How Leonora Carrington Feminized Surrealism

Disir

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Sep 30, 2011
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When asked to describe the circumstances of her birth, the Surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington liked to tell people that she had not been born; she had been made. One melancholy day, her mother, bloated by chocolate truffles, oyster purée, and cold pheasant, feeling fat and listless and undesirable, had lain on top of a machine. The machine was a marvellous contraption, designed to extract hundreds of gallons of semen from animals—pigs, cockerels, stallions, urchins, bats, ducks—and, one can imagine, bring its user to the most spectacular orgasm, turning her whole sad, sick being inside out and upside down. From this communion of human, animal, and machine, Leonora was conceived. When she emerged, on April 6, 1917, England shook.

The success of a creation story hangs on how richly it seeds the life to come. Carrington’s encompasses all the elements of her life and her art. There is her decadence and indelicate sense of fancy; her fascination with animals and with bodies, both otherworldly and profane. Above all, there is her high-spirited, baroque sense of humor, mating the artificial to the natural, and recalling Henri Bergson’s claim that the essence of comedy is the image of “something mechanical encrusted upon the living.” Her humor and its offspring—two novels, a memoir, a delightfully macabre collection of stories, along with hundreds of paintings, sculptures, and objets—have been unearthed on several occasions since her death, in 2011. Each time her work is reborn, it seems more prescient, her comedy more finely tuned to our growing consciousness of the nonhuman world and the forces that inhabit it.

I've never heard of her. I don't think I have ever seen any of her work until today.
 

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