Poured Over: Joanna Moorhead on Surreal Spaces

By Jenna Seery / September 2, 2023 at 6:00 am

“I think that she would have given — to anyone who had been lucky enough to spend time with her — was just this thirst for curiosity”

Surreal Spaces is Joanna Moorhead’s in-depth and personal biography of her own long-lost cousin, Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington. Moorhead joins us to talk about uncovering the truth about her famous relative, Carrington’s eventful life and career, the importance of highlighting women artists and more with guest host, Allie Ludlow.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Allie Ludlow and mixed by Harry Liang.         

Featured Books (Episode):
Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington by Joanna Moorhead
The Story of Art Without Men by Katy Hessel

Full Episode Transcript
Allie Ludlow
Hi, Joanna, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over. We are going to be talking about your book Surreal Spaces today that you wrote recently. Your book is an incredible account of your relationship with your long-lost cousin and world-renowned artists, Leonora Carrington, you explore Carrington’s upbringing, relationships with family, friends and lovers. Her discovery of self and the places she was tethered to the world. What was it like discovering Leonora was your cousin.

Joanna Moorhead
Thanks very much for having me. It’s really, really great to meet you, Allie. So yes, the friendship, the relationship that developed between Leonora and I was, in very many ways, an extremely unlikely one, because although she was my father’s cousin, she had been basically estranged from our family for decades. And when I was a child, I was aware that there been someone in our family that that been some kind of scandal, and that something rather thrilling had happened. And some on this character Prim, as she was known, had gone. And I did attempt to find out a bit about it by talking to, you know, my granny and my dad or his brother, my father, people who’ve known her before she’d gone, but I could say I got a brick wall, there was nothing, there was nothing going to be revealed. But I you know, I like to think I was enough of a journalist, even then to know there was a story here anyway, many years past three decades or so I was in my early 40s, living where I am right now speaking to you from which is South London, raising my four kids here. And a parent with a child in the same class as one of my kids at school had a little drinks do. So it was nothing arty or grand or connected. It was mostly parents from, you know, the same class as my child’s class at school. There was one person there who wasn’t a parent, and she turned out to be a Mexican art historian. I had a little conversation with her and it was at the end of the conversation, I was about to turn away and I said, Oh, just one more thing, just one thing. I said, I’m sure you will never have heard of my dad’s cousin. She was connected with art and she ended up in Mexico, I’m pretty sure but that was really all I knew about her. Her name was and then I remembered her name because in our family, she was called Prim, her name was Leonora Carrington. And this woman was astonished. You go to the table, and she said, I can’t believe you’re saying this. Leonora is basically a national treasure in my country, in Mexico. She’s the most famous living artist. Well, she was certainly one of the most famous living artists, it was going to turn out. And she said, you must go and find her and see her if she’s your cousin. And I had no clue that night, how I would ever manage to do that. So it seemed a completely wild dream that I would ever be able to meet Leonora, but I did go home and Googled her and spoke to my father, and other people who knew her in our family. And I was more and more interested in her. And then a few weeks later, out of the blue, I got stationed to go to Mexico, I’m not a travel writer, not a travel journalist. But I was invited to do a travel piece on the Caribbean coastline of Mexico, Cancún. So I said, Well, I had no idea where I was going to pitch this piece because I don’t write about travel. I suppose the Guardian Travel. So I’m interested. I said, the thing is, I’ll do it if I can find a place to write, but I must go via Mexico City, because I was. And they said no, no, no, won’t be possible. It was Club Med, and they’re flying out of Paris, straight to Cancun, no charge. Anyway, I said, well, not interested. Then after a few days later, there was the PR person they obviously tried every journalist they could think of in London, none of them could do it. So they came back to me and said, actually, you can go via Mexico City. So I was in Mexico City and I had learned or and hadn’t spoken directly to Leonora, I just had had made contact through her gallery in Mexico City. The woman who ran the gallery had been going to Leonora’s, she said there’s a cousin of yours might be in town. She said, well give her my number if she wants to come out for tea, if I’m feeling okay, you know, we can see how things are. The first morning around 10 o’clock, which is when I was told that she, you know, she surfaced at 10 to call after and I phoned her at one minute past 10. And she said two things that I thought were very relevant. One thing was she said, Oh, she said I’ve been waiting for you to call. Well, I found that interesting because it was one minute past 10. But I wondered if she’d been waiting for one of us to call, you know, for somebody? And then the other thing she said was well, you’ better come straight over and I walked down the road. I was 10 minutes from her house, and I just spent the whole of that week with Leonora, and when I left at the end of that week, I knew that I’d met somebody who I could learn a lot from about life, who mattered to me to now. And I hoped that we could be friends. And I said to her, this has been wonderful this week. But, it’s not been enough, can I come back and she said, Well, you know where I am, you know, I’ll be waiting. And then I found a way of going back. And then I visited her twice a year, from that year, which is 2006 until 2010, when she died in 2011. So my last visit was then, we became close.

