Curtains and Cauldrons: The Delicate Politics of Exhibiting Leonora Carrington

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1604354" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/12/03.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="A long horizontal painting depicts a fantastical landscape with forests, animals, huts and ritual figures moving across a bridge, showing Carrington’s blend of folklore, magic and surreal narrative." width="970" height="333" data-caption='Leonora Carrington, <em>The Elements</em>, 1946. Oil on panel, 35.6 x 99.8 cm. Rudman Trust Collection. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>© Estate of Leonora Carrington, by SIAE 2025. Photo: Vincenzo Bruno</span>’>

The exhibition, curated by Giulia Ingarao and Tere Arcq, is on paper a triumph: finally, Italy dedicates a full-scale retrospective to one of the most radical, complex and visionary artists of the 20th Century. More than sixty works trace Leonora Carrington’s trajectory from British Surrealist circles to her self-exile in Mexico, from myth and alchemy to feminist prophecy. Yet there’s something uneasy about the timing: the show opens only a few months after a major Milanese exhibition dedicated to Leonor Fini, another crucial yet long-neglected figure at the surrealist margins. It’s tempting to read this sequence as a long-overdue redress—but also as a curatorial pattern, a sign that women Surrealists are becoming the latest aesthetic trend, a convenient cluster of names to tick off the inclusion checklist.

Over the past few years, these artists—Carrington, Fini, Hilma af Klint, Remedios Varo—have been everywhere: their paintings reprinted, their stories reclaimed, their works adorning museum banners and tote bags. It’s thrilling to see them finally recognized, but the art world’s enthusiasm sometimes feels performative, even cosmetic. There’s a fine line between recognition and tokenism, and institutions still tend to cross it with well-meaning decorum. The “female Surrealist” has become a genre: an object of rediscovery, presented with reverent tone and a faint domestic gloss.

That gloss is everywhere at Palazzo Reale. The exhibition unfolds through six chapters: The Beginning of a Grand Tour into Life, The Bride of the Wind, Displacement, The Heroine’s Journey, The Luminous Dark and The Alchemical Kitchen. They carve a path that mirrors the artist’s life from the post-Victorian imagination of her youth to her years of alchemical wisdom in Mexico. The walls, painted in saturated hues of cobalt, red and forest green, are draped with thin, almost translucent curtains. They don’t enclose the space so much as veil it—a soft filter over Carrington’s untamable force. It’s a beautiful gesture, but one that risks domesticating her wildness, transforming her visionary rigor into décor.

The exhibition text invites visitors to rediscover Carrington as a key figure of Surrealism and the international avant-garde, emphasizing her lifelong journey through metamorphosis, reinvention and discovery. Yet within the rooms, it’s the scenography that often commands attention. The walls are dotted with elegantly printed quotations—some genuine, others curatorial—glowing softly under the spotlights. They look almost like designer aphorisms, curated for a “museum selfie moment.” The risk is clear: to turn a show of such gravity into an Instagrammable experience—a sequence of poised pauses in which the visitor performs their enlightenment. The result, at times, feels less like an exhibition with a solid art-historical backbone and more like a beautifully groomed event: a polished surface that conceals the urgency and rigor of Carrington’s thought.

And yet Carrington’s work refuses any form of containment. Grandmother Moorhead’s Aromatic Kitchen (1974), chosen as the exhibition’s image, is not the cozy domestic scene its title suggests but a kind of ritual laboratory: women-cooks as alchemists, stirring worlds into being. The Elements (1946) and The Lovers (1987) transform love and nature into charged, otherworldly systems of exchange; A Map of the Human Animal (1962) renders the body as a constellation of metamorphoses, a cartography of becoming. Nothing about these works asks to be softened. They are fierce, excessive, irreducible.

Carrington, like Fini and af Klint, was not there to decorate modernism—she was there to detonate it. Her practice dismantled hierarchies of human and animal, spirit and matter, male and female. Her paintings are acts of rebellion disguised as visions. Yet too often, curators neutralize this radicality by over-explaining the biographical context: her relationship with Max Ernst, her breakdown, her exile in Mexico. These narratives are valid, but when they precede the work, they re-inscribe the very hierarchy they should dismantle. Male artists are mythologized through their oeuvre; women are narrated through their lovers, traumas and domestic lives. The label still does the disciplining.

The exhibition’s trajectory, from her childhood drawings like Sisters of the Moon to the esoteric maturity of Sous la rose des vents (1955), follows a spiritual evolution, the “heroine’s journey” that gives its title to one of the sections. It’s here that the show’s thesis emerges most clearly: Carrington redefined knowledge itself, moving from fairy tales to Gurdjieff, from alchemy to ecofeminism, from madness to mystical lucidity. In The Luminous Dark, her fascination with occult traditions—tarot, astrology, cabala—is presented not as escapism but as epistemology, a method of knowing the world through transformation.

The final section, The Alchemical Kitchen, is perhaps the most revelatory. Borrowing Susan Aberth’s term, it reclaims the kitchen—a space of women’s work, of supposed confinement—as a crucible of power. Carrington’s fascination with the “witches’ market” of Mexico City, her experiments with tempera and egg yolk, her meticulous, shimmering brushwork: all converge here into an ars combinatoria of body and cosmos. As Edward James once wrote, “Her paintings are not merely painted—they are brewed.”

And yet, the scenography still hesitates to let her darkness fully unfold. Those thin curtains, the ambient lighting, the polished wall texts—they soften what should be searing. They try to make her accessible, digestible, even photogenic. The result is a contradiction: a radical artist framed in the language of gentleness. A revolution padded with velvet.

The real feminist act would be to strip away the drapery—to let Carrington’s luminous darkness radiate without apology or mediation. Her world doesn’t need to be beautified or explained; it needs to be confronted. Her work already holds the keys to the transformation the art world claims to seek.

Because this recent wave of exhibitions devoted to women Surrealists is both a revolution and a risk. It finally gives them space, but it also tends to sanctify them, to make them “exceptions” rather than architects of a new canon. The next step must be to integrate them not as symbols of inclusion but as foundations of another art history written from the margins inward.

Seeing Carrington’s paintings gathered together—The Lovers, Orplied, Snake bite floripondio—is an unforgettable experience: luminous, uncontainable, alive. The problem is never the work; it’s the frame. Recognition is not revolution. Representation is not liberation. The revolution Carrington envisioned, where transformation is freedom, and freedom is knowledge, still lies ahead, shimmering beyond the next curtain.

So yes, let’s celebrate this new visibility of women Surrealists, but let’s do so critically, without mistaking visibility for victory. Carrington didn’t paint to be fashionable; she painted to survive, to invent new forms of being. To honor her is not to hang her in a gauze-lit room with elegantly printed quotes, but to tear the veil and let her wildness burn through the canon itself. Until then, these rediscoveries will remain what they too often are: polite corrections, curated revolutions with matching curtains.

“Leonora Carrington” is on view at Palazzo Reale, Milan, through January 11, 2025.

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