The work of the British artist Leonora Carrington is usually thought of as mysterious, even frustratingly mysterious – full of pseudo-mythology and looming symbolic creatures. She began to paint in her youth at the height of the surrealist boom of the late 1930s, continuing until her death six years ago in Mexico, and her canvases always hinted at an unconventional spirit, if not a disturbed psyche.
This has left some critics, mostly men, wanting to know less, rather than more. Yet for her many fans Carrington’s imaginative world has the compelling quality of a haunting riddle. These admirers, including Madonna, Björk and Laura Marling, will find Joanna Moorhead’s lively biography a helpful handbook of clues, although it cannot solve all the puzzles of her art.
Carrington began life as the privileged daughter of a domineering Lancashire mill magnate, growing up in Crookhey Hall, a gloomy pile that went on to make spectral appearances in her paintings. In 1935, in a reverse Cinderella story, she ran away from the debutante balls she hated to live in bohemian poverty as an art student. Soon, she found an unlikely Prince Charming in the much older German artist Max Ernst. The couple fell in love at dinner in the modernist Highgate flat of architect Ernő Goldfinger, and for a few years were inseparable.
Carrington’s influential father was so incensed by the relationship he arranged a warrant for Ernst’s arrest, on the basis that his art offended public decency, promptly ensuring he would never see his talented and rebellious daughter again. Moorhead’s account of this family schism has more authenticity than another biographer could offer because she is the artist’s second cousin. In childhood she often overheard relatives sighing over the fate of poor “Prim” (Carrington’s spectacularly inapt nickname, given to her as a baby). She had run off to Paris, Moorhead gleaned, to become an artist’s model. It was a shock to discover later that not only was Prim an admired artist, but a celebrated cultural figure in Mexico. Curious about this wayward cousin, Moorhead flew off to meet her and the two became close.
Before she got to Paris, Carrington (not to be confused with the more strait-laced British painter of the same name, once played on screen by Emma Thompson) was a guest at one of the sauciest country house parties in English art history. While Ernst was on the run in 1937 he took Carrington to a cottage at Lambe’s Creek in Cornwall. Here they cavorted, often nude, with other surrealists including Man Ray, Lee Miller, Roland Penrose and Paul Eluard and, to judge from the photos, with buckets of seaweed as well.
Temporarily settling in France, the lovers socialised with Picasso and Dalí. When their romance dissolved, Carrington decamped to America through a series of dramatic misadventures, including a period in an asylum, all later recounted to Moorhead over tequila and cups of Lipton’s tea in the artist’s Mexican kitchen.
Moorhead’s warm study of her relative also gives weight to Carrington’s second identity as a writer of fiction. Her short story, The Debutante, we learn, gives full vent to the horrors of her restrictive adolescence in England, while her novel The Hearing Trumpet is widely hailed as an eccentric comic masterpiece.
This portrait of an artist may not crack all the secrets of Carrington’s coded practice, but it does reveal she was not a signed-up surrealist. Once, in a scribbled cryptic note, the artist confessed to her cousin she had never even read their manifesto. Truly a rebel among rebels.
• The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead is published by Virago (£20). To order a copy for £15 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