That’s such a wonderful story. And so wild that you didn’t know that your cousin, the name of your cousin would literally grip a stranger.

Yeah, some people have been surprised by that. And in retrospect, I’m kind of surprised by it myself. Leonora was a very, very already well known artist, certainly in our art circles. And there had been an exhibition of her work in London in 1991. However, in 1991, I was having my first baby, rather difficult time of it. One thing, but for another thing, and this is a bigger issue, I think Leonora had an turned away from our family. And she should, she’d left, right. And if you leave your family, and you basically say that the values of that family aren’t really yours, and you feel that to be the person you were, you appear put on earth to be, you need to go somewhere away from them. That’s a very big thing to say. And it means people who are left, really, it doesn’t, you know, they’re not going to be looking for how famous you become now, it left people sad, and I would never say the right or wrong of either side of this story. But I know that there was great sadness in the family in England. And so, but it created a huge rift. It did create a very, I’ve got four daughters, and I can’t really imagine how I’d feel if one of mine and she was so young, you know, she left when she was 20. And she was the only daughter as well, she had three brothers. But there were no other girls. But she was going away and making a new life, which eventually was in Mexico, as you know, he managed to become this great artist leave the world with things that I don’t think she could have done if she’d stayed in England. And then no, I think it’ll be the poorer now for not having them.

it’s really interesting to see the trajectory of her work, the pieces that were created, because of her time in England, and then how it moved and shifted and grew with all of her travels, you know, and specifically her work ending in Mexico is just so phenomenal, especially when she was pregnant. I believe with her first kid; we would not have what we have from Leonora at this moment if she had not left.

Yeah, I don’t think. And I think it’s also very interesting, and this is one of the things that I think I was trying to discuss in this in this new book. I think it’s interesting that she really had to get away as we’ve discussed, but her art throughout her life throughout her very long and very prolific life, in her art and in her writing. She continually returns to her early times. And she said to herself, you know, can any of us escape our childhood? And she said, I don’t think they can? Well, one thing we know is Leonora definitely couldn’t about herself. And maybe I mean, I’m sure she’s right, none of us can. But maybe, for reasons to do with her story. It was particularly difficult to escape her childhood. This is irony isn’t that she takes herself away from it. And yet, what she’s left becomes the raw material for what she becomes in her new life.

Completely. And it deeply inspires her.

And it’s also I would say one of the reasons why she has taken a while to become a better known artist, because he was painting as you know, in Mexico. Her work was largely being sold in Mexico and also in New York. But what she was painting and what was being sold there through the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s referred to Lancashire, in in England. If you’re an artist, it just strikes me that you’re kind of better doing what Frida did, Frida Kahlo paint what’s around you now and then the people who are around you now get it as artists or in Mexico, for entirely good reasons, were probably not best attuned to what had been happening in Lancashire in the First World War.

Yeah, it was difficult for them to relate to it.

I think so. Yeah. Yeah. What goes what we see with Frida Kahlo, the people who were the first recipients of that art would have understood it was their reality to it was the streets they recognized. And that’s one of the reasons why Leonora has had to wait a long time to get the fame I think she actually deserves.

Exactly, exactly. And I do want to say what is so lovely about your book is that you create a step-by-step timeline of Leonora’s history with pictures. I just want to show everyone that there are pictures here to create beautiful images and you start with her upper-class life in England, Lancashire, Crookhey Hall, Hazelwood and have done a phenomenal job of explaining how every place she stayed influenced her work. Did you talk much with Leonora about the individual artworks and their relation to her history? Or did you discover those connections in your own research?

