Surrealism is a century old, if you date it from the publication of its first manifesto in Paris in 1924. Leonora Carrington claimed never to have read it. She was only seven when it appeared, growing up far from the Left Bank in a gothic English mansion where Nanny filled her head with fairytales. Yet when Carrington died in Mexico City in 2011 at the age of 94, she was one of the last living participants in the original surrealist movement. This exhibition in a rambling rural gallery is an ecstatic reminder of all that is liberating in surrealist art.
It’s also an encounter with a woman now getting her due as one of modern art’s greats. In May, her painting Les Distractions de Dagobert sold for $28.5m at Sotheby’s, making her the most expensive British female artist of all time. Yet when her (much younger) cousin the writer Joanna Moorhead, who has lovingly curated this show, sought her out in her later years she was largely forgotten. Think of it: a living surrealist, still working in her cabinet of curiosities of a home in Mexico where she’d settled in the 1940s, unnoticed, unfussed over back home through the 90s and noughties, while the British art world got excited over the latest Hirst or Perry.
“Women can’t paint,” snarls Carrington in a recording here, quoting the misogynists of her youth in her aristocratic smoker’s bark. She suffered not only from a prejudice against women but against surrealism, too. This art movement, which sent shock waves though the modern neural cortex was dismissed by the avant garde as old-hat by the late 1940s. Carrington outlived its bombshell impact by more than 60 years, making dream art many decades after dreams like hers went out of fashion.
But this show takes you straight back to the weirdly exciting 1930s when surrealism was a wild party. Black-and-white photographs by Lee Miller capture Carrington’s craggy beauty as she cavorts with the dream artists. Above all she cuddles with the white-haired, intense-eyed German visionary Max Ernst.
Carrington was a 19-year-old runaway debutante when she met 47-year-old Ernst, a first world war veteran. An amazing room in the exhibition takes us into the house in southern France where they lived and worked together in the 1930s. It is preserved as they left it. Colour photos explore interiors covered in murals of horses and birds, their totemic animals. In a filmed interview, Moorhead asks her cousin what Ernst taught her. The nonagenarian brushes the question aside – she brushes all Joanna’s questions aside like ash from her fag: they did not talk about art, they made art.
The 1924 surrealist manifesto barely mentions art at all. Its author the poet André Breton and his friends were searching for the secret of poetry, finding it in Sigmund Freud’s “unconscious”. They hoped to release pure unconscious imagery with techniques like “automatic” writing and the game Exquisite Corpse. But how to turn these poetic experiments into art? Ernst took this challenge seriously, inventing techniques like rubbing crayons over wooden floorboards and cutting up old Victorian magazines, going beyond Freud to Jungian archetypes, identifying as a shamanic half-bird entity called Loplop.
Carrington was never in his shadow but a fellow traveller into the universal unconscious realm. Surrealism is not really an individualist art, let alone a skilled art. It is a conceptual art that depends on unlocking the unconscious. And Carrington could unlock it any time she wanted, right up to the end of her life.
That’s what makes this exhibition so delicious. With bad surrealism, you feel it’s faked or forced; I personally find a lot of British surrealism academic in this way. But Carrington truly has the key of dreams. Her mind throws out creatures and ghosts and demons that she realises in bronze sculptures and feathered masks. These mythological beings are irresistible.
Carrington’s sculpture The Old Magdalena, her entire body covered with hair, stands as a sentinel of strangeness. Her passionate bronze statue Daughter of the Minotaur, a horned beast with a slender, gender-fluid body, is captivating. Why? It’s smooth, even elegant, not technically radical, yet entrancing in its sheer oddity and above all conviction. It is real.
It creeps up gently, that sense of authenticity. There are murals she created with Mayan textile workers and masks inspired by the Aztec and Mayan heritage of her adopted country Mexico, yet the faces surely come just as much from the gargoyles and Green Man of her English country memories. These are faces you see in dreams, horned faces, grinning faces, each one different, each one familiar.
Carrington made such works right up to her death. What may be her very last work is here, a sculpture of a huge spiky-feathered bird. It is a masterpiece, a fierce embodiment of the life force as it struts and stabs the air. And perhaps, too, it is a memory of her bird-god lover Loplop.
This is a delectable delve into the most ravishing art movement of the 20th century and the woman who brought it, still kicking, into ours.
• Leonora Carrington: Rebel Visionary is at Newlands House Gallery, Petworth until 26 October
