All language subtitles for Leonora Carrington the lost surrealist (Teresa Griffiths-BBC, 2017)

AMBIENT MUSIC PLAYS

Hidden away in a corner of Mexico City,
a reclusive artist lived and

worked for more than half a century.

She was revered by the Mexican art
world, but never courted publicity,

and was little-known overseas.

Surprisingly, she was English, and
her name was Leonora Carrington.

Now, 100 years since her birth, the
spotlight is at last upon her...

..and her work is being celebrated
worldwide by museums

and high-profile admirers.

Collectors are starting
to take note.

But what story lay behind this
forgotten artist

who is inspiring a new generation?

Leonora had once been at the
epicentre of Surrealism,

Europe's most
revolutionary art scene...

and had rubbed shoulders with the
greats of 20th-century art.

What led this woman, who conquered
Paris in the 1930s,

to a life in exile so far from home?

As it turned out,

hers was a very strange and
extraordinary story indeed.

Well, I think it's never too late
to mend...

to mend the fact that
I'm ignored in my own country.

AMBIENT MUSIC PLAYS

My mother had imaginary
and real worlds,

sort of juxtaposed.

She didn't feel that one was as
alien to the other.

And my mother felt that there was
always fantastic in the real

and the other way round...

..and the mysterious was always
around the corner.

I was never entirely sure which side
of the canvas she was on.

She seemed, in her mind, to inhabit

the places that she painted and the

creatures that she drew, they were

just like extensions of her life.

Everything came from dreams
she had had,

in some way interpreted into the
canvas.

We can look at those pictures of
hers and walk around inside them and

meet these strange creatures
that are there.

They're usually quite benign, some
of them are a bit scary.

But it's the sort of creatures that
I would be very glad to meet in my

own dreams.

I always had access to other
worlds, like we all do.

We all sleep, we all dream.

That kind of feeling that you have
in childhood,

of things being very mysterious.

PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

Do you think anybody escapes their
childhood?

I don't think we do.

Well, what my mother told me about
growing up in England was how she

would create a whole world
of her own,

because she was a pretty solitary

little girl.

She grew up as the only girl in a
family with three brothers.

They played together, but they
didn't include her much.

So, she had to build her own
universe, let's say.

CHILD'S VOICE: Now you must know,
Moskoski is not on Earth.

It is on a little planet called
Starvinski.

Dragons Of Moskoski,
chapter one.

CHIRPING AND CHATTERING

EERIE MINIMAL MUSIC

Horiptus is found on the north-west
coast of Java.

Feeds on millet oil seed.

INSECTS BUZZ

Her father was a very, very wealthy
owner of a textile mill,

called Harold Carrington,

and her mother was the daughter of
an Irish doctor.

When Leonora was three, they rented
this really stupendous house,

called Crookhey Hall.

CAWING

It was a kind of dark,
rather exciting place.

EERIE BIRDCALLS

There was a lake. We had a myth that
it was bottomless,

and we weren't allowed
to go there alone.

DOG BARKS

We did think that there was a ghost
in the tower.

EERIE WAILING

Her brothers went to boarding school
when they were quite young.

Leonora stayed at home until she was
about 11 or 12.

And, of course, she was isolated,
as she didn't have any sisters.

She was all alone in the nursery
with the French governess.

She was called
Mademoiselle Coutable.

She never liked me.

I had temper tantrums.

CHILD'S VOICE: Seen standing
in space,

soft blue and green feathers around
its neck.

Peacock.

Notes: birds, etc.

Seen while asleep.
Seen alive on a plate.

Like salad. Coloured green and blue.

Wet like a frog, and wriggly.

When she got to, I think, 11, she
did go away to school.

She went to two Catholic
boarding schools.

I was expelled from two schools.

Both convents.

I think I was mainly expelled for
not collaborating.

I had a kind of allergy to
collaboration.

The Mother Superior wrote a letter
saying,

"This child is neither capable of
study or play,

"and hence we are returning her
to you."

