Review: Joy Williams on Leonora Carrington

So much of what has been written about surrealism is boring. It’s true that Breton was boring as were the manifestos and the politics which were extremely boring. The artists themselves could be boring, their posturing and mischievousness, their collages and fanciful games (though the purported first result of the Exquisite Corpse game is pretty good: The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine). The early surrealists were a merry male collective. Women were accepted as devotees and idealized as muse and guide to the mysterious of the unconscious, for what could be more delightfully unconscious than a woman? The revolutionary aspect of the movement soon devolved into the studied, the strained, and the silly. Surrealism has been dead for years, decades, but, like an exquisite corpse, it lives. Lives in the fantastic art of women tagged with the label who denied being surrealistic at all.

Frida Kahlo said, “I hate surrealism. It seems to me a decadent manifestation of bourgeois art.” Wounded proud Frida Kahlo with her arrows and shattered spine and little monkeys. She was painting her painful life, her actual life, more frightful than any illuminating dream of it. She died aged forty-seven in 1954 in Mexico City.