Wandering through the City of Light, the Idler‘s Art Flâneur Tim Richardson has his perceptions challenged with Leonora Carrington, Brion Gysin and some suitably surreal cuisine

Quel scandale! Until now, your Art Flâneur has never yet reported from Paris, home of directionless mooching since at least 1863, when the poet Baudelaire made an early attempt at a definition in his essay “The Painter of Modern Life”:

For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate observer, it is an immense joy to take up one’s dwelling among the multitude, amidst undulation, movement, the fugitive, the infinite. To be absent from home and yet feel oneself everywhere at home; to view the world, to be at the heart of the world, and yet hidden from the world … The spectator is a prince who rejoices everywhere in his incognito.

Yes, I did do quite a lot of the incognito thing: in the Luxembourg Gardens, around Rue Caulaincourt in the northern part of Montmartre, and along the banks of the Seine near the Tour d’Eiffel — though I opted not to ascend The Iron Lady. Is it even possible to flâneur vertically?

There was a decidedly Surrealist edge to these wanderings, too, thanks to the exhibitions on the agenda. This began with the first major exhibition – at the Musée du Luxembourg until 19 July – devoted to the long life and remarkable artistic output of Leonora Carrington (1917 –2011), who was born into an upper middle class family in Lancashire but rapidly fled abroad, falling in with the Surrealists in Paris in the 1930s and never letting go of that credo.

Then the war came and she was forced to flee, first to Spain and a spell in a mental institution, then New York and finally Mexico, the most surreal country in the world, where she spent the rest of her life. She lived in Mexico City at the same time as Frida Kahlo, another powerful female artist with a Surrealist streak, though apparently they avoided each other – “this town ain’t big enough…”?

Of all the art movements of the early 20th century – Cubism, Dada, Futurism, Expressionism and so on – Surrealism has always seemed to me to have the most “bottom”, if I can put it that way. It’s the real deal. It’s not a fad, or a phase, but more of a calling or vocation. Surrealist artists devote themselves long-term to an uncompromising, uncomfortable and often commercially unsustainable artform. They tend to live the artistic life to the full while remaining devoted to this uncompromising way of thinking about art and life.

Carrington was an exceptional example of this inner resilience, with a never-ending compulsive fascination for the world of dreams and the unconscious. A film made when she was an old woman captures something of her unconventional spirit and humour, her internationalism (speaking three languages in the same sentence, chain-smoking throughout), but also a haunted and at times hunted look.

The surreal impulse clearly started young, long before she went to Paris and met Andre Breton, the overbearing leader of the Surrealists: the exhibition begins with a homemade book created by Carrington when she was just 10, entitled Animals of a Different Planit [sic], featuring strange beasts such as the Ooley and the Ppsyos Bird.

It is salutary to see how the tone of her work changed after her mental breakdown in 1940. Before this, it was characterised by the jaunty playfulness and sociability of the Parisien art set; it was at this time Carrington embarked on a short-lived but apparently happy relationship with Max Ernst, who was 26 her senior.

They lived for a brief period in a little village, Saint Martin d’Ardeche, until Ernst was arrested and interned in 1939 and Carrington’s world went awry. The exhibition contains a memory of the happy time they spent together: a wardrobe painted by Carrington, adorned with a red unicorn sporting a fierce expression.

It’s impossible to know how Carrington’s psychological state affected her work, but during her four months at the sanatorium in Santander she produced some of her most memorable paintings and drawings. The Spanish Physician depicts two figures, a horse and a man, shaggy like woolly mammoths, and a screaming woman in a torn pink dress fleeing the scene.

It is pointless trying to decipher such images, and Carrington would have discouraged it. The power of the work lies in entering into the world created by the artist yourself, and then journeying through it. Which can be exhausting. One of the problems with Surrealism is that it can seem a little – relentless (see the output of Salvador Dalí, which I for one have always found rather tiresome).

So this substantial exhibition takes us through all the phases of Carrington’s long career, which was characterised by deep reading on occult and religious themes, all of which played into the art. Breton called her a sorceress.

Latterly her work became peopled with figures who seem to be taking part in rituals of some kind, often with a female or feminised figure, usually birdlike, taking a central role.

