In 1937, against her family’s wishes, 20-years-old Carrington left England for France with her lover, much older and already established artist Max Ernst, where they both became active in the new and exciting art movement – Surrealism. This episode perhaps symbolises how unhappy she was in her expected societal role of a woman born into a well-off family, she wrote a fictional and very surreal short story ‘ The Debutante’ loosely based on that night. ‘ I was wearing a tiara ‘ And it was biting into my skull’ (p.21).

She did not remember this old-fashioned ritual fondly. Chapter One ‘ The Debutante’ begins in 1935 when young Leonora Carrington was presented as debutante at Buckingham Palace during the reign of King George V. Each chapter was titled after a work by Carrington. The Surreal Life… takes the reader on a wild ride through the twentieth century. The biography is based on the research into the artist’s archives, accounts of people who knew her at various stages of her life and Carrington’s personal accounts. Luckily, the author managed to find her father’s long-lost cousin in Mexico, they became good friends and remained close until the artist’s death. At the time of Moorhead’s personal discovery Carrington was not very well known in her native England. The infamous relative, who in her youth ‘abandoned the family’, turned out to be the Surrealist painter, Mexico’s national treasure Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Joanna Moorhead, a journalist, discovered one day that she was related to quite a famous artist. The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead.

Tove Jansson: Work and Love by Tuula Karjalainen. As I am currently on a mission to add more books about women artists to my bookshelf, here are three art books I really enjoyed reading recently.

Tove jansson art