Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington

Journalist Moorhead (The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington) chronicles in this illuminating biography the personal life and artistic evolution of surrealist painter and sculptor Leonora Carrington (1917­–2011). Raised in an upper-class British family, Carrington resisted her parents’ attempts to marry her off. Instead, she turned to art to explore her “interior reality,” producing work that was symbolic rather than representational and depicted interactions between human and animal figures—particularly horses, which she “had drawn obsessively from a young age and saw as her alter ego.” Among other episodes, Moorhead details Carrington’s extended affair with painter Max Ernst when she was 20 and he was 46; her forced confinement to a sanitarium in early adulthood following a mental breakdown; her flight from Europe to New York City after WWII broke out; and her time, starting in 1942, making art and living on and off in Mexico City. Throughout, Moorhead draws on lucid analyses of Carrington’s artwork, as well as conversations with the artist—a cousin of Moorhead’s father—to illuminate who Carrington was “both as an artist and as a woman.” The result is a revealing and accessible introduction to a noteworthy artist. (Aug.)