Readers unfamiliar with the life, art, and writings of the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington will get an exceptional introduction in Surreal Spaces by Joanna Moorhead, a British journalist whose father was Carrington's cousin. Moorhead had always known Carrington as "the black sheep of our family," yet when in 2006 the Guardian hired her to write about her relative, she discovered that Carrington was "Mexico's most famous living artist." They met for conversations in Carrington's Mexico City kitchen over the next five years. After Carrington's death in 2011, Moorhead traveled to "the houses, landscapes and countries [Carrington] had inhabited" to learn of "the influences, stories, and places that helped to make Leonora Carrington who she was, both as an artist and as a woman."
In this amply illustrated volume, Moorhead covers the highlights of Carrington's career: her privileged childhood growing up Catholic in England, her affair with the much-older surrealist Max Ernst, her time in Spain's Santander sanatorium after a psychological breakdown, and her eventual move to Mexico City for most of her final 60 years. What distinguishes this book are the tidbits Moorhead obtained during their conversations, such as that, when Carrington lived in New York in the 1970s, she was so poor that "she sometimes ate ice cream because it was the cheapest way of getting calories inside her." Carrington called surrealism the belief "that nothing is ordinary; that everything in life is extraordinary." That spirit permeates every page of this handsome book. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer