Cathy's Art Diary

Lively online lecture from ARTscapades looking at life and art of Leonora Carrington through the places where she lived. I had heard the speaker, Joanna Moorhead, before about her first book, a biography of Carrington, at the Charleston Festival, but it was well worth hearing the story again of how she discovered the artist who was a long lost cousin of Moorhead’s father having been been disowned by the family and how they built a relationship when Carrington was in her 90s. This second book looked at houses which were important to Carrington from her childhood home the Gothic Crooky Hall   but concentrating on the house in Mexico City where Moorhead met and spent time with her and the house at Saint-Martin-d'Ardèche which she lived in and decorated with Max Ernst. I was particularly interested in the latter which reminded me of Charleston as a lot of the original art remains.

Fascinating talk at Charleston Farmhouse as part of the Charleston Festival with Joanna Moorhead author of a biography of her father’s cousin, the Surrealist painter Leonora Carrington. This was an interesting detective story as well as a biography as Joanna told us about how this relative had been the black sheep of the family who she had initially only known of though whispered conversations between relatives. She had realised Leonora had ended up in Mexico but it was only through a chance meeting with a Mexican art historian at a dinner party that Joanna realised that her aunt was still alive and a major artist in Mexico. Joanna told us the story of Leonora’s life from a debutant in 1935, through her artistic life in Paris with max Ernst, holiday’s with Lee Millar and Roland Penrose, being in an asylum in Spain and eventually escaping to Mexico. The chair of the event was Joanna Biggs who had edited Leonora’s short stories so the discussion was interesting about wh...