My grandmother got us some
watercolours at first,

and apparently it was a rather
complex set of colours.

It wasn't just a cheap set.

My grandmother was probably the most

instrumental person in that stage,

because my grandfather was not very

enthusiastic about her activities,

and her imagery.

But my grandmother was a Celt,

so she thought this was perfectly
natural.

In a way, Leonora's whole world

started to grow when
she was very little.

All this magical Celtic world
that her mother told her about.

And she had these little paintings
of fairy tales in her room, that she

kept all her life.

With my grandfather, the
relationship was not as close.

He felt that he had to represent
discipline and

all those things.

I felt him to be a
very powerful presence.

I remember how frightened
I was of him.

My mother, I think,

had a sort of love-hate relationship
with my grandfather.

He was strict, but he was fair.

I think he provided a sort of
counterbalance to my grandmother,

in terms of Leonora.

But she later came into conflict
with him.

FOOTSTEPS

He wanted for her
to be a certain way,

a certain upbringing,

a certain social behaviour
and so on.

REMOTE LAUGHTER AND VOICES

Certainly, after maybe 16 or 17,

she was reluctant to be a model of
what he wanted.

Leonora's father was in the process
of becoming very wealthy, very fast.

They were nouveau riche,
and they knew it.

They wanted all the trappings of
wealth.

In a family like that,

everything rests on who the daughter
of the family marries.

In this family, there was only one
daughter,

so who she married could have
carried that family up into the

higher social echelons, as it were.

Well, they wanted me to conform to
the life of horses and hunt balls

and being well considered by the
local gentry, I suppose.

That sort of thing.

So, Leonora went to live in London,
to be launched into society,

to come out as a debutante.

This was one of my grandfather's
plans, to present her to the King.

So they gussied her up and dressed

her in these silk garments
and so on.

I wrote.

There are lots of stories there.

The Debutante was a book that I
wrote afterwards

about my experiences.

"When I was a debutante,
I often went to the zoo.

"The animal I got to know best was a
young hyena.

" 'What a bloody nuisance,'
I said to her.

" 'I've got to go to my ball
tonight.'

" 'You're lucky,' she said,
'I'd love to go.'

" 'Ring for your maid,
and when she comes in,

" 'we'll pounce upon her
and tear off her face.

" 'I'll wear her face tonight,
instead of mine.'

" 'It's not practical,' I said.
'She'll probably die.'

" 'Somebody will certainly find the
corpse, and we'll be put in prison.'

" 'I'm hungry enough to eat her,'
the hyena replied.

" 'And the bones?'
'As well,' she said.

"My mother entered, pale with rage.

" 'We'd just sat down at table,' she
said, 'when that thing,

'sitting in your place,
got up and shouted,

" 'So, I smell a bit strong, what?
Well, I don't eat cakes.'

" 'Whereupon it tore off
its face and ate it,

" 'and, with one great bound,
disappeared through the window.' "

She said it was torture.

That was maybe the last time Leonora
ever did as she was told.

CRUNCHING AND CHATTER OF DINERS

Her family have been seen as this
upper-class family,

but they were not
an upper-class family.

They were a family
who didn't fit in.

I think that's key
to understanding Leonora.

Leonora, from her earliest times,
didn't fit in.

The thing about Harold Carrington
was that he came from a family

where women would have known their
place.

Men were the workers, they went out,

women stayed at home and did as they
were told.

He wasn't used to anybody answering
him back,

and the one person who did answer
him back was the person he least

would have expected -
his only daughter.

And I think that was a big shock for
Harold.

And I think that led to the very big
clash between them.

She used to say that her father was
very stern and very severe,

but I think she cared very much
about her father.

She said that her father was very
narrow-minded and very difficult,

but she spoke more about her father
than about her mother.

There were no marriage proposals,
unsurprisingly.

