By Jonathan Shih
Leonora Carrington was never interested in being someone’s muse. Born in England in 1917, she was raised in privilege but refused to conform to the life expected of her. When she met the much older Max Ernst, she plunged into the Surrealist movement—but not as an accessory. She was a force in her own right, painting dreamscapes filled with wild-haired women, hybrid creatures, and esoteric symbols drawn from Celtic myth, alchemy, and feminism. She fled to Mexico after a nervous breakdown during World War II, and there, she rebuilt her life on her own terms.
Her novel The Hearing Trumpet is a wildly imaginative, feminist satire about an elderly woman who uncovers a secret, apocalyptic sisterhood in her retirement home. It’s sly, surreal, and entirely unlike anything her male contemporaries wrote. Her painting The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg)—a towering feminine figure cradling a fragile egg in a golden wheat field—is full of power and mystery. Where Dalí peddled spectacle, Carrington explored inner transformation. She didn't paint for approval. She painted to survive, to understand, to resist.
She lived for nearly a century, creating work filled with the kind of depth and defiance that demands a second look. And now, finally, the world is beginning to see her not just as a muse or a lover, but as a visionary artist and author who conjured a new kind of magic—entirely her own.
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