A particularly striking image, on a gold background, is Ballerina II (Mythical Figure) (1954): a silvery white, feathered creature with four arms, three eyes and a long red tongue.

Carrington even harked back to her English childhood occasionally: in Edwardian Hunt Breakfast (1956), a moustachioed gent and a female figure with a triangular head preside over a large table laden with fruit and vegetables, while two huntsmen with their hounds enter stage left. The exhibition ends with a spectacular sculpture, Bird Woman and Her Egg, the slender creature seeming to ascend vertically from an ovoid, walnut-like egg, bringing to mind Christ’s resurrection – Biblical imagery being a recurring motif in Carrington’s work.

By the way, all the texts in this exhibition are in French only. This was not a problem for me, as I got a B at French O-Level. I’m just pointing it out for those who may be less fluent.

As a side note, a small but excellent exhibition in north London at the Freud Museum (ends 28 June) must be mentioned, as its theme is Carrington’s time in the Spanish sanatorium. The display brings together a near-complete set of the delicate pencil drawings she produced at this period, all featuring horses in states of movement and transformation, evoking a sense of disorientation, as though adrift at sea or on the verge of disappearing.

There is also one painting – one of her best – in the exhibition: Down Below (1940), a kind of Surrealist version of Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe dans l’Apres-midi, featuring humanoid creatures and a horse in a field in front of a castle. There’s a good quote from Carrington about this distressing period: “I didn’t know where I was going. This seems to be a recurring thing in my life. I think it’s death practice.”

Back in Paris, the next stop on my Surrealist sojourn was a substantial and long overdue retrospective at the Musée de l’Art Moderne (until 12 July) on the work of Brion Gysin (1916 –86): artist, writer, musician and inspiration to several generations of avant-garde artists, including Keith Haring, Iggy Pop and William Burroughs, his major collaborator.

There are various reasons why Gysin has fallen through the cracks of artistic posterity – though he is fondly remembered by many on the scene. He is not easy to categorise, working across so many genres, and he did not produce any single major work that made his name, or a series of works which might define him. He was constantly moving on, always encouraging others, and eventually became a guru of the avant-garde, in his Paris apartment overlooking the Centre Pompidou (the subject of late photographic works).

Gysin was born in England to Canadian parents, but was taken back to Ontario at the age of five after his father was killed in the First World War, returning at the age of 16 to attend Downside, the Catholic public school. But he never lost his Canadian accent. Like Carrington, Gysin went to Paris in the 1930s and fell in with the Surrealists, though Breton betrayed him by removing his work from an important group exhibition just before it opened. The motivation for this apparent act of spite is still unclear, and Gysin was badly scarred by it.

During the Second World War, Gysin was drafted into an intelligence unit in the Canadian Army and tasked with learning kanji – symbols used in Japanese writing. This inspired a perennial obsession with calligraphy and writing systems which played into much of his output, notably his colourful paintings, which superficially look like abstract-expressionism but are filled with repetitive figures, creating a shimmering and often beautiful effect. There are many of these in the exhibition.

In the 1950s, Gysin moved back to Paris and holed up in the so-called “Beat Hotel”, a very basic rooming house in the Latin Quarter, with hot water just three days a week and a bar on the ground floor. It was said that the owner, Madame Rachou, remembered working at an inn as a young girl, where she had served Monet and Pissarro, and liked the idea of artists staying; she even allowed them to pay rent in paintings occasionally, and draw on the walls. (The hotel is now the four-star Relais du Vieux Paris, with rooms from €239 per night – no drawing on the walls.)

It was in this hotel in 1959 that Gysin discovered cut-up technique, whereby words and phrases are randomly rearranged. The moment occurred while he was cutting a mount for a drawing with a Stanley knife (an object which is on display in a vitrine in the exhibition), using a stack of newspapers to protect the table beneath. He noticed words and parts of sentences juxtaposed as a result of his cutting. It was the phrase, “It is impossible to estimate the damage,” which caused him to cry out in laughter and joy, and resolve to experiment further.

