Carrington: You've Met Leonora, Now Discover Dora

Carrington: She only wanted to be known by her surname, unwittingly posing a conundrum for art historians, curators and the wider world a century later. 

Because it's another somewhat later Carrington, the long-lived Surrealist and totally unrelated, who's recently become Britain's most expensive woman artist. But today we're at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester to see an exhibition not about Leonora but about Dora Carrington. She hated that name Dora -- so Victorian -- but with Leonora so much in the limelight (and the subject of a recent show at Newlands House in Petworth, just a few miles up the road), the curators at the Pallant didn't have much option, so they've had to call their retrospective Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury. 

Leonora was a bit of a rebel, as we found out in Petworth. Dora too. But we ought to respect her wish. Carrington, then, has been a bit neglected recently; this is the first show of her works in three decades. And while there are a few of her paintings in public galleries, including the Tate, an awful lot are in private hands. So this is a rare chance to appreciate her art in its entirety. And to take in her story, one of complicated, not to say labyrinthine, relationships on the fringes of the Bloomsbury Set, and one with an ultimately tragic ending.

Let's start off with the other main character in this tale, as painted by Carrington herself: The writer Lytton Strachey, author most famously of Eminent Victorians. 

You may have seen this picture before; it's one of Carrington's best-known, and it's in the National Portrait Gallery. It highlights Strachey's prominent long red beard and, most notably, his very, very long fingers. Carrington was deeply in love with Strachey and they lived together from 1917 until his early death at the start of 1932. Strachey was homosexual. They never married. Both, however, were attracted to a young Oxford graduate, Ralph Partridge. Partridge and Carrington married in 1921 and they all lived together, for a while, in what she described as a "triangular trinity of happiness". While Carrington went on to have further relationships with both men and women, she was so stricken by Strachey's death that she killed herself less than two months later.  

Carrington didn't sign her pictures, didn't exhibit or sell much and she destroyed many of her paintings. There was a bit of a dichotomy about her, as we can see in the very first room of this show. A pastel portrait of her by fellow Slade student Elsie McNaught shows a shy figure, looking down awkwardly and apparently sitting uncomfortably, as if she'd rather be anywhere else. But that's an image at odds with the self-portrait she drew at around the same period, dressed rather daringly in very male attire -- peaked cap and voluminous trousers. That audacious cropped haircut was also hardly the sort to be sported by a timid, retiring type of girl before the First World War.

And here's a photo of her in full exhibitionist mode, posing naked among the statues at Garsington Manor, Lady Ottoline Morrell's Oxfordshire retreat from the war for the arty set. 

Fellow student Mark Gertler was obsessed with Carrington, and his presence can be felt through much of the first half of this exhibition. "Ever since I got to know you I thought of you in every stroke I did," he wrote to her in 1912. 

"I loved that nude painting of yours," Gertler said. "What a good painter you are!" This Female Figure Standing was awarded a first prize from the Slade. It's a perfect painting of an imperfect figure. 

A series of paintings show affinities between the work Carrington and Gertler were producing, with Gertler's The Artist's Mother (looking very stolidly Eastern European), hung alongside Carrington's monumental portrait -- the largest she ever painted -- of Cornish farmer Mrs Box, whom she met on walking holidays.

"She is full of vigour and every day she fetches the cows from the marshes," Carrington wrote to Strachey. "And she is 72!" 

Among other Carrington portraits in this show are ones of the novelist EM Forster (who was unrequitedly attracted to Partridge) and the Spanish-based author Gerald Brenan, a friend of Partridge's with whom she had an affair. That seems to have started on a holiday in the Lake District taken by the three of them in 1921. 

Carrington painted this view of the farm where they stayed, overlooked by the dramatic mountain landscape. It's got a strangely naive quality to it, and the effect is somewhat claustrophobic. This eye-catching canvas is beautifully displayed at the end of a suite of rooms, drawing your attention each time you pass through the doors. 

Another extraordinary landscape is this one, so odd that you feel it could grace any exhibition of Surrealism. 

The Spanish Landscape with Mountains was painted back in cold Britain following a stay with Brenan in Andalucia. Scale is given by the minuscule human presence along a track on a hillside in the lower left.

This is a very enjoyable and interesting show, though you may struggle to work out who was sleeping with whom at any particular point in time among the cast of characters. It's not quite as big as previous exhibitions at the Pallant -- Carrington's body of work is not that large -- but there's plenty to see elsewhere in the gallery, including a collection of new paintings by Maggi Hambling. 

Practicalities

Dora Carrington: Beyond Bloomsbury is at Pallant House Gallery in Chichester until April 27. The gallery is open from 1000 to 1700 Tuesdays to Saturdays and 1100 to 1700 on Sundays and bank holidays. It'll be closed December 24-26. Full-price admission for this and the other concurrent shows is £14, including a £1.50 Gift Aid donation, and you can book online here. Allow yourself a good 75 minutes for this exhibition. 

The gallery is just a few minutes walk from Chichester station, to which there's a train every half hour from London Victoria Mondays to Saturdays. The journey takes about 90 minutes. Hourly trains on Sundays take longer. 

Images

Dora Carrington (1893-1932), Lytton Strachey Reading, 1916, National Portrait Gallery, London. © National Portrait Gallery, London
Dora Carrington, Self-Portrait, 1913, Jerwood Collection
Lady Ottoline Morrell (1873-1938), Dora Carrington, 1917, National Portrait Gallery, London. © National Portrait Gallery, London
Dora Carrington, Female Figure Standing, 1913, University College London Art Museum. Image courtesy of UCL Culture
Dora Carrington, Mrs Box, 1919, The Higgins Bedford. Image: The Higgins Bedford
Dora Carrington, Farm at Watendlath, 1921, Tate. Photo: Tate
Dora Carrington, Spanish Landscape with Mountains, c. 1924, Tate. Photo: Tate