Greeny News

The women of the surrealist movement were often written off as silent and subservient. In fact, a group of them were creating extraordinary work â€" and lives â€" in Mexico

As I got to know my cousin, who is now 93, I discovered an artist who had eschewed fame to concentrate on the essence of the surreal experience â€" her inner life. And far from being moulded primarily by Ernst, she had found inspiration in other women artists, in particular the Spanish painter Remedios Varo and the Hungarian photographer Kati Horna. These two, who are both now dead, were also strong, independent-minded women, who had fled war-torn Europe for Mexico, a country that opened its doors to refugees in the 30s and 40s.

Interestingly, when they met, all three had had relationships with major figures in the art world â€" Horna had been a close friend of the legendary war photographer Robert Capa, and Varo was still the lover of the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret. But in Mexico they formed relationships with men who would be supportive, loyal, yet no match for them artistically. Carrington married a photographer called Chiki Weisz, Varo became the lover of a businessman called Walter Gruen, and Horna's partner was a sculptor and craftsman called José Horna.

In taking this path, they were very different from the painter Frida Kahlo, whom they brushed up against in their new country. She, of course, had married the famous muralist Diego Rivera, not once, but twice. (Carrington attended the couple's second wedding, and apparently annoyed the great man. "He asked me who I was, and I said 'Leonora Carrington, and who are you?' He said, 'Moctezuma,' so I said, 'Really? I thought you were dead.' He didn't seem to find it funny.") Kahlo used to boast that she would stop her own painting to take Rivera his lunch; I get the impression that Weisz had to sort out his own sandwiches.

Varo and Carrington, in particular, found they shared a deep intensity of imagination. They encouraged each other in feats of daring: Varo would write letters to strangers, their names picked at random from the phone book, inviting them to attend dinner parties. There were also endless experiments in cookery, with surreal recipes served up to unsuspecting friends, including an omelette made with human hair, and ink-dyed tapioca passed off as caviar. But while the wild lives of the surrealist men in Paris attracted much attention, those of the surrealist women in Mexico passed largely unnoticed. This wasn't just due to art-world prejudice â€" this group of artists was not looking for an audience. To this day, Carrington tends to be scathing about those she feels are "pretending" to be surreal. "You shouldn't need to fake it," she says.

Amid the fun, games and tequila, there was serious work being done. All three women had to earn their own living: painting was done anywhere in the house where there was space, frequently with children and animals playing around on the floor. Far from shackling them, domesticity seems to have been liberating. Many of Carrington's and Varo's paintings are set in the interiors of houses, which are transformed into places where extra- ordinary, inexplicable, exciting events take place. In Carrington's The House Opposite (1945), female figures move through floors, change into trees, and mix a mysterious potion in a cauldron. In Varo's The Creation of the Birds (1957), a female figure sits painting birds that seem to come to life on the paper and fly out of the window.

But there are also images that express women's oppression. Varo's Celestial Pablum (1958) shows a lonely looking woman trapped in a high tower, caring for a caged moon, and is often considered a commentary on how maternity traps women; Carrington's Green Tea (1942) features a young woman, in a quintessentially English landscape, who has been mummified. (Leonora undoubtedly felt herself to have been mummified by her early experiences, which had included a period at finishing school and being forced to "come out" as a debutante.)

Horna, meanwhile, had already photographed the Spanish civil war, not at the front, as her friend Capa did, but behind the lines; she depicted the fallout of war on the lives of ordinary women and children long before it was fashionable to do so. In Mexico she experimented with photographs of a doll, trying to impose emotional content onto an inanimate object, and her 1987 collage Leonora Carrington in Renaissance Style â€" which shows Carrington in Leonardo-like pose, Italian architecture rising up behind her â€" appears to be a comment not merely on the story of one of her oldest friends, but also on the experiences of women artists through the ages.

While the art world has generally ignored Carrington and her friends, they did have a devoted patron in the Sussex millionaire Edward James, who was also one of the most important collectors of Dalí and Magritte. James died in 1984, but his influence continues to be strongly felt at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, near his home, and in 2007 the gallery's director, Stefan van Raay, and I hatched a plan to bring Carrington's paintings to the UK, the country of her birth. Last week a plane took off from Mexico City for London, laden with work by Carrington, Varo and Horna. The exhibition will be open to the public from tomorrow.

So, will the art world now take a fresh look at these European outcasts in Mexico, and find in them something new, different and important? Madonna spotted the star potential of Carrington and Remedios back in 1995, when she used their work as the basis for her video, Bedtime Story. At the time it was the most expensive music video ever made (costing US $5m/£4m) and today it is included in the permanent collection at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Meanwhile, the work of all three artists is changing hands at auction for sums that would have amazed them all in the 50s when they were seated around that kitchen table. Last year, for example, Carrington's painting The Giantess was sold at Christie's in New York for US $1.5m, putting her among a handful of living women artists whose work can command such sums.

Carrington herself is sanguine; she says that nothing much has the power to surprise her any more. Of course, the people who would be truly shocked are now long dead â€" the surrealist greats, who once glanced in her direction and saw only a beautiful young woman whose presence might help them paint better canvases. Carrington and her friends have had the last word. They were never femme enfants. They were, in fact, the muses who roared.

• Surreal Friends: the work of Leonora Carrington, Remedios Varo and Kati Horna opens at Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, on 19 June, and moves to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich, from 28 September.surrealfriends.com

• Watch a video of Britain's lost surrealist Leonora Carrington talking to Joanna Moorhead about her life and art guardian.co.uk/artanddesign