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.