Imagine that

The daughter of a wealthy textile magnate and his Irish wife, Carrington was born in 1917, near Chorley, Lancashire, in the north of England. As her biographer Dawn Adès has written, it was “a social world of arcane rituals, subtle hierarchies, animal sacrifice [there was a lot of fox hunting] and festering tradition”.

As a child, she revelled in the Celtic myths and legends her mother and Irish nanny used to tell her, but her reaction to almost everything else was to rebel. Her governesses found her ungovernable and several schools expelled her, though, at 17, she was unwillingly presented to George V at Buckingham Palace. (An accomplished writer of prose every bit as hallucinatory as her painting, she subsequently published a short story entitled ‘The Debutante’.) Art was her calling, though, and eventually her parents let her study, first in Florence (where the works of Arcimboldo and Uccello made a particular impression), then at the Chelsea School of Art and with the Cubist painter Amédée Ozenfant.

The defining moment of her youth came, however, one evening in 1937, when a fellow student, Ursula Blackwell, wife of the architect Ernő Goldfinger, invited her to dinner with German Surrealist artist Max Ernst. The bottle of beer that Carrington had just opened overflowed with foam, and Ernst reached to staunch it with his thumb. She already knew and revered his work. “You know when something really touches you, it feels like burning,” she wrote. It was a coup de foudre. She was not quite 20; he was 46 and already on his second, of four, marriages, but off she went to Cornwall with him, to a house party that included Eileen Agar, Paul Éluard, Lee Miller and Man Ray. And when he finally returned to Paris, she followed him and “stayed and stayed” at his apartment on the rue Jacob, not far from Picasso’s house, where they mixed with the likes of Jean Arp, André Breton and Yves Tanguy.

Meanwhile Guggenheim had secured Ernst’s release, and they too arrived in Lisbon, awaiting a Pan Am Clipper flight to New York. “I felt a dagger go through my heart,” Guggenheim wrote, when Ernst told her he had run into Carrington by chance. But – as another of her biographers, Joanna Moorhead, puts it – their affair “was not reignited”. Instead, Ernst married Guggenheim, who later admitted that even Breton “confirmed my opinion that [Leonora] was the only woman Max had ever loved”.

Carrington had no plans to go to Africa, preferring the sound of America. A Mexican diplomat, the poet Renato Leduc, to whom Picasso had introduced her in Paris, had been posted to Portugal, so she presented herself at the Mexican embassy. And there, reader, she married him. They sailed to New York and, in 1943, drove to Mexico.

That summer Guggenheim’s New York gallery, Art of This Century, included a Carrington painting in the legendary Exhibition by 31 Women, a show suggested by Marcel Duchamp and co-curated by Ernst and Breton, featuring female Surrealists such as Leonor Fini, Meret Oppenheim and Dorothea Tanning, as well as Frida Kahlo and, more surprisingly, Gypsy Rose Lee. Carrington, she said, was already painting in “the best Surrealist manner”, full of “animals and birds rather resembling Bosch’s”.

But Mexico opened Carrington’s eyes to another world entirely. Everything was “exciting and utterly strange, even the trees”, she recalled. She was fascinated by “the character of the people, their contact with the dead, the variety of food, plants, animals and landscape”. Its mythology intrigued her, too: hence perhaps the most important painting she made in Mexico, The Magical World of the Maya (1964), 4.5m long and fantastical even by her own standards. Commissioned by the National Museum of Anthropology and History for its opening, it was evidence of her importance to her adopted country. She was less entranced by her husband, and having fallen in with a group of artists, left him for Emeric Weisz (‘Chiki’), a Hungarian photographer who had managed Robert Capa’s darkroom in the Spanish Civil War. Though she continued to have affairs, not least with the Nobel laureate Octavio Paz, their marriage lasted till his death, aged 97, in 2007. She outlived him by four years.

Among this circle was the female Spanish Surrealist painter Remedios Varo, with whom Carrington used to visit the Mercado de Sonora or ‘witchcraft market’ – the occult was another enduring theme in her work. As Margaret Hooks, author of Surreal Lovers: Eight Women Integral to the Life of Max Ernst, wrote, “Natural healers and savants introduced them to alchemical experiments that they later practised in their kitchens”, an activity that surely has some bearing on Operation Wednesday.

But those who knew Carrington learnt never to ask her to decipher her work (nor to ask about her lovers). “Nothing to explain,” she’d bark. Rather her paintings – which Luis Buñuel praised for their ability to “liberate us from the miserable reality of our days” – were challenges to the imagination. In the end, her alchemy was less about preparing potions in her kitchen than in playing with perceptions of the world.

Claire Wrathall writes for the Telegraph and the Financial Times.