“How Leonora Carrington’s Self-Portrait Helped Me Tell Her Story,” by Michaela Carter (Poetry ’95)
Michaela Carter, a 1995 poetry graduate, was recently featured in Lit Hub. Read an excerpt of Carter’s essay below:
How Leonora Carrington’s Self-Portrait Helped Me Tell Her Story
When I first realized that I was going to act on the wild presumption of writing a novel based on the life of the artist and writer (and real-life genius) Leonora Carrington, I was terrified. I was in awe of her work, and the spirit with which she lived her life, and the more I discovered about her the more awestruck I felt.
She was one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists, but more than that, she was a fierce individualist, feminist, mystic and shaman. She made more than two thousand works of art during her 94 years on this earth, and every chance she got she spoke up for the rights of women and the earth.
In spite of my fears—or, perhaps, because of them—I began to write about her. I was particularly fascinated by the drama and trajectory of her early adulthood, and her emergence as a fully realized artist producing her best work. When she was twenty she fell in love with the 46-year-old Surrealist artist Max Ernst and spent two years in a relationship with him, first in Paris, then in the countryside of southern France. During the Nazi invasion of France, the two were separated, and she fled for the border. In Spain, she had a breakdown and was locked in an asylum—a trial she managed not only to survive, but also to grow from, emerging with the newfound self-knowledge and strength that would enable her to access and believe in her genius.
Max Ernst and the art collector Peggy Guggenheim made their way into the story, but my protagonist was chiefly Leonora, and there was something about her I didn’t understand. I knew she left Max before she moved to Mexico, where she became one of the country’s most celebrated artists, but I didn’t know why. Had she fallen out of love? Or was there another reason she needed to break off their affair?
Read the essay in its entirety here: https://lithub.com/how-leonora-carringtons-self-portrait-helped-me-tell-her-story/
