![]() ![]() It’s worth adding that Mexico had a number of homegrown female artists associated with Surrealism, too: María Izquierdo and Frida Kahlo are celebrated examples. The latter, by contrast, an alumna of the San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, was a gifted draughtswoman who planned her pictures with meticulous care. The former was more intuitive and, through the use of egg tempera, earned praise for her jewel-like tones and delicate veils of colour. The three women, all in their late twenties or early thirties on arrival in Mexico, met regularly, whether to cook for each other to shop together in markets to throw fancy-dress parties to take each other’s children to school (Horna named her only daughter, Norah, after Carrington) to play jokes on neighbours (such as serving them tapioca coloured with squid ink and pretending it was caviar) or to make art.Ĭarrington and Varo had different approaches to painting. It wasn’t long before the Englishwoman became friends with two other female Surrealist refugees who lived nearby: the Spanish painter Remedios Varo and the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna. In 1943, Carrington took up residence in Colonia Roma, a well-to-do district of Mexico City. ‘What the French Surrealists codified has always been an everyday reality in Mexico… part of the cultural stream, a spontaneous fusing of myth and fact, dream and vigil, reason and fantasy’ - Carlos Fuentes There’s no doubt, however, that as years passed, especially with the advent of the Second World War, Surrealism began to flourish in discrete ways in discrete regions - and the influence of the man Carrington called its ‘headmaster’ (Breton) began to wane. Oppenheim’s Object (1936) - consisting of a fur-lined teacup, saucer and spoon - ranks as one of the boldest Surrealist artworks of them all.įrom its Parisian roots, Breton was keen to spread the movement far and wide: international Surrealist exhibitions were duly held in Copenhagen, Prague, London, New York and Mexico City between 19. Surrealism’s raison d’être was the bold exploration and expression of an artist’s subconscious, and there was nothing in theory that gave a man’s subconscious precedence over a woman’s. Max Ernst alone counted Leonor Fini, Dorothea Tanning, Meret Oppenheim and Leonora Carrington as a wife or girlfriend. Several of the first female Surrealists actually joined the movement via an oblique route: that is, as the lovers of male Surrealists. How to explain this seeming paradox? Well, in part it was down to the simple passage of time: a small masculine cohort had, by the mid-1930s, developed into a much larger, more diverse one. ![]()
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