Well, anybody who knew Leonora will tell you the same thing, she was not interested in discussing her work with anybody. Really, she felt that when she had made a painting, that it was your job to decide what it was about, and to take the messages from that canvas that made sense to you. So I feel in that way, she was a very sort of democratic artist, she was giving her art freely to anybody who wanted to spend time with it and see it. And she certainly wasn’t the kind of prescriptive artist and as you’ll know, better than me, these artists do exist to or want to tell you what every line and every color and everything on their canvases means. Leonora was a complete opposite of that. So no, we spent very little time discussing her work. But her work was around, there were studies in the house, most of her paintings have been sold because she was a working mother and she was at least a joint main earner, if not the main earner in her family. And she had two sons with her husband who was a photographer. So selling her work was very, very important to her. When I knew her in those last year, she wasn’t surrounded by lots of paintings, most of the paintings had gone she had a couple there. And we occasionally used to go and sit in the room where they were and maybe look at them. And she wasn’t averse to, you know, chatting about a little bit of them. But I think she just didn’t find it the most interesting thing is, you know, she’s more interested in American politics and what was in the paper today or what’s happening on the street outside, the feminist movement. You know, what she’s done and why kind of thing, I was always aware of a number of things, I was always aware of how incredibly lucky I was to get this opportunity to spend time with Leonora, I was also aware that that time we spent together was as good as it’s as good as it kind of gets, you know, to find somebody who you connect to and you think has got things to teach you about the rest of your life, and to find that they have time to spend with you. And you’re just going to have fun and learn a lot. That was me. And I knew how important that time was.

And she was so inspirational.

She was so inspiring in every way. And we didn’t spend a lot of time talking about her work, but I kind of always knew even in those days, that that would be another layer of her revealing herself to me that even after she died that we all this stuff she left return to and I knew a bit about her work when she was alive because I actually curated a show of her work that was back in England in 2010. So I was working with art historians, I was looking at her work. But then after she died, I retraced her steps across fraught starting from Lancashire, going right across Europe in the war, and ending, you know, following in her footsteps, and ending up in Mexico. And so in that time, and they’ve also been quite a lot of big exhibitions of her work over the last few years. So I’ve seen a lot more of her work. And I certainly became, I was very aware of how much the places and the memories of places had played out on the course of many, many years. As well as the new reality of Mexico that’s also there, as you mentioned, but not as much as you might think, you know, if you European artists ended up there, when she arrived in Mexico in a very exciting moment. There’s all the muralists. It’s Frida Kahlo. There’s all this happening. It’s the most, according to Andre Breton, It’s the most surreal nation in the world, and Leonora paints what happened in Lancashire in the 1920s, and 30s. So, you know, she’s not doing the obvious thing, but she did paint some paintings of our Mexican characters, you know.

She did and I really loved Breton’s quote, about how Mexico is the most surreal country in the world. And a part of me wonders if that’s, in a way, why Leonora found home there, because she was so surrealist and her actions and her thoughts and her ideas and I wonder if herself and the country just kind of married in a way.

I think there’s a lot of serendipity and chance. I’m very interested in, you know, what’s chance in life, and what slots into place and what do we make slot into place because we find ourselves somewhere and it works or doesn’t work, and then we change things. And I think that’s right that there was a complete chance that totally in order to Mexico, that was a chance meeting with a Mexican after she left Max Ernst, who had been her lover. And then she and Max had lived in the South of France. And they’ve had this wonderful time together. But then he imprisoned because he was German, and this was Vichy France so he was the enemy. Although, of course, he was not, he’d left Germany because of the Nazis. So all the same he was imprisoned. And she left because she had a breakdown, and she needed to get some help. And she went off with a friend into Spain. And then a lot of other things happened to her. But there was a moment in her life when she was all alone in Madrid. And she had no money, no friends, she turned her back again on her family for another time, they tried to get back to the show, and she refused to go. And she looked across the crowded restaurant, and she saw a man she’d known through Picasso in Paris. And that was a Mexican guy, as you rightly say, Renato Leduc, and the two of them then hatched a plan to go together to Mexico to get married. Because that was the way Renato could get her out of Europe. Once married to a Mexican, she had the right to travel. And they went to New York, and Leonora could have stayed in New York, it was largely a marriage of convenience. So they were very good friends.

How long were they in New York for?

