Leonora Carrington
Committed to an asylum in Spain after fleeing the Nazis, she escaped and became a leading surrealist
Leonora Carrington was born into a wealthy English textile family who expected her to be presented at court and married off suitably. She refused, was expelled from more than one school for rebellion, and instead studied art in London and Paris, where in her twenties she began a relationship with the much older German surrealist Max Ernst.
When the Second World War began, Ernst, a German national living in France, was interned as an enemy alien. The shock, combined with the collapse of their life together, brought on a severe breakdown in Carrington. Fleeing to Spain, she was forcibly committed by her family to a psychiatric institution in Santander, where she was treated with convulsive drugs and later described the experience in unflinching detail in her memoir Down Below.
She escaped the arrangement her family had made for her future by marrying a Mexican diplomat, which secured her a passage out of Europe, and settled in Mexico City in the early 1940s. There, alongside fellow exile Remedios Varo, she became a central figure of Mexican surrealism, painting dreamlike, richly symbolic scenes drawing on alchemy, Celtic myth and Mexican folklore.
Carrington continued painting, sculpting and writing for the rest of her long life, largely apart from the European art world that had first shaped her, and died in Mexico City in 2011 at ninety four.