Image:Leonora Carrington’s work, with its imaginary animals and hooded figures, has gained recognition in the US and UK.
Leonora Carrington, the Lancashire-born former debutante who eloped with Max Ernst and became one the greatest – and last surviving – female surrealist artists has died in hospital in Mexico City at the age of 94.
The artist, who had lived in Mexico since the 1940s, was the daughter of a textile magnate and was presented at court in the 1930s. But she became enthralled by surrealism as an art student and befriended many of the great artists of the 20th century, including Ernst, with whom she lived in France, Picasso, Dalí, Duchamp, Miró and Man Ray. She attended the wedding of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.
During the second world war, when Ernst was interned by the Vichy regime, Carrington fled to Madrid, where she had a nervous breakdown and was briefly confined to an asylum, before being rescued by a Mexican diplomat, Renato Leduc, whom she married in Lisbon and with whom she moved to Mexico City. She subsequently married the Hungarian photographer Chiki Weisz, with whom she had two sons.
In 1943, her work was chosen for an exhibition of significant women artists in New York, by Peggy Guggenheim, Ernst’s new partner. Long considered a significant artist in Mexico, her work with its fantastic imaginary birds and animals and its strange hooded figures, was exhibited in London in 1991 and Chichester last year. One of her paintings, The Giantess, was sold at Christie’s for .5m two years ago. She was awarded an OBE in 2000. Carrington’s death was announced by the national council for culture and the arts in Mexico. She had been admitted to hospital suffering from pneumonia.
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