Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Leonora Carrington – Surrealist painter and writer, who fled WWII, escaped asylums, and created mystical art in Mexico.

Some women vanish into madness. Leonora Carrington galloped through it.

Picture this: 1940, Spain. A twenty-three-year-old British woman bolts from the gates of a psychiatric asylum, barefoot, trembling, drenched in moonlight and Ativan. Behind her, a crumbling Europe; ahead, Mexico City—a city of volcanoes, spirits, and heat thick as honey. She’s not running from reality. She’s running toward her own.

This is how the myth of Leonora Carrington begins. Not with paintbrushes or Parisian salons, but with locked wards and revolution. Her life reads like one of her own paintings—chaotic, enchanted, riddled with cryptic beasts and alchemical codes. But behind the myth was a woman far less interested in legend than liberation. She didn’t want to be a muse. She wanted to burn the idea of muses to the ground.

Carrington was a Surrealist—but don’t lump her in with the boys' club of melted clocks and mustachioed self-regard. Her art didn’t emerge from dreams. It came from something deeper, stranger: an inner mythology she protected like a secret garden. In her canvases, hyenas give birth to kings, witches commune with moons, eggs are not eggs but portals. She didn’t paint what she saw. She painted what saw her.

But to understand the artist, you have to know the girl she once was: a rebellious heiress from England’s aristocracy, the kind who painted her hobby horse with ink and refused debutante balls like they were death sentences. At nineteen, she met Max Ernst—the famously married, notoriously magnetic German Surrealist twice her age—and fell in love like someone jumping off a cliff. They decamped to the south of France, made a home from driftwood and delusion. For a time, they lived as wild creatures in a painter’s Eden.

Then came the war. Ernst, a German, was arrested by the French as an enemy alien. Their idyll collapsed overnight. Carrington fled—first to Spain, where the trauma cracked her mind open like a geode. She described the unraveling as both horror and initiation. Institutionalized, drugged, dismembered by the psychiatric machinery of the day, she emerged not broken but transformed. Madness, she said later, was her crucible.

This wasn’t the kind of backstory the art world liked to frame on a gallery wall. But it shaped her completely.

After escaping the asylum—yes, literally escaping—she fled to Lisbon and sold a family-owned painting to buy passage to Mexico. There, she married a diplomat, hung out with Leon Trotsky’s widow, and settled into a surrealist sisterhood with fellow expats like Remedios Varo and Kati Horna. Together they formed a kind of coven—feminist, esoteric, fiercely private. They drank coffee, plotted dreams, laughed about men. In a world that wanted them to be pretty ornaments, they created magic instead.

Mexico was more than sanctuary—it was alchemy. The city's myth-soaked atmosphere and indigenous mysticism harmonized with Carrington’s sensibility. This wasn’t just a place. It was a living tarot deck. Here, she painted prolifically, often in secret, with zero concern for commercial fame. Her work—arcane, luminous, haunted—quietly redefined the language of Surrealism. Unlike her male contemporaries, Carrington didn’t fetishize the irrational. She wielded it.

Take The Lovers, for instance—a painting where a chimera-headed woman lifts a pale, androgenous figure into the sky like a sacrament. Or And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, where half-human creatures gather in ritual under a moonlit arch. These were not just fever dreams. They were philosophical dispatches from a psyche that had weathered the abyss and come back with gifts.

And yet, for decades, Carrington was overlooked. Not obscure, exactly—more like unclassifiable. The art world didn't know what to do with a Surrealist who refused to explain her work, who shrugged at interviews and lived with a flock of cats. In Mexico, she became a legend. Elsewhere, she was an enigma. Critics often defined her in relation to men—Ernst’s lover, Breton’s discovery—without seeing the mountain range she was building all on her own.

Only recently has the world caught up.

In the 21st century—long after her death in 2011—Leonora Carrington has become a beacon for feminist art historians, a spiritual mother to witches, weirdos, and women who paint their truths in metaphor. Her 1944 novel The Hearing Trumpet, a surrealist masterpiece featuring a 92-year-old heroine with a beard and an appetite for apocalypse, has been reissued, reread, reclaimed. In today’s era of deconstructed identity and psychic survival, her vision feels eerily current. She painted the divine feminine before it was a hashtag. She wrote about patriarchy as a fever dream before it had a name.

It’s not just her paintings that draw crowds now; it’s her presence. Her face—hawk-eyed, amused, feral—graces murals in Mexico City. Young artists quote her like scripture. There’s a Leonora Carrington Museum. There are tattoos of her paintings, scholarly essays, TikToks dissecting her dream logic.

But maybe the most surreal thing about Carrington is this: she never wanted to be anyone’s icon. In interviews, she was notoriously unsentimental. “I painted for myself,” she once said, “not for anyone else.” She hated nostalgia. She considered fame a kind of violence. She preferred soup to ceremony.

Her life was mystical, yes—but not because she sought it. The mysticism came because she refused to abandon herself, even when the world tried to shatter her. She made art not from luxury or vanity, but as an act of spiritual survival. In a culture that still gaslights women for their rage, their visions, their mad clarity—Carrington stands like a prophet.

Today, “Leonora Carrington” is one of the most searched names in Surrealism. But that’s not the point. The point is the work. The strange, untamable, blazing work. She built a universe that was bigger than biography, stranger than any Google search, truer than logic.

And if she were here now? She’d probably roll her eyes at the sudden attention, pick up a brush, and return to her beasts.