Leonora Carrington

"It’s the belief that nothing is ordinary, that everything in life is extraordinary. And being old is no more, no less, extraordinary than being young.” When the artist and writer Leonora Carrington was asked in 2006 what “Surrealism” meant to her, this was her reply. It was a remarkably frank statement from an artist who had, at other points in her career, declared that she “was never a Surrealist,” even memorably asserting that the Surrealist link between women (the femme-enfant) and the muse was “bullshit.” Perhaps it owes its frankness to the interviewer: sitting across the kitchen in Carrington’s house in Mexico City was her cousin, the journalist and author Joanna Moorhead.