They were in New York for several months. And then, and she and I think Leonora is so this is now 1941-42. Leonora was doing well in New York and as you all know, most of the Surrealists had been in Paris, before the war. They traveled across the Atlantic, and they landed up in New York.

Ernst with Peggy Guggenheim.

Ernst with Peggy. There’s a there’s a photograph in this book, in fact, of the of the whole group in New York. Here it is in Peggy’s apartment. These are some of the, you know, the stars of the art world of surrealism. And, and Leonora was doing very well there. So she could have stayed in New York, and she’d probably be much better known today if she had, but she was determined to play out. This is how I see it anyway, she was determined to play out this story, to take it to the end of the line, to see what this life in Mexico could be like. So they headed down to Mexico, she never saw Max Ernst again, they’re like, the last time she would have seen him was in New York in 1942. And I think you’re right that she got to Mexico. And she was in a place that was completely alien, but also remarkably familiar. There were things about Mexico that she really connected to with and understood and they were very deep, instinctive things, you know, magic and instinct and being close to the Earth. And on many, many levels. I think Mexico really resonated.

So you traveled around to follow Carrington’s footsteps and recreate her history for us, to read how many places that you visited all together.

I started from the house where she grew up in Lancashire, Crookhey Hall. I went from there to, I already knew actually the places where she was at school, as she was expelled from her two boarding schools and Parkshire and in Essex, I went to Cornwall, where she first sort of got to know the Surrealists in 1937, having met Max Ernst earlier that year. And that was a very important moment in her story because she really, she knew that she didn’t fit into her family. And then in these weeks she spent in Cornwall with all the Surrealists — Man Ray and Billy Miller and Roland Penrose partner and many others, she realized that there was another whole way of being and she realized that these people felt more like a family than her family. So that was her direction of travel. So I’ve visited that house in Cornwall then obviously I live in London and there are places in London where she there’s a very important place in London is the flat in a in a block of flats called High Point in North London, and where Leonora met Max Ernst for the first time in June, very early June 1937. It was at a dinner party. It was a dinner party, and an architect called Goldfinger Yes, Goldfinger being the name that would later be used by an enemy. And they fell out they, basically, and that’s how he became the baddie that that was all in the future. So Leonora was at art school. She was at a very small art school at the time. And one of her fellow students was Ursula Blackwell, who is married to Goldfinger. So there’s this dinner party. So I’ve been to that flat and that’s really very wonderful to see it. It’s exactly as it was. Many of these spaces are as they were. There’s also the house actually another house where they lived in Lancashire called Hazelwood. And then Paris I went, I found the, the address in Paris where she and Max Ernst had lived and visited, there was a table to get in there. But then I went to the south of France to a village called Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, which was a really important moment in our story, because that’s where she and Max sort of retreated to when things got difficult for them in Paris. And they had this wonderful year really, together, they’re painting the fabric of the house painting on the walls, making the best relief on the walls, painting on canvases as well painting each other, just really enjoying their life together and making art the exterior shots of the house, and I was incredibly lucky because that house, I call that house, a secret treasure trove of surrealist art. And it really is that, the art is not stuff that can be taken away and put on gallery wall. Because it’s embedded. It’s embedded in the house. That’s exactly right. So, so it’s never been open to the public. And there are no plans to make it open to the public. So it’s a really fun space. And I was so lucky that the very kind owner, as well has give me so much access to it. And that really is one of the big reasons why I wanted to do this book because I knew I had something that really was worth sharing and had access. Well, I yeah, I’ve been lucky to get to know the guy. And he’s been very, very kind. So there was and the only reason that that I got to know him in the first place was Leonora was still alive the first time I went there. So I went to see the house and my intention was to go back to Mexico and tell Leonora about how she’d never been back since the day she left at 41. And of course, I never was able to do that because then she died very soon afterwards. But I then got to know the owner and he very, very generously invited me back then I went to Spain to the place where Leonora was kept in a psychiatric hospital very, very grim time in her life. Madrid where she met Renato Leduc, very interesting place where a lot happened to her. And then across to New York, and then on to obviously Mexico City and, of course, New Mexico City. Well, by the time I wrote this book, because I spent so long there with Leonora, and then later in her life, and very important for me, because I’m the kind of age now that she was when she was doing this. She left Mexico and based herself again in New York and Chicago. Later. And you know, I think that’s an extraordinary testimony to her that at a time in life and she was literally the kind of age I am now in her 50s and her 60^th, at a time when you know you’re able to your it might seem appealing to kind of be a bit more comfortable in your life. She was always going to the place that wasn’t the comfort zone. She ended up living on her own in a basement flat in New York very little money, not really selling her work. But she thinks she was always curious. She was curious about the world. She didn’t want to just settle somewhere where things were easy. She wanted. She wanted to find out and go on searching. She was always such a searcher.