And I think her parents were
probably at a bit of a loose end as

to what to do with her next,

and I think that she came up with
this idea of going to art school.

I was planning of going to London to
study painting.

I already knew that.

For Leonora, this was the beginning
of freedom for her.

She was at art school,

and she was mixing with a different
sort of person.

She found that she was an artist.

She found that she
wanted to study art.

And she found Surrealism,

and Surrealism was something that
surprised her,

because it was so familiar.

My mother gave me Herbert Read's
book on Surrealism,

and I had an affinity with it.

She opened that book,

and she connected with Surrealism,
and in particular

she connected with the pictures she
saw in there

by an artist called Max Ernst.

Deux Enfants Sont Menacs Par Un
Rossignol.

Two Children Being Frightened Of...

Rossignol is for the nightingale,
isn't it?

I felt, "Ah, yes, this is familiar.

"I know what this is about."

A kind of world which would move
between worlds.

The world of our dreaming and
imagination.

It was a seismic moment
in the art world.

The public of Britain was just
struggling to

cope with the Post-Impressionists,

and suddenly here were all these
people who were regarded as madmen.

Critics recommended they should be
locked up, to protect the public.

My mother saw these paintings, and

she was really fascinated with them,

and she confessed to me,
"I want to be there...

"I want to be recognised in this
group."

One evening,

she's invited for dinner to the home
of a friend of hers from art school,

and they had invited an artist who
was in London because he had a show

on at the time,
and that was Max Ernst.

They both met, and something really
must have clicked very significantly

for her.

I knew his work and admired it.

I thought he was a very
extraordinary person.

He was very intelligent.

He was also very attractive.

She said it didn't take very long
before they were lovers.

Her father, having heard about this
relationship,

and obviously incandescent at the
turn of events,

decided to try and get Max arrested
for the content of the show.

So he called someone at the
Metropolitan Police and said that he

thought they needed to investigate
this man, Max Ernst,

because his images were
pornographic.

Max, at that time, was married,
and this did not help things.

But Max's friends, I think,

rather liked Leonora,

and were kind of encouraging and
supporting of her.

And among those friends, of course,
were my parents,

Lee Miller and Roland Penrose, who
took to her right from the start.

Fortunately, Max's friend Roland
Penrose got to hear of this threat

and warned Max to go to Cornwall,
where Roland's brother had a house.

Max and Leonora came down,

and there was also
Man Ray and Ady Fidelin

and Eileen Agar and Joseph Bard,
and Henry Moore showed up.

And it was just this amazing,

wonderful 'Surrealism in Cornwall'
moment.

They basically laid low for three or
four weeks,

until the danger had passed.

Max went to Paris,

and Leonora went to find her
parents, to tell them that she had

made a decision on her future.

I suppose it was the culmination of
everything he'd had to put up with

from Leonora. Of all her rebellion
over so many years,

and now she was coming to say that
she was going off to live in Paris

with a married man,
a penniless artist.

He was absolutely furious.

And he said to her, "Never obscure
the threshold of my house again!"

And that's the last she saw him.

I just left.

I just left!

Paris was very exciting at that
time.

I was in love.

I was with someone who was also an
extremely interesting person.

I was working and seeing new places.

I knew it was better than being
in a convent.

Paris must have been a wonderful
moment for Leonora,

like emerging into the sunlight of
really what the rest of her life

would be about.

It was a very, very, very exciting
moment in Paris,

because the Surrealist movement was
at its height.

When I was with the Surrealists, I
didn't have to fit in to anything.

Well, Surrealism was much more than
just an art movement.

It was a way of life.

They were trying to live in that
world of imagination that Leonora

was living in since
she was a little child.

So I think she fit in perfectly.

This was a group of radicals.

They were against every single
institution.

Society, the government, the Church.

They wanted to break
with every rule.

It was anti-bourgeois.

It was anti the very thing that
Leonora had just herself

escaped from.

So she couldn't have been in a more
marvellous and exciting setting than

she found herself there in Paris.

