Date: 17-12-1991
Owning Institution: Serpentine Gallery
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999      
Subject:   20th Century    

AT THE AGE of fourteen, she is said to have lifted her skirts to a Catholic priest. The story has it that she had no underwear on. ''What do you think of that?'' she asked. His answer, sadly, is unrecorded. The daughter of a Lancashire cotton tycoon and an Irish gypsy with social pretensions, she seems to have spent much of her youth strenuously disappointing her parents. She was expelled from two schools for ''general insubordination'', but her most decisive act of rebellion came when, as a 19-year-old debutante in London, she met the Surrealist painter Max Ernst and ran away to Paris with him. Within five years she had broken up with Ernst, suffered a nervous breakdown and settled in Mexico, to pursue her chosen career as a painter and writer. Her admirers consider her to be the grand old lady of Surrealism, and one of the movement's last survivors.

''Leonora Carrington'', at the Serpentine Gallery, is a retrospective with revisionist intent. Carrington, it is argued here, is a major but neglected Surrealist, the victim of patriarchal art history and of her own decision to live and work far from the marketing capitals of the art world. The Serpentine show, the first serious survey of her art yet undertaken, aims to set the record straight.

Carrington's art has commonly been considered, if at all, as a sort of footnote to Max Ernst studies. Ernst himself was partly responsible for this. Early in their relationship, he christened Carrington his ''Bride of the Wind'', an act of renaming which suggests the proprietorial nature of his devotion to her. He envisaged her both as muse and, in an introduction he wrote to her first volume of stories (preserved under glass at the Serpentine), as a kind of holy idiot. She came to embody a certain Surrealist notion of the ideal woman: childishly innocent yet extremely sensual; fundamentally irrational yet a dreamer of wonderful dreams. Ernst encouraged her to paint and even executed half of one of the early pictures in this show, Rencontre, but the suspicion remains that Carrington interested Ernst less as a painter in her own right than as source material.

She got her own back, it appears, by treating him as source material. Her 1939 Portrait of Max Ernst documents what must have become an uneasy relationship. The white-haired Ernst, wearing a heavy fur robe whose fish-tailed train makes him look mermannish, stalks a glacial landscape inhabited only by a horse carved from snow. Ernst carries what seems at first sight to be a lantern but is, in fact, a glass prison inside which another, tiny white horse capers. It is a sinister image, which depicts Ernst as one invested with occult powers, even as a sort of god - but a god devoted to petrifaction, to the containment of natural energies.

 Carrington's is an art of codes and symbols, often of a frustrating opacity, but here at least her meaning seems fairly clear. A symbolic key to the Portrait of Max Ernst is provided by Carrington's Self-Portrait of the same time. She is a troubled figure seated in a ballroom, with only a hyena and a white rocking horse for company. Through the room's window you see another white horse, this time alive, galloping across a green landscape. If the mischievous hyena was always one of Carrington's symbols for herself (see the story printed below), so was the horse. The painting may allegorise a dilemma: whether to remain in the sheltered world of the child, or to venture outside it; whether to be the rocking-horse or the real horse, more potent but more vulnerable.

Carrington's subsequent oeuvre is as Surrealistically zany and dream-like as might be expected. Her continuing allegiance to Surrealism may be inferred from her decision to settle in Mexico, which always bulked large in the imaginations of such as Breton, Dali et al. The collector Edward James, one of Carring-ton's most steadfast admirers, remarked that her works are ''not merely painted, they are brewed''. That seems just about right, and Carrington mixes an awful lot of ingredients in her witch's cauldron: her paintings can look like Bosch updates served with Mexican Day of the Dead trimmings; or trecento pastiches with side servings of Miro, baked in a Klee oven. Her technique is sometimes a little dull, but she is nothing if not various.
Her weaknesses might be said to be those of Surrealism itself. The difficulty of making Surrealist art, of achieving that free play of the imagination, that liberation of the subconscious said to be necessary to it, has been overrated. It is not very hard to give the impression that you have managed the trick - combine a lot of incongruous images in a single painting and call it a ''Surreal'' mindscape - and virtually impossible for anyone else to contest the fact that you have done so.

A picture like Carrington's The House Opposite, which throngs with strange details - witches gathered around a cauldron, leaping and running figures, a ladder leading nowhere, a woman whose neck sprouts branches rather than a head - is proficiently Surreal but also dull in a classically Surreal manner. The problem is a simple one. Even if you can paint your dreams, why should anyone be interested in them? Listening to other people recount their dreams over dinner is (unless you know those people very well) one of the more tedious of life's experiences. Large gatherings of Surrealist paintings can be boring in a similar way: this was true of Max Ernst's recent retrospective at the Tate, and it is true of his former lover's show at the Serpentine.
It is even possible to argue that the Surrealists' obsession with dreams and their materialisation in art represents not a liberation of the power of the imagination but a subtle devaluation of it. Carrington's pictures of hydra-headed people, of dogs with trees for tails and what-have-you engaged in indecipherable goings-on - how do they define the imagination? Merely as something to be untethered, rather than something that might have a more truly alarming ability: the capacity to tell us about the world, to disclose its meanings. The greatest and strangest imaginings in art - Rembrandt's Descent from the Cross, say, or Goya's Disasters of War - are awkwardly rooted in reality. You do not think, of them, ''Oh, what an interesting dream - how imaginative.'' They won't stand for such an easy dismissal.

