Surrealist Artist Leonora Carrington Dead at 94

Source: AFP

Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington dead at 94
By Omar Torres | AFP - 2 hours 50 minutes ago

British-born Leonora Carrington, the Surrealist artist who ran off with Max Ernst and escaped from a mental hospital before fleeing Nazi Europe, has died in Mexico at age 94, officials said Thursday.

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Born in Lancashire, England into an aristocratic industrial family on April 6, 1917 at the cusp of the Surrealist movement, Carrington pitched herself headlong into painting at a young age, and survived her contemporaries to become one of the last Surrealists of the era. At 20 she moved to Paris where she struck up a love affair with Surrealist painter Max Ernst, 26 years her senior. Ernst introduced her to major figures of the art and cultural movement including Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro and Surrealism's founder Andre Breton.

After Ernst was arrested by the Gestapo in Nazi-occupied France in 1939 -- he escaped and eventually made his way to the United States -- Carrington fell into a deep depression before being committed to a psychiatric hospital in Santander, Spain. She recounts the experience, in which she was administered powerful drugs that were later banned, in her book 1972 book "Down Below."

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"She was never insane," Poniatowska told AFP. "She was faced with war and the fools she met who did not understand the dangers of war."

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Carrington with Max Ernst (on her right shoulder) and Paul Eluard (on her left)
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