Unhappy Demons

The walls of one Manhattan gallery last week were hopping with demons. Feathery, hairy, horny, half-luminous creatures merged imperceptibly into birds, animals and plants. Painted with cobweb delicacy, they conspired and paraded before misty landscapes and night skies thick with floating islands. All the pictures had two things in common: an overall melancholy and the signature, Leonora Carrington, in one corner.

The beautiful, black-haired daughter of an Irish mother and a British millionaire, Leonora Carrington was born 31 years ago in Lancashire. Brought up in European convents and finishing schools, she dutifully learned ladylike deportment. But she painted in a very unladylike manner: her first surrealist pictures were heavy with sex and horror. In 1940 she suddenly went mad, spent agonizing months in a Spanish asylum.

Leonora Carrington struggled back over that precipice and still struggles to paint the visions that haunted her private void. Except for those visions, her present life is a model of domesticity. She lives with her two children and second husband (a news photographer) in an out-of-the-way house in Mexico City, strolling out once a day for the mail, and painting at night.

When a friend asked her recently to identify the birdlike demon entitled Mrs. Partridge, Carrington said nothing to indicate that Mrs. Partridge might, under different circumstances, have been herself. But her answer showed that the artist had forgotten neither her British background nor her Irish wit. The lady in question, she replied, “lived highly respected, and is still remembered as the ‘better half of poor Colonel Partridge. When she died the neighbors sighed, ‘She was fey but she was county.’ “