The Brooklyn Rail

From tales of a rebellious debutante to a daring escape from a psychiatric hospital and a journey to Mexico with the rise of Nazis, it is almost hard to believe the life of artist Leonora Carrington (1917–2011). It’s a story that captivated the British journalist Joanna Moorhead when she discovered that Carrington was also her father’s cousin, “Prim,” who had long since drifted from her family. Moorhead met an eighty-nine-year-old Carrington over tea and tequila in 2006 at her home in Mexico City (“This was my initiation into Leonora’s private world”) and they became close over the next few years. Having been asked not to make notes during their conversations, Moorhead would scribble the memories of peoples and places in a diary at night.

Surreal Spaces expands upon Moorhead’s earlier biography, The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington (2017), but the warmth between author and artist remains palpably the same. Moorhead writes generously about Carrington, as any long-lost cousin might, even as she retreads familiar ground. Surreal Spaces is anchored by the homes, landscapes, and countries that defined Carrington, richly illustrated with her paintings and archival material. Moorhead’s writing is at its most gorgeously sensorial when she visits these locations for herself, beginning with the Gothic mansion of Carrington’s childhood, Crookhey Hall, with its imposing gray façade that would fill Carrington’s imagination and inspire paintings such as Bird Bath II (1978).

Other significant early landscapes include Morecambe Bay and Hazelwood Hall, where Carrington’s family moved during her teenage years. Having returned to Hazelwood after formative sojourns in Florence and Paris at finishing school, Moorhead supposes what Carrington might have felt: “Sitting on the rocks at the bay near her home, I’m struck by how flat the horizon is, and I wonder whether that vista echoed her views on what her future in England might hold. The landscape here is acres of sameness.”

Carrington and surrealist artist Max Ernst settled in a farmhouse called Les Alliberts overlooking the village of Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche in the late 1930s. Adorned with their work, Moorhead describes a magical world that remains practically untouched today as she climbs the steep path up to the house, to be welcomed by the bas-reliefs of two figures by Ernst. Moorhead’s visit to Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche exudes the joy that Carrington must have experienced, now free to live as she desired.

The spell of Les Alliberts was broken with the outbreak of war and Ernst’s arrest by the gendarmes in 1940, but the pair would meet again in Lisbon along with countless other émigrés. Moorhead brings to life the arduous waiting game for passage to America, “Lisbon today has changed much since the 1940s, but some things remain the same.” Describing the streets of Alfama that Carrington would have explored, surrounded by smells of “shellfish, fish stew, grilled sardines” and sounds of “the soulful fado music.” Often romanticized, Moorhead dispels something of the tragedy of the artists’ reunion, as Carrington explained to her, “It was wartime, emotional things weren’t so important. You had to do what you had to do to survive, and to get out.”

Moorhead also curiously debunks the image of the psychiatric institute in Santander that Carrington was sent to when she suffered a nervous breakdown after Ernst’s arrest, describing a hospital surrounded by gardens and fruit trees. Having fled Santander by way of Lisbon and New York, Carrington arrived in Mexico City in 1942. Moorhead retreads Carrington’s footsteps through the Sonora markets she so loved and encounters the marvelous curiosities she found there, like the skeleton Santa Muerte clutching a cigarette and glass of tequila.

Carrington and her second husband Emerico Weisz (known as "Chiki") (her first was Renato Leduc) found the perfect home at 194 Calle Chihuahua in the Colonia Roma area of Mexico City. Calle Chihuahua became the epicenter for a group of émigrés and close friends that included Kati Horna and Remedios Varo. Moorhead recalls a visit some ten years after Carrington’s death to her home and finding it largely unchanged—the Liberty tablecloth, the pictures of the Royal Family, and the bookshelves lined with novels by Ian McEwan and Margaret Atwood, the poetry of Octavio Paz, and tomes on the occult and Kabbalah. As she writes, “It felt, arriving in that room, as though Leonora had just popped next door.”

Though Mexico was arguably Carrington’s spiritual home, the European era of her life is often given far greater attention in this book. Moorhead dutifully devotes three chapters to Mexico and the United States, and yet the considerable timespan still leaves less time to coax out the details of places, as she does in earlier chapters.

Carrington writes in her 1974 novel The Hearing Trumpet, “Houses are really bodies. We connect ourselves with walls, roofs, and objects just as we hang on to our livers, skeletons, flesh and blood stream.” Moorhead reveals how Carrington’s spirit lingers in the places that are so woven into the fabric of her art. Though Surreal Spaces does not perhaps shed any new light, the stories of Carrington’s extraordinary life cannot help to beguile, amplified by the tender words of her cousin.