When also her time in New York and she was in her 50s There was a level of anonymity when she was in New York at that time and creating versus when you know, she’s in Mexico City and a British born artist.

Yes. And I think that she knew, you know, the learning that we do about ourselves and the world when we take ourselves into places where we have to kind of not exactly reinvent ourselves but decide again, who we are against the backdrop of this new place where we find ourselves. She was always, she was very good I think at making new friends all these places I visited. I mean, obviously this was mostly New York and Chicago, because the places that I was in in Europe, she left so many decades ago, nobody really was there. I mean, sometimes I was able to meet the children or grandchildren of people who had known her but on the whole it was handed down knowledge whereas in Chicago particularly. And also in New York, I was able to meet people who knew her who remembered her from those days. And they were often she seems to have been that her often friended people who were, you know, not necessarily her age group, often younger people. And she was obviously very good at making friends and often the people she got to know what other artists, maybe younger artists, you know, who were who were more starting out. That’s a very inspiring, I think a small part of her story.

In regard to your travels of all the places that you did visit, which did you find the most intriguing? I know just from your writing, Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche is definitely on my bucket list. Now, I’m a little heartbroken that I can’t go there in person. Well, I mean, can’t necessarily go on to private property. But the way that you’d describe it in the book was absolutely enchanting.

That’s very kind of you, I’m glad you liked that, as I say that that was a really important part of writing the book describe Saint-Martin and the house there. I mean, it was a very, very special place. I kind of found Leonora in all the places where she’d been. I could, and I found you know, it’s wonderful when you’re writing about any artist, or anybody, when you’re, you know, embarking on a biography, or any biographical work, to stand in the space where your subject was to sort of see the views they saw to smell the air, they smell to hear the sounds of the birds, they heard, it brings you close to the person. And of course, I’m so lucky, because I really knew Leonora. But she’s been gone now for quite a few years. And when I go back to those places, I can find something over there. And actually, a very important moment for me was reading, there have been various places where I’ve been able to read her letters. One of them is New York is in the Morgan library in New York in the Pierre Matisse collection, because Pierre Matisse, the son of Henri Matisse was her dealer in New York. And they were close, particularly in the early years of her being in Mexico. And what was wonderful about going to the Morgan library and opening that box and looking through those letters was in order was dead by then, of course, but it was as if she was talking in my ear. And the words that I was reading were her voice. And that gave me a lot of confidence to go forward and do the work I wanted to do, because I knew that the Leonora I’d known was the same Leonora who would come you know, she’d always been this really strong character, they say of all of us, don’t they, we always were 19 in our heads, that that person, you know, it should have been that the person I’d know was that person, but I don’t know, I was absolutely sure the letters were very important as well. And her house in Mexico as well, which is now owned by one of the universities of Mexico City is now a museum. Not exactly a museum, but it’s called the Casto studio is that effectively a museum to book to go in there. But to that house has been recreated to be as it was at the end of Leonora’s life. So at precisely the time when I knew her and it’s of course, very moving to be in that house for not just for me, but for anyone and you’re really going into the most private, you know, the most sort of intimate spaces of life, her bedroom, the kitchen, where she basically held court for decades. Anybody who you talked to or you read about who knew her in Mexico will talk about kitchen, which really was the center of her world. And now it’s all there for people to go and see and I think they’ll feel closer to Leonora for doing that.

Completely. I definitely want to visit her home now, the museum.

That’s not as far for you to go as well.

I know, it’s a little bit easier for me to get there than you. When reading this, I did find myself laughing out loud. At some of Leonora’s quotes, she was definitely a firecracker of a person with strong opinions and a lot of insight. I definitely laughed out loud at her comment on Picasso and Man Ray. She was truly in the center of the art world, during her time in France, and then in New York, although she met many artists and her relocation to Mexico, which artistic relationships do you feel were her most impactful? Aside from the obvious, like Ernst.