Leonora was a now 20-year-old woman,

and because she was
the lover of Max Ernst,

she was kind of parachuted into the
very centre of that circle.

I saw a lot of the Surrealists,
including Breton.

He had a way of talking...
SHE SPEAKS FRENCH

He seemed pompous, but he wasn't
really pompous.

I'd take the mickey out of him now
and again.

I liked Picasso.

I also admired him.

I didn't go overboard, but I thought
that he was very talented.

People like Picasso
lived down the road,

and she said that finally
she'd discovered...

..kin people, kin minds,

people who thought the way she did.

I think being around Max showed
Leonora, in a way,

what was possible,

but of course, being a woman,
she had a lot to push against.

Because, although the Surrealists
were these fantastic avant-garde,

modern, freethinking people,

they still had a long way to go
before they reconstructed their

ideas about women.

And for many of them, women were
sort of like muses,

beautiful creatures that were there
to give inspiration,

sex and a jolly time.

They didn't take them seriously as
artists.

Well, the concept of female

in the group was the "femme-enfant",

which is cute, but derogatory.

And women were not really considered
to be contributors

in terms of art.

But my mother ignored all that and
scoffed, scoffed at it.

It was very clear that she did not
share those beliefs,

and she was very much a feminist.

Very much.

She refused to be a muse.

She refused to fit into their idea
of what she was.

And of course, she had plenty of
experience of refusing to fit in,

it's what she'd done all her life.

She wasn't going to fit into the
Surrealists' idea of how she should

behave any more than she had ever
fitted into anything else.

She always had to remind people that
she was an artist,

and that she was a woman, and she
had her own ideas about her art,

and she was not a muse

for either Max Ernst or for
Breton or anybody else.

Leonora and Max were stayed in Paris
for a few months over, I think,

the winter of 1937-8.

They then went to live in the
south of France,

in a town called
Saint-Martin-d'Ardeche.

Well, Max, you see, it was almost
like a learning process,

because he knew all sorts of things
I'd never heard of,

so it was a revelation, no?

And it was a love affair, also.

I felt that we would be all right
if it went on forever.

She was extremely happy.

This is, in her own words, her
happiest time in her life.

She told me this,

and that Max had been the greatest

love in her life,

at the exclusion of anybody else.

They'd had this idyllic year or so
in the south of France,

and then the War crashed into their
world and changed everything.

All of a sudden, the French start
rounding up people

of German extraction, and putting
them in prison.

Max was put by the French
in a concentration camp.

I eventually...

I eventually went mad.

My mother was destroyed by this.

It was too much for her.

She had a breakdown, and at that
precise moment she was visited by a

friend from England who was
obviously very worried by her state,

and persuaded her to leave
Saint-Martin with her in her car,

and to go with her to Spain.

She found her in a terrible state.

She hadn't eaten in days,

and she was eating roots or
something like that from the garden,

and in a very bad emotional state.

They put her in a car
and took her away.

"No, no, no!
I have to wait for Max!"

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry but the
Germans are coming."

And they were, like, 13 miles away,
or something like that,

and they just got
in the car and left.

She was completely destroyed.

So, I think it was my grandfather
that decided that it would be best

to put her in a mental institution.

Best for whom, I don't know,
but that...

that was a "family decision".

The solution that was found was that
she should be taken to a sanatorium

for people who had mental illness,
in the north of Spain.

She was tricked into going there,
basically.

She was told that she was going for
a day out to the seaside.

The doctor went with her,
she was drugged on the way there,

and she woke up in this place that
she, all her life,

called "the asylum".

That was the beginning of the
darkest chapter, really,

in her life.

"My first awakening to consciousness
was painful.

"I thought myself the victim of an
automobile accident.

"The place was suggestive of a
hospital,

"and I was being watched by a
repulsive-looking nurse

"who looked like an enormous bottle
of Lysol.