Burroughs was living in the hotel at the time and made the technique famous in his own writings, while also collaborating with Gysin for decades, to the point where they merged to become what they described as “the third mind” – the title of a book they co-wrote. Apparently they spoke to each other on the phone every day without fail.

Like Burroughs, Gysin dressed like a provincial bank manager, in a sober suit, with a square comb-over haircut. But of course the avant-garde has often looked this way (see Flaubert, Magritte, Sartre, Eliot, Satie and any number of others). It’s what’s going on inside the mind that’s important. It’s only the retired solicitors who walk around in bare feet.

Alongside cut-up, and his obsession with Moroccan Jujuka tribal trance music (which inspired an album by Brian Jones), the other innovation associated with Gysin was the Dreammachine (1961).

This contraption – which began as a 100-watt bulb placed in the middle of a perforated cardboard tube and mounted on a 78rpm record player – reflected Gyson’s interest in flickering light as a path to psychedelic experience, which interested him more than mescaline or mushrooms (though he did those as well).

The exhibition has a working Dreammachine (from 1979) surrounded by comfy chairs at a safe distance. But looking at contemporary photos of Gysin and others interacting with the work, it’s clear that you’re supposed to be pretty close to it, at first with your eyes open, and then with them closed, which is when the psychedelic fireworks start. I did this and it was a powerful experience.

The only problem was, the psychedelic colours didn’t go away afterwards, to the point where I was worried I had permanently damaged my vision. Was the world going to be psychedelic from here on in? Fortunately, the visions subsided after 20 minutes or so.

That evening, continuing the Surrealist theme, I dined in a restaurant with the fairly surreal name of 975, which offers a randomised menu. I also ordered random wine. The food was possessed of unfathomable French fanciness, which I adored and found reassuring.

The next day was more medieval in theme. The restored Notre Dame, which has been criticised by some for being too white now that the interior has been cleaned, was a wonder. Yes, it has a pristine feel, lit by candelabra along the length of the nave, which is not our experience of English cathedrals. But an atmosphere of transcendent perfection is perhaps closer to the original medieval experience. I imagined a reassuring vision of this mother church coming into the mind of some medieval French crusader knight, as he bled out in the dust on some foreign plain. With its great rose windows of stained glass, you don’t have to be a Christian to understand that a cathedral is on one level a vision of resurrection.

And so to the Louvre, where the great glass pyramid, through which all the crowds of visitors must pass, heated up the atrium like a greenhouse, making the experience akin to Gatwick on a bad day. But it’s a huge museum, of course, and all those people do get dispersed. The destination here was an exhibition (until 20 July) on the Renaissance painter Martin Schongauer (c1445-91), whose name may not ring a bell because very few of his works survive (seven paintings and three altarpieces) and most of them usually reside in the museum in his hometown of Colmar, south of Strasbourg.

The great masterpiece here, among some very fine small paintings and engravings, is the Madonna of the Rose Bower (1473), in which the Virgin is dressed in red (not blue), surrounded by flowers and birds in a hortus conclusus, or enclosed garden. As with several of Schongauer’s paintings, the composition seems unusual because the human figure is rather larger than is usually the case in works of this period, producing a powerful impression of physical presence. Schongauer came from a family of goldsmiths, and there are various speculations as to how this could have informed his work – which I found unconvincing. He was clearly a singular master; his style was all his own.

Before leaving Paris there was time for some final flâneuring, which was interrupted by the sight of a particularly tempting flan in a patisserie in Montmartre. It was a big yellow slice, a kind of super-duper egg custard. How could a flâneur refuse such a flan? In the event it induced a kind of gastronomic delirium.

Credits:
Ballerina II (Mythical Figure), Leonora Carrington, 1954: Private collection ©2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington. ADAGP, Paris
The Spanish Physician, Max Ernst, 1940: ©2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington. ADAGP, Paris © Art Institute of Chicago, dist. GrandPalaisRmn
Edwardian Hunt Breakfast, Leonora Carrington, 1956: ©2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington. ADAGP, Paris © Peter Schälchli
Down Below, Leonora Carrington, c 1941: ©2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington. ARS, NY and DACS, London

This is part of a larger article from Idler #110.

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