Dearest Uncultured Swine,
And there are a few more of you this week… you may be expecting some more sharp, incisive social commentary from yours truly, but what you’ll actually be getting from Dis Content are the ramblings of a mad woman – Welcome! This brilliant community chats about all walks of art, espresso, saying we’re well-read but not being well-read, and absolute shite. Happy to have you.
Onto more pressing matters: the Surrealists were arseholes (but Leonora Carrington wasn’t). Let’s unpack that below.
Girl, so confusing
I’m deep in my feels today because my friends decided to euro-summer without me... 87 years ago. In the summer of 1937, Pablo Picasso, Lee Miller, and Man Ray travelled to the south of France to wine, dine and visit some expatriate friends; one of whom was genre-subverting-but-still-called-Surrealist painter, Leonora Carrington.
Oh, you don’t know who tf Leonora Carrington is? You sexist pig (neither did I). Even with the term ‘Surrealism’ all my lonely brain cell could conjure was, “THAT’S WHAT SALAVDOR DALI DID.” Turns out the movement was, unsurprisingly, more involved than Dali, and its ideas accidentally, maybe, inadvertently, gave rise to one of the most powerful feminist figures of the twentieth century.
The Surrealist movement was quite taken with the psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud, who was quite taken with a subconscious attraction to his mother. Freud’s work inspired poet and writer, Andre Breton, who then went on to write a manifesto on seeking ‘ultimate reality’ in the subconscious called, Manifeste du surréalisme in 1924.
Carrington was only seven at this point, so it’s safe to say she couldn’t paint for shit. But she was a burgeoning brat. Jumping from school to school, Carrington was keen to escape the stifling role of an upper-class British young-woman and by age 18, finally defected to become the conservative parents worst nightmare: an artist.
The young artist found easy in with the London arts scene and through it, met established Dada/Surrealist artist, Max Ernst, who was 46. She liked his art. They had the sex. He left his wife for her. It was all. Very. Freudian. Putting my obvious icks to one side for now, their creative partnership pushed Carrington’s craft and what followed was her first Surrealist masterpiece, Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse) above.
What you might see is a neat, formally painted image of hot nonsense. And that is correct. But Carrington gave the girlies some Easter eggs in her accompanying short story, The Debutante, in which, a society girl trades lives with a hyena wearing a female face. Horny academics suggest the hyena represents her animalistic sexuality and difficulty in masking it; the swollen breasts painted on the hyena somewhat corroborate this. But what about the horsies? Carrington used them as her alter-ego or totem animal. If the hyena is her sexual repression in Self-Portrait, then her horse-girl spirit wants to be outside, roaming free.
Themes of entrapment pop up many times in Carrington’s work, she first fled from her conservative parent’s only to feel infantilised again in her relationship with Ernst. But Surrealism allowed Carrington to show her raw feelings and in a very Swiftian way, leaving traces of the female experience in her work for us to decode. This is where she deviated from Dali and his contemporaries.
The Surrealists weren’t um... amazing to women. Women were muses (only), primordial and childlike beings reductively referred to as the femme-enfant aka the woman child. Knowledge of this makes me feel many feelings about Max Ernst. Surprising no one, their relationship was doomed anyway, with the advent of WWII the pair were forcibly separated and though we might rejoice the end of their cursed union, Carrington was in right a state about it.
You know what a heartbroken woman who’s suffering from lifelong repression needs? To be understood and cared for. Carrington was, instead, popped into an asylum and pumped full of drugs. Mercifully, this rather suited the Surrealist aesthetic and our girl continued to paint, with works such as Green Tea and Down Below giving visceral impressions of her traumatic time in confinement. Carrington later absconded (not fucking with you she genuinely escaped) to Mexico, where she lived among Surrealists Frida Kahlo had referred to as, ‘those European bitches’.
Though Carrington’s earlier works provide much needed tea about the mid-century’s artistic inner-circle, her brilliance as an artist only grew. When later asked her thoughts on being a muse, she said, “I didn't have time to be anyone's muse... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.” A classy dame. And yet, even though she went on to have long, successful output as an artist and, eventually, as a women’s rights activist, there’s still no ‘Career’ tab on her Wikipedia – but there is an ‘Association with Max Ernst’ one.
***Ok what do you think, should I put an ‘Association with Leonora Carrington’ on Max Ernst’s Wikipedia? I think so too. Now toddle off and get on with your creative days, LOVE YOU ALL, as always feel free to send me suggestions of ANYTHING you want me to critique/review/touch on - let’s talk again soon.
C U Next Tuesday xxx Maggie Jeannnnnnn xxxx
(thanks to Grace for editing)