|
Two years before Carrington's arrival in Mexico, the 1940 International Exposition of Surrealism, organized by Wolfgang Paalen of Austria, André Breton of France, and the Colombian poet César Moro, had presented works by Picasso, Masson, Duchamp, Delvaux, Ernst, Tanguy, Dalí, Domínguez and Paalen, as well as work by Mexican artists now known as the Generation of 1920-1940. Included in the group was Frida Kahlo, who traveled in 1938 to Paris and came in contact with the surrealists. De Chirico, Dalí, Magritte, Delvaux and Picasso were not only well known in Mexico, but seemed to have codified and dogmatized what Mexican popular and traditional art expressed naturally. From this, there was an easy artistic identification and fusion which, like the Christian and pre-Hispanic syncretism after the conquest of Mexico, gave rise to an outpouring of expression. Roberto Montenegro, Manuel Rodríguez Lozano, Antonio Ruiz, Carlos Mérida, Guillermo Meza, as well as Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros (who joined more from enthusiasm than conviction), represented the meeting of two worlds, which practically proved that there was an unsuspected inherent surrealism throughout the planet, mingling the Mexican proclivity for fantasy and, of course, the symbolic nourishment of their ancestral art, with the dogmatic surrealist pretensions.
Carrington would later establish friendships with Paalen and his wife, the French painter Alice Rahon, who had arrived in Mexico at the same time as Breton; with the Spanish painter Remedios Varo and her husband, the French poet Benjamin Peret; the Hungarian José Horna and his wife, Kati, as well as with the Mexican painter Gunther Gerszo, the Spanish film maker Luis Buñuel, with the poet Octavio Paz, and, of course, with a small artistic and intellectual world whose influence continues even today. In 1944 Carrington met Edward James, a British aristocrat of refined surrealist taste. Their close friendship would last until his death in 1984. For Carrington, James represented a powerful creative stimulus, a vital intellectual collaborator and a dedicated collector of her work. Their mutual influence resulted, for Carrington, in a number of paintings (among others, Ulu's Pants, 1952; Are You Really Syrius, 1953, Song of Gomorrah, 1963) closely related to the syncretic design (Mesopotamian-Egyptian-Gothic-Surrealist) in the construction of James' house in the jungle of Xilitla, San Luis Potosí, Mexico. Another close, undying friendship was with Remedios Varo (1913-1963). The two were inseparable and Paz called them "bewitched bewitchers..., unmoved by social mores, esthetics or cost... they cross our city with an air of indescribable and supreme distraction. Where are they going? To where they are called by imagination and passion,"(4) expressing the Mexican admiration for their worldly assurance topped off by their fame as irreverent spellbinders.
In the forties, Mexico had no more than a dozen art galleries and, of course, no viable market in which to participate, such as that of New York, to which Rivera, Kahlo, Orozco, Siqueiros and Tamayo had access. During that decade, Carrington occasionally exhibited her work in New York. It wasn't until 1956 that she had her first solo exhibit in Mexico. In 1957 she had her second, and in 1960, the third, held at the Palace of Fine Arts, which would consolidate her creative personality. Both the art critics and the public received her with delighted astonishment.
Some of her themes during the forties--autobiographical passages in the form of mythological tales: (Down Below, 1941; Crookhey Hall, 1947; Chiki, Ton Pays, 1947), fairy tales: (Green Tea, 1942; The Pomps of the Subsoil, 1947; Nine, Nine, Nine, 1948), are revisited in a new light in her paintings of the fifties and sixties: Celtic myths in Samain, 1951; nostalgia for childhood in Inventory, 1957; secret doctrines in Kabala, 1964; children's games as rituals in The Candle Game, 1967; the inclusion of portraits of real people, such as her two children, born in 1946 and 1947, as witnesses of fantastic events in And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, 1953; myths in the light of new analytic and literary theories (The Giantess, 1950; Sacrament at Minos, 1954; Temple of the Word, 1954), which present on one hand, the cotidian as a succession of unusual events, and on the other, voyages of the spirit through time and space in search of itself in the face of infinity, since the official story is a mere masquerade.
In the fifties, together with the poet Octavio Paz and the painter Juan Soriano, Carrington began a theatrical adventure, famous even today, in spite of its brief duration, for having given a foothold to the development of avant garde theater in Mexico. "Spoken Poetry" was an experiment, according to Paz, which tried to "return to theater its character of mystery: a ritual game and a spectacle that would include the public. I remember that Leonora Carrington proposed that the spectators wear masks..."(5) Shortly afterward Carrington met the Chilean mime, Alejandro Jodorovsky, a student of Marcel Marceau in France and the one who introduced the happening as well as promoting the theater of the absurd in Mexico. Together in 1962 they presented Penelope, the theatrical work she had written in 1946. And in 1968 Carrington did the scenery for the presentation of El rey se muere, by Ionesco, directed by Jodorovsky.
|
