Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was one of the most creative of the Surrealist artists.
Her paintings are charming, intriguing, enigmatic, and sometimes impenetrable. She was working for nearly seven decades and her output was prolific, covering many topics and styles.
Adam McLean has created a seven-part study course on Carrington's work.
The Early Years
Mexico
Celtic
Esoteric and magical
Her map diagram
Humour, animals
Late works
Nowadays, it seems that most art historians drag an artist's work into the commentator's worldview. They ruthlessly press an interpretation onto the work, rather than letting it speak for itself. Adam McLean avoids recontextualising Carrington's art but instead provides background information that can flesh out the readers' appreciation of her paintings, point to the source material from which she drew, the internal links between the complex symbols and show the links between many of her works.
Providing an external narrative to an artist's work can be quite destructive, stealing the viewer's appreciation of a painting by assigning a meaning that was not within the motivation of the artist. Sadly, some art historians elevate themselves above the artist by encapsulating their work in a web of meaning, suggesting that they understand what lay behind the painting more than the artist herself did. This is the folly of Postmodernism, which has polluted art history, perhaps more than any other discipline.