"I was in pain, and I realised that
my hands and feet

"were bound by leather straps.

"I learned later that I had entered
the place, fighting like a tigress."

It was the treatment she received
there that was so terrible.

She was treated by being given a
drug called Cardiosol,

which induced an epileptic fit.

"I don't know how long
I remained bound and naked.

"Several days and nights lying in my
own excrement, urine and sweat,

"tortured by mosquitoes whose stings
made my body hideous.

"A new era began with the most
terrible, blackest day of my life.

"How can I write this when I'm
afraid to think about it?

"I'm in terrible anguish,

"yet I cannot continue living alone
with such a memory.

"I know that once I've written it
down, I shall be delivered.

"But shall I be able to express with
mere words the horror of that day?

"A stranger entered my room.

"He carried in his hand a
physician's bag of black leather.

"Each of them got hold of a portion
of my body,

"and I saw the centre of all their
eyes were fixed upon me in a ghastly

"stare. Don Luis's eyes were tearing
my brain apart,

"and I was sinking down into a well,
very far.

"The bottom of that well was the
stopping of my mind for all eternity

"in the essence of utter anguish.

"With a convulsion of my vital
centre,

"I came up to the surface so
quickly, I had vertigo.

"When I came to, I was lying naked
on the floor.

"I went back to my bed
and tasted despair."

I think that experience sealed her.

Sealed her life,
the rest of her life, no?

And the fact that it was in some way
an order of her father, no?

So, you see there, families worked
in a very peculiar way, there, and

I don't think Leonora ever really
forgave that.

I came out...different.

Much more frightened.

What it mainly did for me,
in a conscious way,

was to have suddenly become aware
that I was both mortal

and touchable,
and I could be destroyed.

I didn't think so before.

She was still only in her early 20s.

She was really completely alone.

I was frightened, so frightened all
the time.

My family wanted me to go back to
England,

so it was, you know...

I didn't want to go back then.

Leonora ended up
meeting Renato Leduc.

Renato must have been a terribly
nice man who undoubtedly took a

great deal of interest in trying to
save Leonora,

because he realised that she was a
very special person.

He married her,
to get her a Mexican passport,

just simply to save her life.

He actually got me out of Europe,
Renato.

I met him in Madrid.

He worked in the Mexican Embassy,

and the whole Mexican Embassy left
to come back to Mexico.

She decided to go to Mexico, and she
didn't know a word of Spanish.

She had no idea how she would live,

and she went on this great adventure
of going to a country she had

never...she didn't even imagine
what it could be like.

Once you cross the border and you
arrive in Mexico,

you will feel that you are coming to
a place that's haunted.

Spirits, the presence of spirits.

Whatever spirits are.

It was like going to the other end
of the earth.

It is very extraordinary,
and very...very exotic.

Sometimes I found it marvellous,
sometimes I found it horrifying.

There's a lot of similarities
between the ancient Mexican

civilisations and
the Celtic cultures.

There's this concept of Surrealism
we have, of imagination, freedom,

magic as a way of life,

and I think that resonated with her
own culture.

Mexico became a refuge.

She found it painful

to leave Europe,
and she was always

nostalgic about Europe.

But then she made a life in Mexico.

But Leonora didn't know anybody,
clearly, in Mexico City,

and suddenly found herself
all alone there.

Renato seems like he was probably
quite a man's man,

liked going out to bars,
the cantinas,

and understandably,
she wasn't very happy.

PIANO MUSIC PLAYS

Renato was a nice man,
but he had an attitude

which was that it didn't matter if I
was alone, you know,

most days of the week,
without speaking Spanish...

..and not knowing anybody.

I think it was more than just a
marriage of convenience,

but it didn't have the deep roots
that a relationship needs, to go

through many, many years.

I asked Renato,

"Why did you separate such an
extraordinary woman?" and he said,

"Because she would talk to the dog
more than she did to me."

