I met Leonora Carrington in the mid-1980s at a Tibetan Buddhist center in upstate New York. She was an elderly woman then, sitting quietly in a chair at the back of the room. She had long hair and carried herself with dignified humility. When my friend introduced us, I knew nothing about her work.
“This is Leonora Carrington,” my friend said. “She’s a very accomplished artist.”
We shook hands and exchanged a few words. I remember being intrigued by her presence. There was a quiet self-possession that set her apart from everyone else in the room. Years would pass before I saw one of her paintings or learned anything about the extraordinary life she had lived.
Looking back, I feel amused that I had no idea whom I had just met. Nothing about our brief conversation suggested that she had lived one of the most remarkable artistic lives of the twentieth century. I did not know that she had scandalized English society, escaped war-torn Europe, survived a mental collapse in Francoist Spain, fled to Mexico, or become one of the defining figures of Surrealism. I certainly did not know that the strange, luminous worlds she painted would one day become some of my favorite works of art.
Why was one of the twentieth century’s greatest Surrealists spending time at a Tibetan Buddhist center in upstate New York? At the time, I didn’t know to ask. Years later, after I had become familiar with her paintings, the answer would become obvious.
Carrington had always been drawn toward worlds that existed beyond ordinary perception. She filled her canvases with women who transformed into animals, horses that emerged from myth, alchemical rituals, Celtic folklore, medieval symbolism, and mysterious interiors where the ordinary seemed only a thin veil over another reality. Long before many Western artists looked seriously toward Eastern traditions, Carrington had spent a lifetime exploring mysticism, esoteric philosophy, Jungian psychology, and spiritual transformation. The Buddhist center no longer seemed an unlikely place to have found her. It seemed exactly where someone like Leonora Carrington might feel at home.
She was born in Lancashire, England, in 1917, into a wealthy industrial family that expected her to become a proper debutante. She resisted almost every expectation placed upon her. Expelled from two schools, she preferred fairy tales to polite society. Eventually, she persuaded her parents to allow her to study art in London, where she encountered Surrealism. Rather than diminishing the power of her imagination, the movement seemed to give it a language.
In 1937 she met Max Ernst, twenty-six years her senior and already one of Surrealism’s central figures. They fell in love almost immediately and settled together in southern France. History has often cast Carrington as Ernst’s muse, but that does neither artist justice. From the beginning she possessed a vision entirely her own.
Surrealism itself has often been misunderstood. Many people think of it simply as bizarre imagery or dreamlike fantasy, an artistic movement devoted to irrationality for its own sake. But this is a shallow perception. Influenced by Freud’s ideas about the unconscious, the Surrealists believed that beneath ordinary reason lay another reality, one revealed through dreams, symbols, myths, and unexpected associations. They hoped to recover ways of seeing that modern civilization had suppressed.
Carrington shared that aesthetic, but she never fit comfortably within the movement. Many of the male Surrealists treated women as muses, symbols, or objects of desire rather than as artists in their own right. Carrington refused that narrow role from the beginning. Her paintings were not visions of women imagined by men. They are worlds inhabited and governed by strange women in the throes of transformation, filled with ancient knowledge, and possessing forms of intelligence that resist simple explanation.
Sadly, her life was fraught with tragedy. After Germany invaded France in 1940, Max Ernst was arrested, forcing Carrington to flee to Spain. Already traumatized by the war and Ernst’s disappearance, she endured another horrific ordeal in Madrid when she was taken from a café by a group of soldiers and gang-raped. The accumulated trauma contributed to a severe psychological collapse. She was confined to a psychiatric institution in Santander, where she underwent treatments that today seem almost medieval. In her extraordinary memoir, Down Below, she described receiving repeated injections of Cardiazol, a drug used to induce violent seizures as a form of psychiatric therapy. The experience nearly destroyed her.
Yet it also transformed her. Unlike many artists who conceal periods of psychological crisis, Carrington absorbed hers into her work. Madness, dreams, and spiritual visions became inseparable. Looking at her paintings, it is often impossible to know where her life ends and mythology begins. That uncertainty is precisely what gives them their peculiar authority.
Eventually Carrington escaped Europe through a marriage of convenience to the Mexican diplomat and poet Renato Leduc, entered into largely so she could obtain safe passage during the war. The couple traveled first to New York before settling in Mexico in 1942, the country that would become her true home for the rest of her life.
Far removed from wartime Europe, she found herself among artists, writers, poets, and political exiles who had also crossed continents in search of refuge. She became close friends with the wonderful Spanish painter Remedios Varo and the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna. Together they formed one of the most remarkable artistic circles of the twentieth century. Their conversations must have wandered easily between alchemy, astrology, medieval manuscripts, Jewish mysticism, Celtic folklore, dreams, and Renaissance science. They treated imagination not as an escape from reality but as another way of understanding it.
That attitude distinguishes Carrington’s work from much of twentieth-century modernism. Her paintings rarely feel ironic. They are playful, certainly, but never cynical. We live in an age that demands immediate gratification. Carrington refuses; her images remain stubbornly mysterious. They invite contemplation rather than explanation. Like dreams, they lose much of their magic when put into words. And yet, we try.
One of her many paintings that captivates me is The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg), painted in 1947. This painting sold for almost $1.5 million in 2009. (Carrington passed away in 2011). A monumental woman with a tiny head dominates the landscape; her enormous white cape flows toward the earth. Tiny geese gather around her feet while birds circle overhead. She cradles a luminous egg in her hands as though protecting something both precious and fragile.
The egg has appeared throughout human history as a symbol of creation, rebirth, and hidden potential. The giant woman is neither saint nor goddess in any conventional sense, yet she possesses a powerful presence. She feels ancient and modern simultaneously, like someone belonging to no particular place. A similar quality runs through nearly all of Carrington’s work. She rarely explained her symbols, and perhaps that was wise. The paintings are strongest when they speak for themselves. They reward repeated viewing because they resist easy understanding.
The more I looked into Carrington’s life and work, the more fascinated I became, and the more I wished I had gotten to know her back in the ’80s when I had the chance. I was surprised to discover that her world did not end with painting. In her later years she created a remarkable series of monumental bronze sculptures, many installed in public spaces throughout Mexico. The mysterious beings that wandered through her canvases emerged into three dimensions, as though they had finally crossed the threshold between imagination and ordinary life. They possess the same quiet authority as her paintings. They do not offer to be decoded. They simply ask us to accept that the world may be stranger than we think.