This is to find fault more with Surrealism itself than with Carrington's contribution to it. Her various man-ners demonstrate an eclectic originality. She paints strange little works, in glowing colours, that are com-partmented like Renaissance predella paintings; she has a miniaturist's love of detail, endlessly elaborated. Carrington's memorable works, however, are not her weirdest or her most saturated, but the ones where you have at least some sense of their connection with the real world. The pictures of herself and Ernst, say, or Crookhey Hall, in which a white night-gowned figure flees from an English manor house past all kinds of threatening demons. So Carrington's work may contain a lesson of sorts about Surrealism itself. The most perfectly incomprehensible, enigmatic art - the art that most completely defeats what the Surrealists thought of as the bourgeois need to understand, to find or make meaning - is also the most perfectly tedious.

Hyena in high heels
In this extract from Carrington's story The Debutante a young girl visits the zoo.

My mother was arranging a ball in my honour on the first of May. During this time I was in a state of great distress for whole nights. I've always detested balls, especially when they are given in my honour.
On the morning of the first of May 1934, very early, I went to visit the hyena.
'What a bloody nuisance', I said to her. 'I've got to go to my ball tonight.'
You're very lucky,' she said. 'I'd love to go. I don't know how to dance, but at least I could make small talk.'
'There'll be a great many different things to eat,' I told her. 'I've seen truckloads of food delivered to our house.'
'And you're complaining,' replied the hyena, disgusted. 'Just think of me, I eat once a day and you can't imagine what a heap of bloody rubbish I'm given.'
I had an audacious idea, and I almost laughed. 'All you have to do is to go instead of me!'
'We don't resemble each other enough, otherwise I'd gladly go,' said the hyena rather sadly.
'Listen,' I said. 'No one sees too well in the evening light. If you disguise yourself, nobody will notice you in the crowd. Besides we're practically the same size. You're my only friend, I beg you to do this for me.'
She thought this over, and I knew that she really wanted to accept.
'Done', she said all of a sudden.
There weren't many keepers about, it was so early in the morning. I opened the cage quickly, and in a very few moments we were out in the street. I hailed a taxi; at home, everybody was still in bed. In my room I brought out the dress I was to wear that evening. It was a little long, and the hyena found it difficult to walk in my highheeled shoes. I found some gloves to hide her hands, which were too hairy to look like mine. By the time the sun was shining into my room, she was able to make her way around the room several times, walking more or less upright. We were so busy that my mother almost opened the door to say good morning before the hyena had hidden under my bed.
'There's a bad smell in your room,' my mother said, opening the window. 'You must have a scented bath before tonight, with my new bath salts.'
'Certainly,' I said.
She didn't stay long. I think the smell was too much for her.
'Don't be late for breakfast,' she said and left the room.
The greatest difficulty was to find a way of disguising the hyena's face. We spent hours and hours look-ing for a way, but she always rejected my suggestions. At last she said, 'I think I've found the answer. Have you got a maid?'
'Yes,' I said, puzzled.
'There you are then. Ring for your maid, and when she comes in we'll pounce upon her and tear off her face. I'll wear her face
tonight instead of mine.'
'It's not practical,' I said. 'She'll probably die if she hasn't got a face. Somebody will certainly find the corpse, and we'll be put in prison.'
'I'm hungry enough to eat her,' the hyena replied.
'And the bones?'
'As well,' she said. 'So, it's on?'
'Only if you promise to kill her before tearing off her face. It'll hurt her too much otherwise'.
'All right. It's all the same to me.'
Not without a certain amount of nervousness I rang for Mary, my maid. I certainly wouldn't have done it if I didn't hate having to go to a ball so much. When Mary came in I turned to the wall so as not to see. I must admit it didn't take long. A brief cry, and it was over. While the hyena was eating, I looked out the window. A few minutes later she said, 'I can't eat any more. Her two feet are left over still, but if you have a little bag, I'll eat them later in the day.'
'You'll find a bag embroidered with fleurs-de-lis in the cupboard. Empty out the handkerchiefs you'll find inside, and take it.' She did as I suggested. Then she said, 'Turn round now and look how beautiful I am.'
In front of the mirror, the hyena was admiring herself in Mary's face. She had nibbled very neatly all around the face so that what was left was exactly what was needed.
'You've certainly done that very well,' I said.
Towards evening, when the hyena was all dressed up, she declared, 'I really feel in tip-top form. I have a feeling that I shall be a great success this evening.'