prints and sculpture, the first from about
1936, the most recent from only a few
years ago. Looking at them, I sense that
they could never appeal to audiences as
wide as those of Kahlo or OKeeffe,
both of whom, while certainly indebted
to Surrealism, use styles and symbol systems
that are more believable, less sci-fi,
and far more approachable than the nightmarish
androids that tend to appear in a Carrington
painting. This books author, an
art historian at Bard College, more or
less admits to this when she contends
that (because of Carringtons interest
in alchemy and the occult) "there
is no key with which to decipher her work
easily, because there cannot be
one. It is not that certain embedded symbols
have no meaning; it is that these symbols
cannot and do not illustrate
ideas in the manner we are accustomed
to."
(Reprinted by permission from Ballast
Quarterly Review, Volume 20 Number
4, Summer 2005.)