the complete stories of leonora carrington by leonora carrington

He has occupied her, in every sense: her art is no longer under her command, nor is her body. “Art is a magic which makes the hours melt away and even days dissolve into seconds, isn’t that so, dear lady?” Célestin remarks. After the narrator finishes her portrait, she steps back to check her work and is horrified to discover that the face she has painted is her own. The corpse of Célestin’s dead wife glows in the dark, giving out the only light in the forest. “Pigeon, Fly!” was written-in French, as many of Carrington’s stories were-sometime between 19, and it is far from an idyll. After a spell in Paris, she and Ernst settled in the tiny village of Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche, where they turned their house into a lived-in art work, with paintings on the cupboards and a mosaic of a bat laid into the basement floor. But she would soon turn her back, permanently, on the life laid out for her-by 1937, she had run away to France with her married lover, the Surrealist artist Max Ernst, who was twenty-six years her senior. In 1935, she was presented at Buckingham Palace, among the season’s wealthy débutantes. Her father owned a textile mill, and Carrington and her three brothers were raised at Crookhey Hall, a turreted mansion with its own croquet lawn and ornamental lake. Born in Lancashire to an Irish mother and an English father, she grew into a beauty whose dark eyes and black hair told of her Irish ancestry later in life, she would sometimes claim, fancifully, that her forebears had been gypsies. The dead wife “was beautiful and had a mass of silky black hair,” the narrator tells us.Ĭarrington is describing herself. The body is lifted from its coffin for the purpose. And so the woman, who remains unnamed, is ridden west through “wild country” to a clearing in a forest, where Célestin, who has the face of a sheep, requests that she paint a portrait of his young wife, who is recently deceased. “Entrust your honourable person, as well as your canvases, your brushes and everything you need in your profession of artist to my emissary,” comes the message, from the court of Célestin des Airline-Drues. In it, a woman receives a summons, delivered by an androgynous figure with “long, straight hair” and lips “painted reddish purple,” who speaks in a man’s voice.

“Pigeon, Fly!” is one of the more unsettling stories by the frequently unsettling writer and painter Leonora Carrington, who was born a century ago and died in 2011.

The complete stories of leonora carrington by leonora carrington