The house of Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) in Mexico City, renovated in 2021 to become a museum, will ultimately not open to the public. The local university which owns it has announced its decision to make it a research center.
The “house museum” project was officially announced in 2021 after the artist’s residence was sold for $500,000 (€450,000) to the Autonomous Metropolitan University (UAM) by his son Pablo Weisz Carrington. The latter had sold his mother’s house on the condition that it be transformed into a museum. He then loaned more than 8,600 works by the artist valued at $3 million (€2.7 million) to the UAM. The university had invested 12 million pesos (€540,000) in the project between the purchase and renovation of the building.
Managing a museum was not in the interest of the university and its research ambitions, reports El Pais. According to UAM officials, the house was acquired to make it “a documentation center because fundamentally the interest of the university is research. » A conflict with the union regarding personnel would also have prevented the museum project from coming to fruition. We can also think that the museum’s economic model was not sustainable as it was.
The original museum project would have been a highly touristy location similar to “Casa Azul”, the Frida Kahlo Museum in Coyoacan south of Mexico City. Born from the promise of the artist’s son to make it a museum, that of Leonora Carrington would have allowed the public to have access to the works in the artist’s place of life and creation: the living room, the kitchen , the workshop and the interior gardens where she lived for 60 years. The museum project included the 8,600 objects loaned by Pablo Weisz Carrington, 45 anthropomorphic sculptures and 4 graphic works. A 360-degree virtual tour of the rooms of the house and objects was also planned for the public.
Leonora Carrington, who died in 2011, was born in 1917 into a family of wealthy textile industrialists in England. After her art studies, the artist left her country for France where she joined Max Ernst whom she met during an exhibition in London. Painter, sculptor and novelist, Leonora Carrington quickly became part of the circle of Surrealists among whom she rubbed shoulders with Paul Eluard, André Breton and Leonor Fini. Often brought back to her romantic relationship with Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington was a committed feminist: “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse. I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”she said. She participated in the international exhibition of Surrealism organized by André Breton and Paul Eluard in 1938 and she settled in Mexico at the beginning of the 1940s. She produced dreamlike and enigmatic paintings as well as fantastic stories, some of which were illustrated by Max Ernst as The House of Fear (1938).