I think Ernst was very, very important in her life, because he sort of opened the world up for her in a way that she hadn’t known about that world before. But I think beyond that, that probably the most important there were many, many relationships and enormous life that were very, very important. She was very interested in other people. So relationships were very important to her as a person who be curious about you, you know, she wasn’t, wasn’t one of these people who just wants to tell you about themselves. She wants to hear about you. But I think very important relationships that well, it was a pair of women who were her friends in Mexico City. So she ended up in Mexico because as we’ve said she married a Mexican, but many artists from war torn Europe were landing up in Mexico, Mexico has an open door policy in the 1940s. It was it was it was taking in refugees, who was an a particularly took in a lot of kind of intellectual refugees, people who were writers and artists. There was a group of them in Mexico City, so Leonora was able to connect with that group. And in fact, that’s what she did when she left her husband, Renato Leduc. He was a poet, in fact, but their marriage didn’t survive. And he of course, was Mexican. But then she met this new group of friends and two, they were artists and writers from Europe. and they all stayed in Mexico for the rest of their lives. There were two women in that circle in particular who were very important, one was Remedios Varo, a Spanish painter. And the other was a Hungarian photographer called Kati Horna, partner of a, Spaniard, Jose Horna, that she was actually Hungarian. And the three those three women spend a lot of time together. I always think, you know, Leonora had left her family but I think in those were in she may be had people who became almost sisters, or they were close, they spent a lot of time together. They didn’t collaborate directly on work. They in order very rarely collaborated with other artists directly on work. One place where did was with Katy’s husband, Jose Horner. And she did, he was an amazing craftsman. And she did some wonderful paintings on the side of a crib that was made for Kati, and Jose’s daughter, Nora is still there in Mexico City to this day, and have the beautiful crib, which was in a museum in Mexico City for some time and is shown in sometimes in museums now. So the relationship between those two women I think was very, very important. Sadly, Remedios died in 1963. So that relationship wasn’t long, but Kati Horna lived into the 21st century, and they will close as older women as well.

It was really interesting how she found such strength in connections with her female counterparts, like Remedios and Kati Horna especially because Leonora I mean, she was always an artist, but she really came into the art world during a time that was dominated by male artists. Like Dali, Duchamp, Mata, Man Ray, I mean, they were all around when she was creating and much of art history likens the rise of female artists to their partners. Most are known as the wife of or the lover of some great male master, but Leonora was always an artist in her own right, creating work since childhood and never wavering in her abilities. And it’s a complete disservice to call her Max Ernst lover like so much of the art world did for such a long time. How do you think she would feel knowing that her work is getting recognized by the art world?

Well, I think there’s no doubt is that artists, any artist, creates works to communicate. That’s about as communication is communication, probably more than any other way of communicating other than I guess writing being a writer, if you have, you either write books, or you paint on canvases or you create art, you’re doing something that you hope will have a longevity beyond your own art you that’s what it’s about. It’s about communicating with people in another time and space, and saying something that you think is important that generations from now can also pick up on. So I think although Leonora was, she was never going to change the way she lived in order. She was not chasing fame or looking for fame, because I think she thought that would compromise what she wants to do in the here and now in that moment in her life. But I think like any artist, one, you know, she puts her work out there. And I think she couldn’t fail to be because, how could an artist fail to be pleased that people were looking at their work again, and thinking it was interesting, and had things to say in the in the 21st century. I think she would be humbled by it, but also very proud and pleased that she that things she had to say that she really felt from her heart with things that resonated with other people, even people now some years on.

And the themes of her artwork I do really feel are timeless. So, you know, I think that we’ll be seeing a lot more love for Leonora than we already are. And also, I’m just wondering, what do you think she would say, knowing that the latest Venice Biennale was named after her children’s book The Milk of Dreams?

Yeah, I can imagine that she wouldn’t have believed it— that I’m sure or I’m pretty sure as sure as people can be that she would have been really proud that this Biennale was as you know, the first Venice Biennale in all the decades, how old is it, 70 years or so, the first one that’s really probably focused on women’s work. And Leonora was always interested in the question of why it was so much harder to be a female than a male artist. And I think she would have been very, very proud of her part in changing the narrative that that bit of the narrative in a really important place in the art world as you know, I mean, Venice, the Venice Biennale is a cutting-edge part of the art world and it matters what happens there.

