Art alchemy / Infernal machines
Today: Anna Merlan author of REPUBLIC OF LIES: American Conspiracy Theorists and Their Surprising Rise to Power; and writer and editor Maria Bustillos.
Issue No. 533
Surrealist Strategies
Anna Merlan
There’s No App for That
Maria Bustillos
Surrealist Strategies
by Anna Merlan
When the painter Leonora Carrington’s lover was arrested by the Gestapo in 1940, she fled their sanctuary in rural France and promptly had a psychotic break. Her incandescent, floridly extramarital affair with the German painter Max Ernst, 26 years her senior, is the stuff of Surrealist legend, but their idyll came to an instantaneous end when the Germans invaded France and seized Ernst on charges of being a “degenerate” artist (“under the escort of a gendarme who carried a rifle,” Carrington later wrote). Friends persuaded Carrington to leave France for Spain, her delirium gathering speed along the way. She was 23 years old.
“In the political confusion and the torrid heat,” she later wrote. “I convinced myself that Madrid was the world’s stomach and that I had been chosen for the task of restoring this digestive organ to health.”
Keep us breathing fire!
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