{"id":20494,"date":"2021-04-08T17:14:48","date_gmt":"2021-04-08T16:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/?p=20494"},"modified":"2023-02-05T23:23:08","modified_gmt":"2023-02-05T23:23:08","slug":"leonora-carrington-and-the-house-of-fear","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/2021\/04\/08\/leonora-carrington-and-the-house-of-fear\/","title":{"rendered":"Leonora Carrington and the House of Fear"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Kim Evans’ 50-minute TV profile of Leonora Carrington finally turned up on YouTube in December, in a slightly truncated copy. I taped this when it was first broadcast by the BBC in November 1992, and had the foresight to digitise it before my video recorder stopped working, but I’ve never wanted a YT account so I resisted the urge to upload it myself. If I was going to do so I’d offer things to Ubuweb instead, but I haven’t managed that either.<\/p>\n

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Leonora Carrington and the House of Fear<\/em><\/a> was shown a few months after Carrington’s paintings had been the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery<\/a> in London, two events that made nonsense of Tate Modern’s subsequent labelling of her as a “lost” artist. Most artists would be happy to be described as “lost” if it meant being given almost an hour of screen-time on BBC 1 together with a retrospective show at a major London gallery. Describing Carrington as “lost” was a convenient way for the Tate and any art critics playing catch-up to sidestep their having ignored her work for decades. (Joanna Moorhead embarrassed Tate Modern about this neglect<\/a> in 2007.) Surrealism’s avant-garde status waned in the late 1940s, and the movement became increasingly disreputable thanks in part to Salvador Dal\u00ed’s prominence and self-promotion. There were Surrealist exhibitions in London prior to 1992\u2014notably the expansive Dada and Surrealism<\/em> show at the Hayward Gallery in 1978\u2014but the British art and literary world has always been suspicious of an excess of imagination, the very thing that’s to the fore in Kim Evans’ film. This follows the standard BBC template of the time, combining a biographical sketch with a view of the artist’s day-to-day life which here includes a visit to a crypt full of mummified corpses, and a lesson in how to make egg tempera. Marina Warner championed Carrington’s art and writing throughout the “lost” years, and she turns up briefly to offer some comment.<\/p>\n

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Previously on { feuilleton }
\n\u2022 Temptations<\/a>
\n\u2022 The Secret Life of Edward James<\/a>
\n\u2022 Leonora Carrington, 1917\u20132011<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Kim Evans’ 50-minute TV profile of Leonora Carrington finally turned up on YouTube in December, in a slightly truncated copy. I taped this when it was first broadcast by the BBC in November 1992, and had the foresight to digitise it before my video recorder stopped working, but I’ve never wanted a YT account so … Continue reading “Leonora Carrington and the House of Fear”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"New blog post: Leonora Carrington and the House of Fear","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2,44,18,19],"tags":[2576,11329,731,532],"class_list":["post-20494","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-painting","category-surrealism","category-television","tag-joanna-moorhead","tag-kim-evans","tag-leonora-carrington","tag-marina-warner"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pq7rV-5ky","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20494","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20494"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20494\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20494"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20494"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.johncoulthart.com\/feuilleton\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20494"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}