June 2021. Mexico City
“I warn you, I refuse to be an object” - Leonora Carrington
On a weekday morning in about mid May I was taken to 194 Calle Chihuahua in the Roma Norte district of Mexico City to the see the house and studio of the artist Leonora Carrington. This was a trip I neither had nor asked any details about before going, which seems to make the most memorable kind in Mexico. Had I done some research I’d have discovered it was not then open to the public, but that our host for the day - a friend of the friend taking me - was a cousin of Leonora’s who had overseen its transition from home to museum and invited us along as test guests. But I was happy and clueless and so proceeded the day. The street was unimposing, the house sat self consciously somewhere halfway down it. Unlike Casa Azul, the big bright blue block holding court in the leafy southern area of Coyoacán, home of the iconic and everlasting Frida Kahlo, nothing indicated that brilliance had ever shuffled about behind the walls. Black iron bars covered tall, thin almost Renée Mackintosh type windows set into a paste grey facade, giving the Bauhaus style that dominates the area a shadow of Scottish gothic. Or maybe I’m just conjuring up nostalgia as a Brit abroad.
Following a dramatic escape to Paris aged twenty to pursue a romance with the artist Max Ernst, Leonora entered into a world of creative breakthroughs and world war trauma that eventually saw her hospitalised in psychiatric ward. It was a marriage of convenience that led her to Mexico when in 1941, aged twenty-four, she wed a diplomat who allowed her escape first to New York and subsequently to Mexico City. Her lifelong marriage was to the Hungarian photographer Emérico “Chicki” Weisz, with whom she lived at 194 Calle Chihuahua and had two sons, with only a small myseterious gap of about fifteen years spent in the US. If there weren’t indications of Britishness from the outside of the house there were automatically a few once we’d stepped inside. For one, it enveloped you with that sort of cavernous bone-touching cold that has settled in unheated houses in the Yorkshire moors. But I’m at risk of Leonora’s spirit getting annoyed by these connections; as every biography about her implies she was desperately keen on shaking everything a restrained UK upbringing had given her, including the unsuitable family nickname of ‘Prim’.
The house of an artist, especially one that has since become an museum, has a charged atmosphere to it. There were four of us - my friend and I, Leonora’s cousin and the museum’s curator - and the interpersonal dynamics held their own dimension. The curator was nervous in the cousin’s opinions, she of ours, we of our own about the house. Once over the spiritual and physical threshold of this unentered place we took part in a certain amount of standing about and looking at things in a sort of suspended reverential pause, knowing we were in a place that required and insightful comments to merit the illicit entrance. Unlike what one might imagine of this particular surrealist’s mind the inside of the building did not open up to reveal a chaotic landscape of contorted scenes but clean, minimalist, glassy spaces scattered over now and again with familiar objects. Of course the artwork was there - black sinewy iron sculptures lining the walls and tables, large hard volcanic figures guarding the stairwells and terrace - but it was the homeware that caught the eye. After all this visit was not so much about the genius’s output but about the place in which they were concocted. The house was a reminder that the everyday can never be escaped, perhaps especially within the realm of surrealism.
Room by room revealed carefully kept ephemera from Leonora’s daily life. The pale-wooded dining room housed a squat iron black desk patch-worked with neon yellow sticky notes. The kitchen cupboards had faded postcards of the British monarchy tacked onto them, Charles often embellished with a biro-ed moustache or eye-patch. The bathroom was a highlight: it had a collection of dusty English magazines and half empty pots of rosy pink 1980s perfumes that reminded me of my Gloucestershire grandmother’s powdery make-up collection. I could have spent an entire day looking at the bookcases alone, which revealed a deep dive into the mind of someone who drew inspiration in Celtic mythology and runic symbology as much as dog-training and Ian McEwan. I almost felt both too close and too far from the house’s owner at all times, wary of intruding as an accidental invitee, an outlander, too close and too far from the owner’s culture. Perhaps I was picking up on a presence through Leonora’s cousin, for whom the experience was spiritually strange. It was, she confessed, difficult being in a place she had once called her Mexico City home only to now be constrained as a visitor, unable to touch, taste, or feel anything similar to what she had when she’d stayed in the house with Leonora, alive.
The project has been perfectly and intricately designed by UAM, to whom the house and all its belongings were donated by Leonora’s son, Pablo. It was full of memorabilia, but there was a slight feeling that the absences told a stronger story. The breadcrumb trail of objects left to tell the life of the artist felt like they had deliberate and not always justified assessments made about their significance: a toothbrush angled on top of the sink became a divine item but the paintbrushes in the rooftop studio had been cleansed to appear all but unused. It reminded me of a strange place set down a narrow street in East London called Dennis Severs’ House that I once happened to discover and can almost invariably never find again. In the words of the creator, each room in the house is arranged “as a scene in a family drama, inspired by the shadows of the past he sensed within the House. In this way he transported his guests through centuries, little expecting that he would – in due course – become one of the shadows himself”. The house, created by an anglophilic American in the 1970s, is eccentric, disturbing, and unique. In contrast to Carrington’s and totally to what Severs’ would hope for, no room for me felt truly historical or ‘lived in’ - despite the mechanically aided agitations to make it seem like a cigarette has just been smoked or a curtain just closed or a flagon of ale just quaffed. Whereas Severs filled every crevice with filth to help the house and visitors decompose into the past, Carrington’s spaces had been dabbed clean to make sure they exist well into the future.
I don’t know quite where the invisible line between an archive living or just surviving lies. An archive exists in a constant battle to protect time from time itself; anything truly alive - mould, dirt, insects - must be removed to ensure longevity. In a place as beautifully curated as Casa Estudio Leonora Carrington, as the house is now known, it’s clear that the emotional investment poured into this artist’s legacy will not fail to keep her spirit alive in her adopted country. As another Brit who’s moved here, perhaps the deliberate quality of the items I’m picking up comes from an affinity with feeling like someone who is misplaced but content. The collection a foreigner gathers around them is something that quietly insists you are comfortable and very much at home in your new place. Even if a doodled-upon postcard looks at you from the kitchen fridge and betrays for a split-second a secret about your past life.