I am delighted to see that the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) has acquired two paintings by the surrealist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), an artist usually described as “Anglo-Mexican” but whose DNA and wild imagination both had roots in Westmeath.
One of the additions, which date from the mid and late 1940s, is untitled. The other is called The High Queen of Ireland.
And the latter may be a key to understanding the personality of a woman who, although she grew up in England, had a head filled with Celtic myth and folklore by her Moate-born mother, Marie Moorehead.
For the young Leonora, links with the mother country were reinforced by summer visits. And even after decades living in Mexico, her home from 1942 onwards, the influence lingered.
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One of her mature-period paintings, for example, is Grandma Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen (now in Oklahoma and not, alas, IMMA).
How much detail the scene borrows from the actual Moate kitchen is debatable. Because set against the backdrop of what might be a Stanley range, it features mysteriously cloaked female figures working like alchemists on a table within a magic circle, while a giant goose towers over them.
But it fits with what a long-time friend and patron, the collector Edward James, once said of Carrington: that her work wasn’t so much painted as “brewed [ ...] in a cauldron at the stroke of midnight”.
And as the title makes explicit, even after decades of exile from her native England, never mind Ireland, her imagination was still inflamed by childhood memories, real or inherited, of Moate.
In a 2017 biography, British journalist Joanna Moorehead, a cousin of the painter, argued that long before she joined the surrealist movement in the 1930s, Carrington was already there in spirit, thanks to her Irish heritage.
[ Lionising Leonora – An Irishman’s Diary about artist Leonora CarringtonOpens in new window ]
“What her mother and grandmother gave Leonora was the raw material for her life: a way of looking at the world that allowed an unusually wide berth for the inexplicable, the spiritual, the mystical, the bizarre.
“In essence, it was a world that was naturally surreal, long before Leonora ever heard the word ‘surrealism’; indeed Ireland, like Mexico, was surreal centuries before the coining of the word by Guillaume Apollinaire, or the writing of the surrealist manifestos by André Breton et al.”
Her mother’s society marriage in 1907 to the wealthy Harold Carrington meant the future artist grew up in a stately home in Lancashire, to a life of privilege.
But she was to suffer some well-documented mental health problems too. Those came to a crisis during the second World War, just before which she had been living in Paris with the painter Max Ernst, who was considered “degenerate” by the Nazis.
The couple were forced to flee the occupation, but in opposite directions – he to the US, she to Spain. In the process she had a psychiatric breakdown, was hospitalised for three years and treated with dubious drugs, at least one of them subsequently banned.
Escaping that, and Europe in general, she found refuge in Mexico, a country that became a spiritual and actual homeland for the rest of her life.
Thereafter, Mayan folk beliefs mingled with her inherited Celtic ones in a heady concoction that turned her into one of her adopted country’s most famous artists long before she died, in 2011, aged 94.
She had been long forgotten by her mother country, and even by her father one. But her declining years saw a revival of interest in Britain, and in 2013 IMMA also unveiled a posthumous exhibition of her work.
IMMA’s two new acquisitions restate Ireland’s claims on an artist who, despite long absence from it, never relinquished her roots here.
Carrington’s kitchen portrait dated from an impoverished period in the 1970s, when she was living in the US but still haunted by memories of childhood visits to Moate.
As Joanna Moorehead commented: “[It] might have been half a century later, and she might have been thousands of miles away in New York, but she could still remember Granny’s vast, cavernous kitchen with its huge range, and she could still smell the wafting scent of her cooking.
“The room was mysterious and magical; in her memories it was bathed in a crimson glow, but rather than symbolising warmth and safety, the colour seems to have been linked more to a blood-red warning of the underworld currents and dangers that lurked in the shadows.”
Hence the painting, “both humorous and ominous”, in which one of the cooks brandishes a knife but it is not clear whether the giant goose is prey or pursuer.
The painting has all the ambiguities that were the hallmark of Carrington’s work, suggests Moorehead; “also, it straddles the two halves of her life, since she has placed the staple ingredients of Mexican cuisine – corn, peppers, garlic – on the table of a kitchen in rural Ireland. Surviving [ancestors] remember the kitchen; but the only person who could have put those ingredients there was Leonora.”
