17/07/2025
Exactly three years ago, it was extremely hot and I was sheltering from the sun in libraries while trying to write a thesis. Today, a strange package arrived: my dear friend Evan opened it for me and found volume 35 of Women: A Cultural Review. I was thrilled. Back then, I was obsessed with thinking about as a political thinker, not just a visual artist, let alone a ‘muse.’
As always happens in my research processes, life is full of serendipities: I come across lost paintings in unusual places, unknown drawings on , someone casually reading her outside the café where I write, etc. When I began I knew there was something I wanted to understand, but I didn’t quite know what. I always tell my students that being an art historian is like being a detective. I became one while learning (at least trying) to do literary analysis.
My intuition was real, I discovered in her not only a great sense of humour, but also a scathing critique of total institutions (boarding schools, asylums, concentration camps, etc.) and gender mandates. Carrington, as well as witnessing the disasters of Na**sm and Francoism, was a victim of medical and gender violence.
She was not silent. When I think that ‘the personal is political,’ I think of her: how she used her voice to create testimony and memory about the abuse she experienced for being a ‘crazy woman’ when in reality, she was saner than the rest of the world, submerged in the normalisation of fascism.
I handed in the thesis in and decided to forget it, I didn’t like it and it made me feel insecure. Last year I edited it and started looking for a journal that would accept it, I received more rejections than I can count. Then came the acceptances, one of them in a ‘much better’ (those measurements are rare) journal than the ones I had applied to. I am very grateful. The lesson is not to stop trying and not to take no’s personally. I think that I am closing a cycle with Leonora, I am very fond of her and it gives me a certain peace to honour her work.
Finally, this work would have been impossible without the help of Leticia Sabsay, Millo Miller, and .
