Surrealist Leonora Carrington, died at 94 in Mexico

MEXICO city - British painter, writer and sculptor Leonora Carrington, regarded as one of the last original surrealists, has died, National Arts Council of Mexico confirmed Thursday. She was 94.

Carrington was known for his haunting, dreamlike works which often focused on the strange ritual-like scenes with birds, cats, Unicorn-creatures and apparent other animals such as spectators or participants.

Once the lover of German artist Max Ernst, Carrington was also part of the famous wave of artistic and political emigrants, who arrived at the Mexico in the 1930s and 1940s. In the field dominated by men of surrealism, she was a member of a rare trio of female Mexico-based surrealist with Frida Kahlo and Remedios Varo.

"It was the last surrealist of high life," said the poet Homero Aridjis and longtime friend. "It was a living legend."

Friend and sponsor Dr. Isaac Masri said that it is died Wednesday of old age, after being hospitalized. "It was a large force of life and a worthy death, thus, without suffering," he said.

"She created mythic worlds in which animals and human beings magical occupies the main stage, in which fusion cobras with goats and blind crows become trees," the National Council for the Arts wrote, adding, "these were some of the images is the result of a mind obsessed to portray a reality that exceeds what can be seen."

She wrote poems, novels, tests and articles for magazines and newspapers and thousands of paintings, sculptures, collages and tapestries exhibited in the city of Mexico City, New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo and several other arts centres

Mexican author Elena Poniatowska was a friend of 1 / me longti artist and wrote the novel "leonora" based on his life.

"Leonora was really a woman who has been one of the types", Poniatowska said.

Carrington was born in Clayton Green, Lancashire, England, April 6, 1917 and come to the Mexico, during the second world war. For many years, she shared her time between Mexico City, New York and Chicago, but his latest inspiration and home for a long time has been in the Mexico, once nicknamed "surrealist country" by the writer and poet André Breton for its colourful and sometimes grotesque costumesmasks, rituals and dances. That meshes well with the surrealists, whose works have been marked by irony, not informed, strange juxtapositions and fantasy.

Carrington has largely shunned public events but enjoyed inviting friends to tea to an old house in the neighbourhood of Bohemia.

The University of Manchester teaching fellow Joanna Pawlik, who works with the Centre for the study of surrealism, noted that Carrington joined the surrealists in the 1930s, well after the group released its first manifesto in 1924. Pawlik noted that at least another artist who has worked with the surrealists, artist U.S. Dorothea Tanning, is still alive.

Born into a wealthy family, Carrington is the second of four children of an English manufacturer of textile and an Irish mother who painted murals small as a hobby.

When she was 9, Leonora is become so rebellious family sent him to religious schools, where she was expelled for bad conduct.

Later they sent him in a boarding school in Florence, in Italy, then in a private school for girls in Paris. She was miserable in both cases.

In the mid-1930s, she lived with Ernst in Paris, where she became friend with Breton, the Spanish painter Pablo Picasso and other members of the surrealist circle. She held his first exhibitions of Surrealist painting in 1938 in Paris and Amsterdam.

The war broke out with the Nazi Germany and in 1939, Ernst was imprisoned in a camp of concentration Largentiere by the French authorities as a foreign enemy.

The following year, Carrington fled to the Spain. It caused a scandal at the British Embassy in Madrid noisily threatening plot to kill Adolf Hitler and was interned in an asylum for the insane in Santander, where it ends by escaped and made his way to Lisbon.

Carrington was rescued by the writer, Renato Leduc, she has met during his days in Paris where he worked as a Mexican Consulate official. They married - apparently for Carrington outside Europe - and went to New York and Mexico City later.

She became a Mexican citizen. She and Leduc divorce, and she married her second husband, born in Hungary writer-photographer Emerico "chiki" Weisz, in 1946. They have two children, one of them, Pablo, became a painter in his own right.

The Mexico, it binds with the poet and prize Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, Frida Kahlo and her husband, the irascible muralist Diego Rivera, the late Spanish film producer-director Luis Bunuel and many others.

Carrington took his two sons and left the Mexico in 1968 to protest the killing October 2 army of demonstrating students from the University, but returned a year later.

In 1971, she went to the Canada and Scotland to study Buddhism under a Tibetan monk in exile, and then he returned to Mexico City. She left again for New York after two earthquakes devastated the city in September 1985 and three years later, moved to Chicago.

A few years after this she returned to the Mexico.

The artist is survived by two sons, Gabriel and Pablo. His body was carried to a funeral home in Mexico City for viewing, and she was buried Thursday in the British cemetery of the city.