Skip to main content

Leonora



'Leonora' is a novel based on the life of the artist and writer, Leonora Carrington, written by Elena Poniatowska, a friend of Carrington's for more than fifty years. It is, at the outset, a wonderful performance that tells the life of a 'cuckoo' born in a (very comfortable) nest not her own. A highly privileged and wealthy family acquires an only daughter (of four) who is highly imaginative, directly perceptive, and gloriously unpredictable.

From the beginning, art was a core preoccupation. She draws incessantly and drinks paintings down, absorbing masters and traditions. Likewise, she is subject to visions, her imagination was concrete and before her, not fancifully 'within her head', and expressed in a language that is reminiscent of the youthful Blake, except that for Carrington the reference points were more the Irish folklore of her beloved nanny, and of the sidhe,  the people of the mounds, rather than the informing Biblical actors of Blake's formation.

Knowing the outlines of her life, and loving her art, you can see not only the origins of many of her motifs - of horse and hyena to name but two, both present above - but the gathering doom of her early life when the conventions of her family's expectations collided with the necessities of her calling.

She was a debutante, presented at court, and courted by a procession of eligible men bewitched both by her incredible beauty and the prospects of her inheritance and she disdained them all. What point the artifice of courtly and country lives of privilege when what you truly needed to do was painting. And needed, not wanted, the soul's character was shaped well beyond and before the womb.

I have arrived at the point when, reluctantly, her parents are about to let her study art, hoping that having acquired some competence, it will 'settle' her. Little do they know that it will make her and break her relationship with them, utterly. She is about to find too her first great love, the painter Max Ernst, and plunge into the vortex of the Surrealists and the wider Paris art world.

Breton, whom she admired, described her as the Surrealists' muse, an epithet that she dismissed, reminding them that it was still their women who cooked their food and emptied their ashtrays! She always declined the "Surrealist" tag, after all she was painting her reality. There was no 'Sur' about it!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

Luminous Spaces - the poetry of Olav H. Hauge

Don't give me the whole truth, don't give me the sea for my thirst, don't give me the sky when I ask for light, but give me a glint, a dewy wisp, a mote as the birds bear water-drops from their bathing and the wind a grain of salt. It began with a poem, this poem, in Mark Oakley's 'The Splash of Words: Believing in Poetry' - a wonderful series of meditations on particular poems, one each chapter. The poet is the Norwegian, Olav H. Hague (1908-1994). I immediately ordered, 'Luminous Spaces: Selected Poems & Journals' and was enjoying dipping until, at the weekend, recovering from a stomach bug, I decided to read them through and fell wholeheartedly for a new friend. Hague was born on a farm. His formal education was brought short by a combination of restricted means, an inability to conquer mathematics: and, a voracious diet of reading ranging beyond the confines of any confining curriculum. He went to a horticultural college instead an...
1 comment
Read more

Richard Hauser and the evils of Marx

Richard was a distinguished Austrian sociologist who had contributed to the Wolfenden report that led to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England, Wales and Scotland in the late 1960's. I was remembering him on the plane today because I saw a reference to his wife, Hephzibah Menuhin, pianist sister of the violinist Yehudi and human rights activist. I met him after responding to an advertisement in the New Society. He lived in a house in Pimlico, a widower, with a clutch of young people, running an ill-defined (for me) social research/action institute, that I visited several times and to which Richard wanted to recruit me. I was never clear as to what my responsibilities might be and resisted co-option. He was, however, extraordinarily charismatic and as a Jew had fled Austria in 1938 not without receiving permanent damage to his hearing, courtesy of Gestapo interrogation. I vividly remember one story he told me that gives you an idea of his character. He was invit...
17 comments
Read more