Leonora settled into Mexico,

into a Mexico where a great number
of intellectuals

were coming to Mexico
at the time,

of all nationalities and all races,

and Leonora undoubtedly found a
very interesting life

in which to live.

Now, did that make her happy?

God only knows.

She made new friends there, and they
were, crucially,

other people like her, who had fled
from wartime Europe and who had no

family, and most of those people,

who became her closest friends in
Mexico City,

would never see their families
again, any of them.

At one of the parties,
she met my father...

and the way she describes it,
she says,

"I decided this man would be a good
father for my children."

That's how she described him.

Nothing more, just that.

Chiki was a Hungarian photographer

who had fled Hungary and made

his way to Paris on foot after

witnessing from the window
of his apartment,

with his mother, a parade of Nazis
going by, saying...

you know, flourishing knives and
saying they were after Jewish blood.

Leonora and Chiki were both people
who'd ended up in Mexico from

war-torn Europe. They were both
people who'd left their families

behind. Chiki's family were mostly
dead.

They were at an exciting moment, in
a way, in their lives,

because they were there in this new
country and they were young people,

and Chiki, unlike Leonora's previous
lovers, was a younger man.

I think she liked Chiki, no?
At the beginning.

He was good-looking, and Chiki was
always a very,

very good man, but he was very shy.

And so they got together and married
after a little while,

and then my brother appeared,
and I appeared.

I believe motherhood was the most
amazing experience she ever had.

She told me once that having
children was, for her, so important,

because it's the only unconditional
love you can have in your life.

She said, "They are the only ones
that will never leave you."

When she was pregnant,
she was scared,

but she was painting like crazy.

This creative instinct came to her
at the same time of being able to

create life.

And I think that gave her a very
powerful sense.

I think her best work did come at
the time when she was painting with

the brush in one hand and the baby
in the other.

She probably adored her kids.

In fact, I would say, she did love
her kids,

but in Leonora's own way.

Certainly not in the traditional way
that a normal mother would have

loved her kids.

I think she was terrified that, if

she loved them the way her parents

loved her, they would be as unhappy

as she had become with her parents.

AMBIENT MUSIC PLAYS

She realised,
when she had Gaby and Pablo,

how important this new family was

going to be to her, because she was

somebody who'd left her
family behind.

She realised that she was going to
have a second chance at family,

and she was determined that that
second chance was going to go a lot

better than the first chance
had gone.

I don't think she could have loved
two children more than my brother

and myself.

I don't think that would have been
possible.

And my father was the same,
in a different way.

He was a little more realistic in

terms of getting us to get through

school without flunking and things.

He instilled a little discipline
into this marvellous world

that we were enjoying.

The boys were very near her.

The boys were always walking, one on
this side, one on this other side,

and always with her.

She shut herself in her studio,

but we used to open the door
and come in.

She would say, "I need to work,
so be very quiet.

"Here's a piece of paper. Draw."

And that's how I started drawing.

Sometimes it was dreadfully
difficult.

She was paralysed and desperate,

that no images came,

and it was barren,

and she was extremely depressed
sometimes.

But sometimes it
just flowed, like that,

and she was very excited, and she
wouldn't leave the studio, because

there were so many things coming.

Leonora was always very reluctant to

talk about her work, about her art.

She would never explain what
anything meant.

She just said,
"It just came that way."

She didn't do anything to promote
her career.

She was totally foreign to anything

resembling public relations.

She did the work and put it out, you
know, in public, and that was it.

It's difficult for me to put,
verbally.

I leave that to all the people who
do the writing.

It comes with a feeling
more than an image.

It's not that you actually see it.

There's a kind of sense that it's
quite right.

Let's say, that green was quite
right.

Or that green was, oh, no, no,
not quite right.

Then you don't stop to wonder where
that's coming from.

To be an artist, it was so natural
in her, no?

And to be famous,
she didn't like at all.

She didn't like journalism,
she didn't like...

She hated interviews.
She didn't like questions,

she never even answered them.

