Leonora Carrington – who recently became the most successful female artist in UK history when her painting Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) was sold at Sotheby’s in New York for USD$28.5 million – will be celebrated in a major exhibition in Newlands House Gallery, Petworth this summer.
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00:00Good morning, my name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers and how lovely
00:06this morning to speak to Joanna Moorhead, who is the curator of a fascinating sounding
00:11exhibition, Leonora Carrington, a Rebel Visionary, which is a new exhibition at Newlands House
00:17Gallery in Pepworth. Now you have the distinction of being her cousin and you got to meet Leonora
00:24in Mexico in 2006. Now there's a long story behind that, but tell me more about how you
00:30found her when you met her for the first time, knowing that she was this mysterious cousin
00:35of yours.
00:36Well, you're right, it was a very important moment in my life, meeting Leonora. I remember
00:45her coming down the corridor to open the door and she was, I mean, her housekeeper had opened
00:50the door, so she was this small figure coming out of this kind of dark room behind. She
00:57was dressed completely in black, which is usually how she was dressed. And I said to
01:03her, hello Prim, because Prim was the name she was always known by in our family. And
01:09she said to me, I'm not Prim anymore, I'm Leonora. And I understood in that moment that
01:15she had moved on and she'd been gone for many decades by that point from our family
01:21and that she was living, she'd gone out to live a very different life.
01:25And she was estranged from the family, but it sounds like that melted away as soon as
01:31you met her.
01:32Yeah, I mean, things hadn't been easy when she sort of rejected our family all these
01:41years before and she'd run away with the Surrealist artist Max Ernst to live in Paris
01:46with the Surrealists. So that included Picasso and Dali and Duchamp and Breton and all those
01:50huge figures of 20th century art. And she was, by the time I met her, the only person
01:56left from that group because she was by far the youngest. She was only in her 20s and
02:00they were mostly men in their 40s and 50s.
02:02And she was, what, late 80s when you met her, presumably?
02:05Yes, exactly that. She was at the end of her 80s.
02:08Tell me more about what you sensed of her personality, just being with her.
02:13She was very, very curious about life. And I think that that's what made her such a great
02:21artist and such a great person to spend time with. And I was then lucky enough to spend
02:26quite a lot of time with her over the next five years. She always said she wasn't interested
02:33in telling you or anybody what her paintings were about. She handed them over. Her paintings
02:40belonged to you, the viewer. And I think there was an extraordinary democracy about that,
02:46about her. And she was always, although she was the famous artist, she was more interested
02:52in what you, you know, she would always be interested in what was going on around her
02:55in politics and what was happening on the street and what you were doing if you met her.
02:59And she had a great sense of humor and she had an extraordinary sense of kind of adventure about
03:03her. And although she was known for these amazing adventures she'd had with the Surrealists,
03:09and then there was a whole story about her escaping across Europe in the middle of the
03:14Second World War and all sorts of things happened, including a time when she was locked up in an
03:18asylum. So she had this extraordinarily adventurous life in her early years.
03:24But when I knew her in her late 80s and then in her 90s, she was still living an adventurous life.
03:30And I found that captivating. I felt so lucky to be able to share it with her for the time I was
03:38there. And I knew that I would learn a lot of important things about getting older, because
03:42I was in my early 40s and she was in her 80s. And I thought, hey, I want to get old out, you know,
03:46Leonora is. Fantastic. So what do you think she would make of this exhibition that you've curated?
03:52I hope she'd be, obviously, I hope she'd be really pleased. I think what we're doing in this
03:57exhibition is trying to show the breadth of Leonora's work and also that she carried on
04:04working right up to the end of her life. As I say, she's known as an artist and writer,
04:10and she's known, a lot's known biographically about one very extraordinary period of her life.
04:16But actually, she lived a long life and she made a lot of art and she made art in a lot of different
04:20directions. She was a wonderful painter, she was a wonderful writer, but she was also a sculptor,
04:27a maker of tapestries, a designer of jewellery, a maker of lithographs. There's so much more to her
04:31oeuvre. And at Newlands House, we're going to be showing a lot of this work and it's work that's
04:36never been seen in the UK before. Fantastic. Now, there is significance to where you are sitting
04:41right now behind you. That's right. Behind me is a lithograph by Leonora, dating from 1997,
04:49and it's one of the pieces that we will have in the exhibition at Newlands House Gallery.
04:55It's one of the works that, one of the things Leonora was always interested in from her
05:01earliest years, right to the end of her life, was animals. And she was very interested in boundaries.
05:07And one of the boundaries she was interested in was the boundary between human animals
05:13and animals. And a lot of her work references animals. And this is one of those pieces.
05:21Fantastic. Well, it's going to be a fascinating exhibition. Really lovely to speak to you and
05:26best wishes for the whole exhibition. Great to speak to you. Thank you so much. Thank you.