Gallery  February 3, 2025  Cynthia Close

Leonora Carrington’s Enchanting Surrealism at the Rose Art Museum

Courtesy Rose Art Museum

Leonora Carrington, Rabinos (the Rabbis), 1960. Oil on Canvas. 15 1⁄4 x 23 1⁄4 in. (38.735 x 59.055 cm). © Leonora Carrington / Arts Rights Society (ARS), New York.

I didn't have time to be anyone's muse... I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist. -Leonora Carrington

The 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 was titled The Milk of Dreams after a book of illustrated children’s stories created by the British-Mexican surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). The title was more than a symbol of recognition for this important artist. 

Courtesy Rose Art Museum

Leonora Carrington, The Last Resort, 1954. Oil on canvas. 52 x 32 in. (132.08 x 81.28 cm). © Leonora Carrington / Arts Rights Society (ARS), New York.

For the first time in its 127-year history, the Biennale featured a majority of female artists. In May 2023, Carrington’s 1945 painting Les Distractions de Dagobert went for $28.5 million at Sotheby’s, a new record for a British-born female artist. 

Now, from January 22 to June 1, 2025, the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University will be giving Carrington her first ever museum exhibition in New England. Titled Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver the exhibition includes over 30 works showcasing a world filled with her magical energies reminiscent of the phantasmagorical scenes in paintings by the early Netherlandish painter, Hieronymus Bosch (c1450-1516).            

We spoke with Dr. Gannit Ankori, Henry and Lois Foster Director, Rose Art Museum Chief Curator, and Professor of Fine Arts and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University, about her admiration for Carrington and her motivation for organizing this exhibition.

“Leonora Carrington has always been a personal favorite. I came to know her through my work on Frida Kahlo.” [Ankori is internationally renowned for her groundbreaking scholarship on Frida Kahlo.]  Although Carrington was born in 1917 in Lancashire, England, she spent most of her long and creative life in Mexico City, where she died on May 25, 2011 at the age of 94. 

Courtesy Rose Art Museum

Leonora Carrington, Dream Weaver, 1955. Pencil on paper. 19 1⁄2 x 13 1⁄2 in. (49.53 x 34.29 cm). © Leonora Carrington / Arts Rights Society (ARS), New York.

In the 1940s, Mexico provided a haven for surrealists, a movement dominated by men. Dr. Ankori elaborated, “Carrington was one of the founders of feminism in Mexico. She also worked and saw herself as a surrealist. Her imagination was boundless. She hated organized religion, but in Mexico, she tapped into the occult… Her imagery is so rich; every painting is like an archeological site.” 

Dr. Ankori teaches a course titled “Provocative Art: Outside the Comfort Zone,” an apropos description of Carrington’s life and stylistic approach. “She was a prodigy. I knew her figure and landscape paintings. I was not aware of the drawings. Like the drawing Dream Weaver, it almost sums up her entire life– she weaves dreams. I managed to get works from her earliest days when she was just a teenager, learning how to draw.” 

Carrington’s indomitable spirit rebelled against all the restraints— sexual, cultural, and societal— that her nouveau riche family tried to place on her. She experienced trauma. She was institutionalized. She’d been drugged, given electroshock treatments, and raped. 

Courtesy Rose Art Museum

Leonora Carrington, Nunscape at Manzanillo, 1956. Oil on canvas. Framed: 37 x 45 in. (93.98 x 114.3 cm). © Leonora Carrington / Arts Rights Society (ARS), New York.

She had a relationship with influential surrealist Max Ernst (1891-1976) when he was 40 and she was 19. But, she ended it saying, “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 series of five sepia-tinged black and white photos of Carrington at her studio working on the painting Nunscape at Manzanillo (1956), taken by her friend Kati Horna (1912 – 2000), demonstrate her intensity and focus as she worked. 

The photos and the painting add a layer of intimacy and connection for viewers in this thought-provoking exhibition. As Dr. Ankori stated, “You see her process. She was prescient. She saw things that evaded the rational mind.” 

Courtesy Rose Art Museum

Leonora Carrington, Night Nursery Everything, 1947. Tempera on Masonite. 23 1⁄2 x 31 1⁄2 in. (59.69 x 80 cm). Private collection. © Leonora Carrington / Arts Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Two spectacular paintings— Night Nursery Everything (1947), a tempera on Masonite, and the oil on canvas Pastoral (1950)—  are representative of the rich, multilayered storytelling we have come to associate with Carrington. They are included in the show along with rarely seen preparatory drawings

While modest in size, each painting is an amalgam of vignettes. Night Nursery Everything is drenched in reddish, sienna tones. An interior vision of a child’s world dominated by two odd female figures provokes ambiguous memories. Are the women protectors? Specters? Guardians?  

Courtesy Rose Art Museum

Leonora Carrington, Pastoral, 1950. Oil on canvas. 21 x 29 1⁄2 in. (53.34 x 74.93 cm). © Leonora Carrington / Arts Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Pastoral takes us outside. Cooler tones prevail. Like an alchemist, Carrington presents a picnic on the grass where a nongendered ghostly figure is being offered an opossum-like animal by a human-sized, pointy-snouted creature. Other strange, yet oddly familiar animals scamper and fly about. 

The scene evokes a feeling similar to what this viewer experienced reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) by Lewis Carroll (1832-1898). There are similarities in the backgrounds of these two precocious and exceptionally gifted creatives. Like Carroll, Carrington invites us to carve out our own meaning. 

It is astounding that the Museum of Modern Art did not acquire a significant work by Carrington until 2019. To contextualize Carrington’s achievements, Surrealism(s) – Then & Now, co-curated by Dr. Ankori and Brandeis Director of Communication and Marketing Chad Sirois, is drawn from the museum's permanent collection and traces surrealism’s evolution from its beginnings to today. 

Artists on view include William Baziotes, Giorgio de Chirico, Gregory Crewdson, Max Ernst, Mona Hatoum, Frida Kahlo, Hayv Kahraman, Ljuba, René Magritte, André Masson, Roberto Matta, Tracey Moffatt, Tony Oursler, Pierre Roy, Kay Sage, Yves Tanguy, and others, placing the quality of the surrealism collection at Brandeis Universities’ Rose Art Museum among the finest in the country.

42.365687314483, -71.2591314

Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver
Start Date:
January 22, 2025
End Date:
June 1, 2025
Venue:
Rose Art Museum
About the Author

Cynthia Close

Cynthia Close holds a MFA from Boston University, was an instructor in drawing and painting, Dean of Admissions at The Art Institute of Boston, founder of ARTWORKS Consulting, and former executive director/president of Documentary Educational Resources, a film company. She was the inaugural art editor for the literary and art journal Mud Season Review. She now writes about art and culture for several publications.

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