More than three years after announcing the imminent opening of Leonora Carrington’s former home in Mexico City as a public museum, the university in charge of the project has scrapped the idea, intending to use the house as a research centre instead. According to Carlos S. Maldonado of the Spanish newspaper El País, the museum may have been nixed due to a labour dispute at the Metropolitan Autonomous University (UAM), although the university denies this.
The impetus for turning the late Surrealist painter’s house into a museum—à la Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul—came from Carrington’s younger son Pablo Weisz Carrington, who took on the project after her death in 2011. Weisz Carrington sold the house, along with a loan of 8,000 of the artist’s objects, to UAM in 2017 with the understanding that it would eventually be opened to the public as a museum. UAM invested roughly $600,000 into the museum, and teased its public opening in 2021.
UAM justifies its pivot on Carrington’s home from public museum to research centre by saying that it is a logical step for a university. Union leaders at UAM are sceptical of this explanation. The union points to the fact that, in accordance with its contract with the university, it had asked for 17 additional jobs to staff the new museum in 2021. These were never created. Some also point to a perceived lack of interest from UAM’s leadership to continue with the museum project.
The cancellation of the museum is perhaps ill-advised given Carrington’s recent rise in popularity both in the art market and among the general public. The artist has been front and centre in this year’s celebrations of the 100th anniversary of Surrealism, and her painting Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945) set a record for her work in May when it sold at auction for $28.5m.
