Armed With Madness
Before her death in 2011, Leonora Carrington had become the last significant surviving figure of the Surrealist movement. Armed with Madness tells her story as a graphic novel. Sticking with known facts (as she recounted them), the text and picture panels trace a life worthy of a Merchant Ivory film. The daughter of British wealth was a bookish, rebellious, imaginative child. Her father disapproved but her more sympathetic mother sent her to Florence and gave her paints and brushes.
Carrington was in Paris during the 1930s, an active participant in the milieu of Pablo Picasso and Max Ernst. Armed with Madness accurately depicts the power struggles within the Surrealist movement, the dangerous flight by several artists across the border into Spain when the Nazis invaded France. Carrington wrestled with mental illness but found a supportive new home as an expatriate in Mexico where she campaigned for women’s rights. The conventional picture-text frames of Armed with Madness are occasionally, appropriately, broken by explosions of surrealism.
