Armed With Madness: The Surreal Leonora Carrington

Award-winning storytellers Mary M. Talbot and Bryan Talbot’s full-color graphic novel Armed with Madness presents a new perspective on the 1930s Paris art scene from neglected artist, feminist icon, and influential surrealist Leonora Carrington.

Reluctant muse and feminist champion—heiress, rebel, refugee—and perhaps the last of the great surrealist artists, Leonora Carrington played many roles in her long and extraordinary life. Exchanging her privileged upbringing in prewar England for the more exciting elite of Paris’s 1930s avant-garde, she comes to rub shoulders (and more) with the likes of Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, and Salvador Dalí after embarking on a complicated love affair with Max Ernst.

But the demons that have both haunted and inspired her work are gathering, and when the world goes mad with the outbreak of war and the Nazi invasion, Leonora’s own hold on reality collapses into a terrifying psychotic episode of her own. Eventually fleeing war-torn Europe, she emerges into a new and richly creative life in Mexico City, establishing herself as a prodigious painter, writer, and advocate of women’s rights.

Armed with Madness, from the acclaimed partnership of Mary and Bryan Talbot, celebrates the life and career of a truly remarkable artist and woman.