Mick Hartley

The surrealist painter and writer Leonora Carrington has died in Mexico City at the age of 94:

Ms. Carrington, one of the last living links to the world of André Breton, Man Ray and Miró, was an art student when she encountered Ernst’s work for the first time at the International Surrealism Exhibition in London in 1936. A year later she met him at a party.

The two fell in love and ran off to Paris, where Ernst, more than 25 years her senior, left his wife and introduced Ms. Carrington to the Surrealist circle. “From Max I had my education,” she told The Guardian of London in 2007. “I learned about art and literature. He taught me everything.”

She became acquainted with the likes of Picasso, Dalí and Tanguy. With her striking looks and adventurous spirit, she seemed like the ideal muse, but the role did not suit. Miró once handed her a few coins and told her to run out and buy him a pack of cigarettes. “I gave it back and said if he wanted cigarettes, he could bloody well get them himself,” she told The Guardian. “I wasn’t daunted by any of them.”

In the Surrealist movement around Breton, women were generally expected to be muses rather than participants. It's interesting how it was chiefly British and American women, like Carrington or Lee Miller, who challenged this.

More from Joanna Moorhead in the Guardian:

Leonora was renowned in our family as its black sheep. But when I arrived on her doorstep in Mexico City in 2006 – a cousin from England she had never met – she could not have been more welcoming. I hope and believe she felt that in kindling a friendship with me, she was building a bridge back to her family and her native country. In the time I spent with her in her extraordinarily dark and chilly house (a little bit of Lancashire, teapot and all, in the centre of Mexico City), she would often talk about how, through nine decades of trying to work out what life was about, all she had succeeded in discovering was that we were merely naked apes who knew little about life and even less about death. She was the most honest, and the bravest, person I ever met.

Neither of these obituaries, though, mention her glorious short novel The Hearing Trumpet; something of a surreal masterpiece. And, happily, still in print. 

From the sleeve of the original English edition in 1976:

Already before its first official publication in Britain, The Hearing Trumpet enjoys the reputation of an underground classic. First written by the author and panter Leonora Carrington in the early 1960s, its existence seemed destined to remain unkno0wn to all but a small group of friends and admirers wnhen the original manuscript was lost shortly after completion. Luckily, a rough draft was uncovered in 1973, and the author was prevailed upon to re-work it for publication in French translation. When Le Cornet Acoustique appeared in France in 1974 it was universally acclaimed as a classic of "fantastic literature. Marian and her hearing trumpet have been likened to Alice and her looking-glass, and Luis Buñuel has said: "Reading The Hearing Trumpet liberates us from the miserable reality of our days."

Here's a taster.