Presented at court as a debutante in 1930s England, Leonora Carrington brought an Aldous Huxley novel and read it to opt out of the marriage market. This episode follows her from a strict Catholic textile fortune and a Gothic revival mansion in Lancashire, through expulsion from two schools, a first glimpse of surrealism in Paris at age ten, art training in London, and the intense relationship with Max Ernst that took her to a farmhouse in southern France.

We trace how World War II shattered that world: Ernst’s arrests as an enemy alien and a degenerate artist, her flight to Spain, a sexual assault by soldiers, a psychotic break, and commitment to a Santander asylum where she was treated with seizure-inducing Cardiazol, later documented in her memoir Down Below. The conversation covers her escape in Lisbon through a marriage of convenience to Mexican diplomat Renato Leduc, her new life in Mexico City with Remedios Varo, her turn to alchemy, the Kabbalah, and the Popol Vuh, egg tempera painting, the novel The Hearing Trumpet, her role in Mexico’s women’s liberation movement, and the 2024 sale of a 1945 painting for 28.5 million dollars.

• How her self-portrait with a hyena rejected the surrealist muse role from the start
• Why Down Below stripped away the male surrealists’ romantic view of madness
• How diplomatic immunity became her getaway car from family and doctors
• Why she chose alchemy and Mayan mythology over Freud
• How the 2022 Venice Biennale took its title, The Milk of Dreams, from her children’s book