It does. I love that quote that you have where I think Leonora was napping and she awoke. How did it go again?

Yeah, so she’d been asleep. And I was just reading, and I just thought she was asleep. And then suddenly she kind of sat up just suddenly shot up in the bed and said, Why do you think it is that, that it’s been so much harder to be a woman artist than a woman writer? Why is that? And I realized that she hadn’t been asleep. She’d been in that phase that’s between sleep and wakefulness when her brain was mulling over that that thought. And she was, and we often used to talk about one of the things she often mentioned was, where were women during the Renaissance. And now my next stage of my journey as a writer is going to Florence and I found the woman artist I wish I could have told Leonora about, but I’m going to write about her. And so I hope that wherever the, you know, I know, I know, she’d be with me in spirit on this journey, because I know that it, man, you know, she was so interested in where women were, where were the women, you know, centuries in Italy. So next stop. So I’ll come back to talk to you about that one.

Oh, my gosh. Can you tell me who it is?

She is called Plautilla Nelli. With dates of 1524 to 88. She was in Florence. She lived and died in Florence. And she was…

She was a nun right?

She was a nun. And a few decades after Leonardo da Vinci she painted a Last Supper. Whereas people queue up across the planet to see Leonardo’s Last Supper, her last supper, three or four times ended up almost destroyed. And I’m going to tell the story in my next book about how that painting was saved, and how it now hangs in Florence. And telling the story of that painting I’m also, I hope, going to tell the story of where women were and how they, how difficult it was for them to work. That how some women did manage to work, including Nelli, and I think she is the ancestor of all the women artists who followed her, and that was Leonora. Yeah, there’s so much the story of women’s art, the story of women artists I’ve always said this is being told backwards. So if you ask people to name women artists, they’re much more likely to say artists well, they’ll say Frida Kahlo, they might say Paula Rego they might say Georgia O’Keeffe, the contemporary and modern. But if you ask them who was living in Montana, Artemisia Gentileschi, Plautilla Nelli? I mean, you’re the first person I think, Allie, I’ve ever spoken to who has known who Plautilla Nelli is.

Well, I actually I didn’t know who she was until I read Katy Hessel’s book, The Story of Art Without Men.

Well, I know Katy, she’s my friend. And yeah, that’s great that she’s included.

So, now I’m so excited to read this

That’s why the it’s the story backwards. Because these are the least visible women in the story of women artists.

Now, and there’s so little history on them. There’s so little documentation. And it’s gonna be a feat. You know, going and going over and researching all of that, and I cannot wait to read your next book.

That’s very kind. I really hope you do and I’m so glad you’ve enjoyed the Leonora one.

Oh, it’s been fantastic. I’ve loved Carrington for a while but to read this bio and learn about her history. She is just such a wonderful person. And I would like to ask you just one last question. What message do you think Leonora wanted to share with the world? Because she had so many quips and just such an insightful person?

Yeah, that’s quite that’s quite a hard question, I think. Yeah. I think that she was always very much in favor of us being true to ourselves and being authentic to ourselves. I think that was really important to her. And I think that she always encouraged others around them, around her, and just the rest of us, you know, to really always sort of interrogate why we are doing the things we do. To be clear about what matters to us. I think she was also very, very attuned to not just the stuff that we can see, not just the here and now, you know, but she was very interested in the layers of humanity, the layers that make up our lives, our history, our relationship with the natural world. You know, he was interested in that in the 1940s and the stuff that she was writing about what, writing about but also painting in the 1940s is the cutting edge stuff of the climate crisis and the ecology today. Now she was way ahead. But I think what she gave me and I think that she, you know, and I think that she would have given it to anyone who, who, who had been lucky enough to spend time there was just this, this thirst for curiosity, this curiosity that went the that went on and on and on. And I think that, you know, it was almost sort of, she almost transmitted it to others, because you could see how enriched her life was by being always curious.

She was always very curious. Joanna, thank you so much for joining us. And everyone, I hope that you enjoy Surreal Spaces as much as I did. And just thank you. Thank you for writing this. It was a phenomenal read, and I can’t wait to read what you do next.

Thank you so much. Thank you very much for having me on the podcast. I’ve really enjoyed it.