Leonora Carrington (1917 –2011) and Remedios Varo (1908-1963)
Leonora Carrington was a British-born Mexican artist, surrealist painter, and novelist. She lived most of her adult life in Mexico City and was one of the last surviving participants in the Surrealist movement of the 1930s.
In 1936 Leonora Carrington saw the work of the German surrealist Max Ernst at the International Surrealist Exhibiton in London and was attracted to the Surrealist artist before she even met him. The artists bonded and returned together to Paris, where Ernst promptly separated from his wife. In 1938 they left Paris and settled in Saint Martin d’Ardeche in southern France.
The new couple collaborated and supported each other's artistic development. They created sculptures of guardian animals to decorate their home in Saint Martin d'Ardèche. In 1939 Carrington painted Portrait of Max Ernst as a capture of some ambivalences in their relationship. The portrait was not her first Surrealist work; between 1937–1938 Leonora painted Self-Portrait, also called The Inn of the Dawn Horse, now exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sporting white jodhpurs and a wild mane of hair, Carrington is perched on the edge of a chair in this curious, dreamlike scene, her hand outstretched toward a prancing hyena and her back to a tailless rocking horse flying behind her.
With the outbreak of World War II Ernst, who was German, was arrested by the French authorities for being a "hostile alien". Soon after the Nazis invaded France, Ernst was arrested by the Gestapo, because his art was considered by the Nazis to be "degenerate". He managed to escape and, leaving Carrington behind, fled to the United States with the help of Peggy Guggenheim, who was a sponsor of the arts.
Carrington went eventually to the Mexican Embassy to find Renato Leduc, a poet and Mexican Ambassador. Leduc was a friend of Pablo Picesso, and agreed to a marriage of convenience with Carrington so that she would be accorded the immunity given to a diplomat's wife. Meanwhile, Ernst had married Peggy Guggenheim in New York in 1941. That marriage ended a few years later. Ernst and Carrington never resumed their relationship.
Carrington and Leduc divorced in 1943. Events from this period continued to inform her work. Carrington lived in Mexico the rest of her life. Carrington died on May 25, 2011, in Mexico City of complications due to pneumonia. She was 94 years old.

Remedios Varo Uranga was a Spanish (and naturalized Mexican) surrealist artist working in Spain, France, and Mexico.
Varo studied art in Madrid and moved several times between Paris and Spain where she met and exhibited with other leading Surrealist artists. She met her husband, the French surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, in Barcelona. In 1941, Varo and Péret fled the Nazi occupation in Paris and moved to Mexico City where many other Surrealists had sought exile. She was a good friend with Leonora Carrington in Mexico.
Varo was influenced by artists such as Francisco Goya, El Greco, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, and pre-Columbian art. She also borrowed from Romanesque Catalan frescoes and medieval architecture, mixed nature and technology, and combined reality and fantasy to create paintings that defied time and space.
Remedios Varo died of a heart attack at the height of her fame in her home in Mexico City on October 8, 1963. Since that time, her works have been seen in over a dozen solo exhibitions and nearly one hundred group shows worldwide.