No Mere Muse, This Influential Surrealist Artist and Feminist Gets Her Due in a New Biopic and Art Exhibitions

Leonora Carrington’s life and work are celebrated with the new film “Leonora in the Morning Light.” Meanwhile, an exhibition at the Freud Museum showcases for the first time artwork she created inside a psychiatric hospital

Michele Debczak | Correspondent

May 28, 2026 3:26 p.m.

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To those familiar with Leonora Carrington’s work, her paintings are instantly recognizable. The 20th-century artist was known for creating enchanting scenes that combine the surreal imagery of mythology with strikingly personal details. But despite her singular style, Carrington didn’t achieve the same fame as many of her peers in the Surrealist movement. Now, 15 years after her death in 2011, she’s reaching new audiences thanks to a new biopic, a large solo exhibition in France and an exhibition at the Freud Museum in London.

Born in England in 1917, Carrington had an upper-class, Catholic upbringing, but it was the Celtic mythology she learned from her Irish mother and nanny that stuck with her and informed her work as an adult. She studied art in Florence and London and became acquainted with the Surrealist art movement exploding in Europe. In 1937, she met Max Ernst, one of the movement’s leading artists, and ran away with him to France. There she met the other Surrealist icons of the era, including Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí and André Breton, and she threw herself into her own artistic practice.

Though she was producing serious paintings of her own during this period, she was best known as Ernst’s muse—a characterization that persists.

When later asked about this by art historian Whitney Chadwick, Carrington reportedly said, per the Met’s Kathy Hessel, “I didn’t have time to be anyone’s muse. I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.”

At the start of World War II, Ernst was interned by the Nazis and Carrington sought refuge in Spain. There she suffered a mental health crisis and was checked into a psychiatric hospital. The current exhibition at the Freud Museum in London is dedicated to the work she created there, including sketchbooks and her 1940 painting Villa Pilar, which has never been displayed to the public. According to the Guardian’s Nadia Khomami, the animal-women hybrids in a dreamlike forest setting are meant to “depict the psychiatric hospital as a symbolic underworld.”

In the 1940s, she moved to Mexico where she connected with a community of like-minded artists. In addition to continuing to make Surrealist art that explored nature, femininity and the occult, Carrington became an influential figure in Mexico’s women's liberation movement during the 1970s. She also wrote novels, plays and a memoir titled Down Below.

The new movie Leonora in the Morning Light covers many chapters of the artist’s life, from her immersion in France’s Surrealist scene in the 1930s and her romance with Ernst, to her trials in Spain, and finally to her rebirth in Mexico. Adapted from a biographical novel by Elena Poniatowska, the film stars Olivia Vinall as the title character. Following a film festival run, it’s now set to hit theaters.

Leonora in the Morning Light | Official UK Trailer

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Carrington’s tumultuous life and connection to some of the most famous artists of the 20th century make for juicy biopic fodder. But it's the artist’s work itself that still has people talking about her nearly a century after the Surrealist movement’s peak. More than 125 of Carrington’s works are on view right now in the first major show dedicated to her in France, at the exhibition “Leonora Carrington” at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris.

“She sought to capture fleeting scenes of the subconscious where real memories and imagined visions mingle,” Tessa Solomon wrote for Art in America in 2021. “In Carrington's rich universe, ethereal beings enact rituals with unknown purposes; these creatures have characteristics of women and animals, and seem to be somewhere between humans and beasts. There's a soft glow and sensuality to her paintings, and some critics have said that this emphasizes Carrington's femininity, not as a crutch but as a gift.”

“The Symptomatic Surreal” is showing at the Freud Museum in London now through August 10. The painting Villa Pilar joins the exhibition starting July 1.

Leonora in the Morning Light premieres this month in the United Kingdom and Ireland.

“Leonora Carrington” is on view at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris through July 19.

Michele Debczak | Read More

Michele Debczak is a writer and editor based in Brooklyn, New York. She appears in seasons four through six of History Channel’s “The Food That Built America,” and her work has been featured in Mental Floss, IndieWire, Eater and Vice.