Leonora Carrington (English-Mexican, 1917-2011, b. Clayton-le-Woods, Lancashire, England, d. Mexico City, Mexico) - La Silla: Daghda Tuatha dé Dannaan, 1955, Paintings: Oil on Canvas, Private Collection
Hermann Landshoff, Leonora Carrington, Andre Breton, Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, New York, with Morris Hirshfield’s painting nude at the window (1941) at Peggy Guggenheim’s town-house, 1942.
Leonora Carrington, Tiburón, ca. 1942, a stunner that needs to be seen up close to be really seen. A lot’s going on with this passenger fish, including an execution chamber in its basement. This month (April 2017) marked the Carrington centennial, and there are three brand new books of this unique artist and writer’s work: The Complete Stories (some never before published); Down Below, her brief but harrowing 1941 memoir; and the children’s book The Milk of Dreams, which brings together her writing and visuals in nine stories of the bizarre and dreamy, now available in English for the first time. Clearly time for a major Carrington revival.
In November, we have a newly translated volume of Józef Czapski’s haunting memoirs of the Soviet Starobielsk prison camp and insightful reflections on art making, alongside Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, a delightful surrealist adventure set in the strangest of nursing homes.
The Polish artist, writer, and army officer Józef Czapski became a Soviet prisoner during World War II—experiences he illuminated in Lost TimeandInhuman Land, previously published by NYRB Classics. This new volume includes his memoirs of the doomed men of the Starobielsk prison camp, where he was one of just a few Polish officers to escape execution. Also included are a selection of Czapski’s essays on art, history, and literature.
Beloved by Björk, Ali Smith, and Luis Buñuel, The Hearing Trumpet is a fantastic romp starring an eccentric ninety-two-year-old woman who is institutionalized by her family. But this is no ordinary institution: the buildings are shaped like cakes and igloos, the residents must undergo bizarre religious training, and it houses an ancient, mysterious magic. This feminist fable by the treasured surrealist painter remains one of the most original and inspirational of all fantastic novels.
“I can’t keep on all my life writing in the same way…The world now is quite different and so is my life in it.” —Anna Kavan, née Helen Woods, born this day in 1901
As editor Victoria Walker notes in her intro, Kavan’s stories about troubled outsiders recall the work of Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, and Carson McCullers, and her gothic tones might remind you of Leonora Carrington and Isak Dinesen. Definitely worth a read.
Cover art: Gertrude Abercrombie, Reverie, 1947; photograph: Illinois State Museum
