FLOODESIGN

Today, 100 years after her birth in Lancashire, England, and six after her death in Mexico City, one can imagine a future in which the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington is no longer relegated to a secondary mention in the compendia of the movement. COVER YOURSELF, LEONORA T H E S U R R E A L I ST W H O WO U L D N OT B E S I L E N C E D BY C A I T L I N D O N O H U E In 2014, Sotheby's sold one of her paintings for $2.6 million. In 2015, a Tate Liverpool retrospective reintroduced her to her native country. This year saw the release of an anthology of her unnerving short stories, featuring previously unpublished work. Like Frida Kahlo, another artist who worked in Mexico and whose fame skyrocketed posthumously, Carrington's legacy appears bound for the kind of renown often denied to women who had the mixed blessing of having been linked to high-powered men. Born into a nouveau riche textiles family, Carrington spent her childhood riding horses and getting kicked out of convent schools. In her teens she enraptured Max Ernst, who was then one of the world's most famous visual artists. The two moved to Paris, where Carrington, once presented as a debutante to the queen of England, entered Surrealist café society. She met Marcel Duchamp, Louis Aragon and André Breton, and she famously declined to fetch Joan Miró cigarettes. "I wasn't daunted by any of them," she recalled of these male luminaries, whose artistic predilection for presenting female sexuality ran aground on a woman keen to be her own muse. It was rumored she later covered Luis Buñuel's hotel room with menstrual-blood handprints after he forced his keys upon her at a party, in ham-handed ardor. The painter Leonora Carrington in her Greenwich Village apartment, circa 1942. bpk Bildagentur/Sammlung Fotografie/Archiv Landshof/Art Resource, NY 48 www.peakperfs.org

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