Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) had a life that reads like a work of fiction. Born into money in Lancashire, she careered through a rich girl’s journey that involved being expelled from school, running away to France, going mad, finding the Devil, shacking up with the predatory German surrealist Max Ernst — who had a thing for injured younger women — and eventually fetching up in Mexico, where she delved deeper into the occult, practised witchery, studied alchemy, wrote unreadable novels and dabbled at being an artist.
It’s the kind of life that until recently would have been accused of privilege, decadence and whimsy. Today, with the global mood having three-point turned and unreason on the rise, it is widely admired. A couple of Biennales ago in Venice the theme for the entire jamboree took its name, The Milk of Dreams, from a children’s book by Carrington. It isn’t only reason from which art is back-pedalling; it is also adulthood.
To signal all this, and because it is a locale with its finger in the wind, the Firstsite gallery in Colchester has put together a Carrington show that has borrowed its rhythms from her and shoots about here, there and everywhere in a doomed attempt to keep up with her hectic imaginings.
Carrington is here because of her minimal connection with Essex. She was briefly educated at the famous Catholic boarding school of New Hall in Chelmsford, where she managed to be characteristically disruptive and was expelled by the nuns. The Firstsite gallery loves making local connections. Indeed, it is as excellent a destination as it is chiefly because its shows are tied so firmly to its locality. But roping Carrington into this event because she was expelled from a local school feels like a stretch, and the whole event has an air of hit and hope about it.
The display consists mainly not of art but of documentation — books, photos, extracts, captions and an assortment of blurry prints and facsimiles of such variable quality that I suspect some of them of being photocopies. It’s clear that genuine examples of Carrington’s art have been tough to source and that the show has been forced to talk her story rather than prove it.
There is, therefore, plenty of room to expand on her minimal Essex links and to make them a substantial chunk of the tale. New Hall school appears in a set of doomy postcards in which it looks like the setting for a Hammer horror movie. A potted history outlines the school’s connections with Mary Tudor, Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell.
Further gaps in the journey are filled by quick dips into Essex’s past — a picture sequence devoted to the local heroine Boudica — and spooky objects sourced in local museums, which, I suppose, inhabit the same superstitious psychic space as Carrington’s art: a mummified cat from Egypt; a bag of bones from a cave; some Celtic coins included because Carrington’s mother was Irish and would entertain her daughter with far-fetched tales of Celtic adventure.
The relentless detours feed a growing hunger for actual examples of Carrington’s work. A couple of teenage paintings, the first a view of the family home, the second a scene at Hyde Park featuring horses and hyenas, prove immediately that she had no natural fluency in her hand and that her imagination was always beleaguered and heavy.
A key painting called Green Tea, set in a rolling landscape — identified sloppily in the captions as “the countryside of Hazelwood Hall in Lancashire or the Mid-Essex countryside” — features an embalmed witch surrounded by fantastical bits of topiary and some chained-up horses. It feels like a lament for feminine imprisonment and the taming of natural forces, although nothing is ever certain in a Carrington painting. Unfortunately we are not looking at the actual picture here, but at a shiny poster facsimile, curling at the edges.
Perversely Carrington’s surrealist accomplice, Leonor Fini, with whom she shared a thunderous witch obsession, is better represented as an artist and steals the middle of the show with her hazy imaginings of female bondage and a suite of haunting witchy faces.
In the final room, set in Mexico, the thinking grows impossibly labyrinthine as the alchemy, the magic, the witchcraft and the Mexican gods are mixed with Buddhist notions and Druidic fantasies to create a surrealistic bouillabaisse of make-believe and superstition.
The only substantial painting in the show, called Night of the 8th, shows a witchy shaman approaching a snapping beastie from which is emanating a floating menagerie of imagined creatures and half-creatures of the sort invented previously by Hieronymus Bosch. I wanted to like the picture. I wanted to admire Carrington’s mental flexibility, her gender-bending adventurousness, the feminine pushiness and freedom of her art. But Night of the 8th is weak and scratchy, and no amount of retreating from reason will change that.
The good news is that hanging next to the Carrington, filling out the event, is a room devoted to Jessie Makinson, another painter of superstition, fantasy and witchcraft, but one whose work thrills and intrigues.
Makinson’s big paintings, each one the size of 20 typical Carringtons, are again about a liberated female presence romping through art. Her women have snaky eyes and judging from the broomsticks they carry they too are proud to be witches. There’s a sense of sexual abandonment to the storylines as well as the cavorting Amazons strip down to Renaissance nakedness and pile into action.
What wins here is the technique. A precise, beautiful, ambitious painting hand is letting its imagination roam wildly, while expertly referencing Renaissance art, Botticelli, the Flemish masters. The results have a touch of art deco about them, laced deliciously with satanic lunacy.
Leonora Carrington: Avatars & Alliances is at Firstsite, Colchester, to Feb 23
