The Burlington Magazine: Review Leonora Carrington

The opening section traces Carrington’s formative years as a young artist, nourished by the English countryside of her childhood and the fairy tales and Celtic myths told by her Irish mother, as well as a stay in Florence that introduced her to the Renaissance – a seductive beginning that sets the stage for the myth of her predestined genius. In her notebook Animals of a different planit (c.1927), made when she was only ten years old, and early works such as the series Sisters of the moon (1932–33; Fig.26), Carrington’s distinctive line already reveals key preoccupations: narrative imagination, female spirituality and metamorphosis. Yet here, as so often in Carrington scholarship, biography threatens to overshadow interpretation. The temptation to read her childhood as prophecy persists.

Carrington’s Surrealist years in Paris and southern France form the next turning point. The section ‘The Bride of the Wind: A Transnational Journey through Surrealism’ evokes her partnership with Max Ernst (1891–1976) and their brief attempt to fuse art and life into a single Gesamtkunstwerk. Photographs and two painted cupboard doors from their home in Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche recall the idyll they lived in, which was abruptly shattered by war. Ernst was imprisoned, Carrington fled, was confined to an asylum in Spain and later chronicled the experience in her memoir Down Below (1943). The difficulty of obtaining loans of major Surrealist works is palpable here, and the absence of key pieces stymies the sense of collective ferment that once defined the movement. What emerges instead, however, is a more introspective register, hinting at Carrington’s later transformation from Surrealist affiliate to independent visionary.

With her relocation to Mexico in the mid-1940s and the birth of her two sons, Carrington entered the phase that would define her mature vision. This part of the exhibition is among its most rewarding, not least for the inclusion of Las tentaciones de San Antonio (Temptation of St Anthony; 1945; private collection), which recalls Hieronymus Bosch’s treatment of the same subject, seen by Carrington in the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid. Seated beside a river with the customary pig at his feet, Carrington’s three-headed saint, swathed in white cloth, reimagines temptation as spiritual transmutation rather than torment. In the catalogue, which is in Italian, Martín perceptively notes the way in which Carrington transforms the saint’s ordeal into an alchemical rite centred on female and androgynous figures. Cauldrons, animals and occult symbols evoke pre-Christian rituals and the endurance of feminine knowledge – the latter is a thread that runs through the entirety of her practice.

Although the exhibition lacks the scope and several of the major masterpieces of its Madrid predecessor, it compensates with a number of lesser-known, rarely exhibited works, some of which are exceptional in quality. A highlight is Retrato del Dr. Urbano Barnes (1946; private collection), first shown at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, in 1948 and seldom seen since. The Mexican physician appears as a medium between earthly and metaphysical realms, surrounded by symbolic animals and alchemical motifs that endow the work with a talismanic aura. With its luminous palette
and meticulous detail, the painting shows Carrington at the height of her pictorial imagination. Its narrative density recalls the celebrated Les distractions de Dagobert (1945; private collection), which is absent from the exhibition and fetched a record price at auction in 2024. Simpler in composition, Retrato del Dr. Urbano Barnes nonetheless shares that sense of microscopic worlds in motion – stories within stories affirming the existence of multiple realities.

As the exhibition progresses, its focus shifts from biography to cosmology. The fourth section, titled ‘The Heroine’s Journey’, forms the intellectual core of the show. Carrington’s work is interpreted through the mythologist Joseph Campbell’s concept of the life journey. Her paintings are presented as psychic maps of the soul’s voyage. Her lifelong interest in Gnosticism, Kabbalah, Hermeticism and Eastern mysticism is illuminated by such works as the resplendent Orplied (Fig.27) and Quería ser pájaro (He wanted to be a bird; 1960; private collection). Quotations from the artist herself, inscribed on the gallery walls, lend the exhibition a welcome polyphony, her own voice interrupting and at times subverting the interpretive frameworks imposed upon her.

The final rooms, ‘The Luminous Dark’ and ‘The Alchemical Kitchen’, draw on Susan Aberth’s influential studies of Carrington’s engagement with alchemy and the occult. (4) Here, painting, cooking and conjuring converge as acts of transmutation. In Grandmother Moorhead’s aromatic kitchen (Fig.28), for example, the domestic sphere becomes a site of feminine power and magical metamorphosis. The message is clear: for Carrington, art was not an illustration of magic, but its continuation by other means.

As the exhibition draws to a close, its measured curatorial tone gives way to a sense of containment. Although the display succeeds in illuminating Carrington’s extraordinary range, the overall framing, which is grounded in biography and reverent contextualisation, risks taming the forces that animate her work. The white voile draperies, the fashionable wall colours and the conventional catalogue lend the presentation a genteel restraint and decorum that speaks of institutional caution rather than artistic daring. In its desire to narrate Carrington’s life, the exhibition edges towards canonisation: the transformation of a fiercely independent artist into a cultural monument.

Carrington’s project was never one of transcendence in the heroic, modernist sense, but of remembrance: reclaiming forms of knowledge erased by modernity, such as pre-Christian myth, matriarchal symbolism, Celtic cosmology and alchemical thought. From these sources she fashioned an alternative vision of nature, womanhood and consciousness that now resonates powerfully with younger generations. They are drawn to her not because she was ‘ahead of her time’, as is often claimed, but because she was attuned to other times: forgotten, cyclical and continuous.

This exhibition exemplifies the uneasy task of ‘troubling the canon’. (5) Expanding existing narratives by inserting a few exceptional women into patriarchal histories too easily reinforces the structures it means to challenge. To ‘trouble’ the canon, rather, is to expose the exclusions and hierarchies that sustain it, including those of gender, race and rationality, and to acknowledge the misunderstandings and desires that accompany any act of historical recovery. Seen through this lens, Carrington’s art does not simply enter the canon; it unsettles it, reminding us that the true work of feminist revision lies not in completion but in continuous disturbance.