The milk of dreams | Leonora Carrington at Newlands House Gallery

Kati Horna, Portrait of Leonora Carrington in her studio, 1956. Courtesy of the Leonora Carrington Council and rossogranada

In May this year, Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington’s 1945 oil painting, Les Distractions de Dagobert, sold at Sotheby’s New York for a staggering $28.5 million, the highest sum ever achieved at auction by a female British painter. To put this in context, no painting by Salvador Dalí has attracted such a price tag.

And just to think, twenty years ago, Carrington was so unknown in the country of her birth that her (much younger) second cousin, the journalist Joanna Moorhead, had no idea that her relative – long exiled in Mexico, and her late eighties – was an even an artist (until she met a Mexican art historian at a dinner party, who told her Carrington was a national treasure in her adopted country).

Moorhead’s interest was piqued, and she travelled out to Mexico City to introduce herself (Carrington had left England in 1937 and had had no contact with her family since). They became friends, and – with a book in mind – the journalist started making several trips out every year, until the artist’s death, aged 94, in 2011.

Leonora Carrington, Untitled, 1979. Wool tapestry, signed, 197 x 260 cm. Courtesy of the Leonora Carrington Council and rossogranada

There was a lot to learn. Carrington had been disowned by her parents in 1937 after eloping to Paris, aged 20, with French surrealist Max Ernst (he was 47),

moving with him to a home in the South of France where they collaborated on artworks and hosted the great and the good of the surrealist set. When Ernst was interned in 1939 – for ‘degeneracy’ – she moved to Spain, where she was sectioned into an asylum from which she managed to escape. She made her way to Mexico, where she set up a small studio in her house in the capital. There she spent her entire adult life creating art, in many forms, all of it inspired by her dreams, her imagination, and Mexican and Celtic folklore (her mother and nanny were Irish).

By the time the book, titled The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington, came out, in 2017, Carrington had been rediscovered by the British art world, with a 2015 exhibition at Tate Liverpool introducing her startlingly individual work to a wider audience. Her star has been in the ascendant since: prices have rocketed at auction, the 2022 Venice Biennale was titled The Milk of Dreams, after one of her children’s stories (she also wrote novels), and then came that remarkable sale in New York.

Leonora Carrington, Bird, 2011. Bronze sculpture, 69 x 72 x 92 cm. Courtesy of the Leonora Carrington Council and rossogranada

Last year Moorhead was asked to curate an exhibition of Carrington’s work by Nicola Jones, the director of Newlands House Gallery in Petworth. Newlands, situated in an elegant Georgian townhouse in the centre of the village, was opened in 2020, and has established a fine reputation with exhibitions of top-rate artists, alive and dead, including Sean Scully, Julian Opie and (surrealist photographer) Lee Miller.

Leonora Carrington, Woman with Fox, 2010. Bronze sculpture, 92 x 34 x 32 cm. Courtesy of the Leonora Carrington Council and rossogranada

The press view of the exhibition was extremely well attended, and the show has quite rightly attracted good reviews, including a five-star rave by Jonathan Jones in the Guardian.

Don’t expect to see any of Carrington’s large -scale masterpiece oil paintings, but do expect to see a range of artworks in a wide variety of

art forms, created right up to the year of her death: the thirteen rooms at Newlands are filled with lithographs, drawings, sculptures, masks, jewellery, tapestries and theatre designs, as well as a handful of paintings, all crafted in her inimitable style, all demonstrating her vivid imagination and interpretations of her sub and unconscious world. There are excerpts from her writing, and evidence of her fierce feminist campaigning. There are 1930s photographs of Carrington and her art-world friends by fellow surrealists Lee Miller and Roland Penrose.

Best of all, there’s a ten-minute interview between Moorhead and Carrington, filmed in 2009, during which the artist gives most of the journalist’s questions very short shrift indeed. This comes towards the end of the show, and Carrington’s personality comes across so vividly, it makes you feel like you’ve been personally acquainted: have you ever seen gallery viewers laughing at an exhibition video? This ‘encounter’ made me go back to the beginning of the exhibition, and look at the fantastical artwork all over again, with fresh eyes. Despite the paucity of major paintings, it’s a don’t-miss show, which runs in the Petworth gallery until October 26.