Joanna Moorhead

In 2006 journalist Joanna Moorhead discovered that her father's cousin, Prim, who had disappeared many decades earlier, was now a famous artist in Mexico. Although rarely spoken of in her own family (regarded as a black sheep, a wild child; someone they were better off without) in the meantime Leonora Carrington had become a national treasure in Mexico, where she now lived, while her paintings are fetching ever-higher prices at auction today. Intrigued by her story, Joanna set off to Mexico City to find her lost relation. Later she was to return to Mexico ten times more between then and Leonora's death in 2011, sometimes staying for months at a time and subsequently travelling around Britain and through Europe in search of the loose ends of her tale. They spent days talking and reading together, drinking tea and tequila, going for walks and to parties and eating take away pizzas or dining out in her local restaurants as Leonora told Joanna the wild and amazing truth about a life that had taken her from the suffocating existence of a debutante in London via war-torn France with her lover, Max Ernst, to incarceration in an asylum and finally to the life of a recluse in Mexico City. Leonora was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s, a founding member of the Women's Liberation Movement in Mexico during the 1970s and a woman whose reputation will survive not only as a muse but as a novelist and a great artist. This book is the extraordinary story of Leonora Carrington's life, and of the friendship between two women, related by blood but previously unknown to one another, whose encounters were to change both their lives.

A Surreal Life

The Surreal Life of Leonora Carrington

This accessible guide helps new parents or anyone taking care of a baby or child to learn how to take proper care of the baby, to choose the right equipment and supplies, and to keep the child healthy, happy and safe. Full color.

K.I.S.S. Guide to Baby and Child Care

Stefan van Raaij

Teresa Arcq

Surreal Friends brings together for the first time the works of three women surrealist artists. friends in exile in Mesico in the 1910s: British painter Leonora Carrington. Spanish painter Remedios Varo and Hungarian photographer Kati Horna. Leonora Carrington came to Mexico in the 1910s when her love affair with Max Ernst was interrupted by outbreak of the Second World War. In Mexico City she found herself liberated from her English upper-middle-class background and from the expectations of the older male Surrealists of whose circle she had been a part in Paris and New York. She made new friendships-with Varo and Horna especially. but also with other refugees artists and writers including Frida Kahlo and Octavio Paz. Remedios Varo arrivedin Mexico City in 1911. having fled Nazi-occupied France with her lover, the French Surrealist poet Benjamin Poet. Until her early death in 1963 she produced a wealth of paintings inspired by the spirit and freedom of Mexico, in which magic, humour and illusion feature strongly. Kati Horna was born in Hungary and moved to Paris to pursue a career as a photographer. With her partner Jose Horna she documented the Spanish Civil War. before moving with him to Mexico City in 1939, In Mexico she became a photojournalist for various newspapers and also took on more personal photography projects, much of this work suffused with a Surrealist thread. For all three women, Mexico offered freedom to explore their art, Surreal Friends tells the fascinating story of their artistic friendship.

Joanna Moorhead

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