The surrealist artist Leonora Carrington established roots in Mexico and at age 90 is still hard at work in her home in Mexico City. This article will give a brief sketch of the life of this world famous artist whose friends included Picasso, Salvador Dali, Frieda Kahlo and Diego Rivera, to name a few.

Leonora was born in 1917 into an upper-middle-class English family. As a child Carrington was headstrong and difficult and was repeatedly expelled from schools for her rebellious behavior. She was sent to Florence where she attended Mrs. Penrose's Academy of Art and where her interest in the macabre began after she discovered the grotesque art of the middle ages.
After an unsuccessful debut at court in 1934 which convinced Leonora that she wanted nothing to do with “high society”, her parents succumbed to her pleadings and allowed her to study art.

While in the pursuit of her dreams, Carrington met Max Ernst, the surrealist painter whose work she had admired as a youngster. She was then 20 and would soon become his lover. He left his wife and they went to live in Paris where she came to know Picasso, Salvador Dali, Man Ray, and Joan Miró. During this time, with Ernst's encouragement, Leonora began to write as well as paint. Their idyllic set-up, however, was interrupted two years later when Max was imprisoned as an enemy alien at the outbreak of the war. He was set free but later re-taken by the Gestapo when the Germans invaded France. He managed to escape and fled to America with the help of Peggy Guggenheim. Leonora was devastated and fled to Spain where she had a nervous breakdown which landed her in a psychiatric hospital. Her parents were sending her to South Africa to be admitted to a sanatorium there but she escaped from the vigilance of a nurse. This is when she made her way to Mexico where she found a landscape and culture that nurtured her fascination with the supernatural.
In Mexico she met and married Emericko Weisz and had two children with him. The first son - Gabriel Weisz is an intellectual and a poet and the second son Pablo Weisz is a surrealist artist and a doctor.

Mexico gave Leonora the space and opportunity to sculpt and to paint, and - with its Aztec and Mayan history and its cult of the dead - a fresh and rich seam of inspiration. There were new artists to share ideas with: Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera; and the artist to whom, apart from Ernst, she has been closest in her life, Remedios Varo.
Hers is a world of mysterious and magical paintings, described by her cousin as “dark canvases dominated by a large, sinister-looking house; strange and slightly menacing women, mostly tall and wearing big cloaks; ethereal figures, often captured in the process of changing from one form to another; faces within bodies; long, spindly fingers; horses, dogs and birds.”
Leonora has been mostly ignored in her native England. Only Edward James, the wealthy and eccentric aficionado of surrealism, who himself ended up in Mexico, became an avid collector of her works. Nevertheless, she built up over the years a massive international reputation and will be remembered as a feminine pioneer of a new, more female strand of surrealism. She dabbled in alchemy and the occult, and her work was rooted for a time in the magical and domestic elements of women's lives. Matthew Gale, curator at the Tate Modern states that “One of the extraordinary aspects of Leonora's work is how she draws on so many different inspirations, from the Celtic legends she learned from her nanny, through the constraints of her upper-class upbringing, to the surrealism of Paris in the 1930s - and then to the magic of Mexico," Gale says. "Her work is evocative of so many things, and it's enormously complex: she hasn't had a massive output because her technique is so meticulous and the work so detailed. She certainly wasn't a Picasso who could churn out several pictures a day; her work would take many months, even years."
There is currently an exhibition of Leonora Carrington’s works in Jalapa, Veracruz brought here through the efforts of the State Office of Cultural Affairs. The show runs through September, 2008.