I don't think she was really that
much interested in the art market.

Of course, she wanted to sell the
paintings, because she needed money

to eat and to raise the kids
and to feed them,

but I don't think she was that
interested in the public recognition

of her work.
That was part of her life.

I don't think she could have
survived without painting.

She would use any kind of little
room for her painting.

It was not important to have a
studio, like many of the other

quote-unquote "great artists" had.

She had a little studio upstairs,

a very poor little studio with
electricity and things that were all

like this, you know?
Cords all the...

Very... Things...
You said, "My goodness!"

And the rain, it got in.

And she had a very
uncomfortable chair.

Everything was, sort of, very
difficult and uncomfortable,

and that's where she painted.

But it was very funny,

because you saw all these Mexican
painters, that weren't 10% as good

as she could be, that had all these
enormous studios,

horrible white studios full of
horrible paintings,

and she had this, and she was doing
all this marvellous painting, no?

In this little room.

I think it's in Mexico that she
found her real way, artistically

speaking, because that's where she
had, I think,

enough time to dedicate herself
fully to what she was.

An artist.

She'd kind of run and run and run
and run and run,

and she got to the end of the line,
really.

There was nowhere else to run to.

She could have gone back, but she
was never going to do that.

And there was nowhere else to go.

Did she want to go back to England?

Well, she was terribly
homesick and nostalgic,

so her relationship to England was
always sort of a

lost home.

Well, a home is a kind of illusion a
lot of us have.

Being settled doesn't exist, really.

I need change.

Because I get sort of suffocated by
my own atmosphere...

or things that become too familiar.

She never quite

fitted anywhere.

Not England, not Mexico.

I don't think she was comfortable
anywhere, that's the truth,

and if there was one country where
my mother was very comfortable,

was art. Hmm?

That was her country.

Even though she may have never
accepted this, I told her myself -

"Mexico has received you
with open arms,

which would never have happened
in Europe.

Never.

Well, Leonora is considered one of
the greatest Mexican painters.

She's always been considered a
Mexican artist.

Even though she was born in England,
for us, she is our artist.

She belongs to Mexico, and she has
always been recognised here.

She's always had a very good name.

Leonora's work is so unique, and I
think that's a legacy that,

even though she was surrounded by
all these big shots of Surrealism,

she was able to look inside of her
and create something that was really

unique and visionary.

Being tucked away in Mexico City
certainly did not help her achieve

recognition in the way that she
could have done, should have done,

but Leonora certainly did not
achieve the recognition in this

country that she so richly deserved.

Leonora, as an artist, may still be
in her infancy in terms of how

well-known she will one day be,

and I do think that Leonora's moment
is still ahead,

in terms of her being really
well-known and acknowledged as an

artist, because so many of her
themes were ahead of their time,

and are probably still ahead.

I think she was ahead of all of us.

She was so extraordinary, so...

so, anyone who's ahead of you,
you always...

they are always there.

The idea of saying that, as you
can't explain or you can't

understand, you say things that are

under...under the personality of
that person, no?

And Leonora was like that.

She walked in another world,
she lived in another world, no?

She was a little bit like...

..like a genius, but also like
a monk of the Middle Ages,

or like someone that doesn't exist
any more.

Lots of things died when she died.

A lot of my journeys
were running away.

But in old age, I feel that I'm
beginning a journey in a way.

Death is of course inevitable.

Somehow I have to go with it a bit,

as a way of discovering
or uncovering,

because, really, we know nothing
about death.

Nothing.

Yes, well, her son Gaby has said

that almost her final words before
she died was, she looked at the

wall, and he said,
"What are you looking at?"

And she said, "At the blackbirds.

"The wall is filled with wonderful
blackbirds."

You know, which seemed...

a marvellous thing to see at the
very end for her.

Yes, we were impressed, because it's

like the blackbirds coming for her.

To take her to the fantastic world
she was living in already.

BIRDSONG

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