A STEAL ON THE SURREAL in MEXICO CITY:
This unlikely art heist might have come straight from Leonora Carrington's own surreal tales of shifting form. In the pre-dawn murk of Mexico City, a lion moon fell to earth and a horned Celt vanished, only to reappear mid-week as scratched as a stray tomcat.
Brazen art thieves picked out two of Leonora Carrington's bronzes from 88 sculptures lined up on Mexico City's main thoroughfare, Paseo de la Reforma, a fortnight ago. Open outdoor exhibitions are unusual in this polluted city of 22 million, but Libertad en Bronce 2000 was an innovation to bring in the millennium.
In this crime-ridden capital, all the works had been fixed to steel poles, cemented into place. Traffic plied on either side of the well-lit display and security patrolled round the clock. When guards caught thieves struggling with the 50-kilo bronze disc, the Lion Moon, it fell to the ground and chipped its brow. Before anyone could give chase, the thieves had crossed the road into Chapultepec Park with Corrunus, another bronze by the Lancashire- born artist.
Ms Carrington - who ran away at 19 to become Max Ernst's "Bride of the Wind" and is a seminal surrealist artist in her own right - was crestfallen when the show's organisers reported the theft to her.
"It is lamentable," she told them. "Corrunus is a Celtic god who protects people close to him, but also punishes violence severely."
Her words raised eyebrows in Mexican art circles, where for half a century Ms Carrington has steeped her work in occult imagery. She incorporates shamans, omens and demonic mutation into her paintings and stories so often that critics praise her brujeria (witchcraft). Was this a threat of supernatural retribution? Isaac Masri, the president of the Agua Tinta foundation that owns Corrunus, added that Interpol had been alerted, and offered a reward of 5,000 pesos for information leading to its recovery.
"It is difficult to speculate on who did the robbery, because the art world is very closed. It might have been stolen on order," he said. 'Whoever has it will see it's worth more to bring it back than to try and sell the piece." And with these prophetic words he seems to have conjured up the lost Celtic deity.
The next evening, a jogger appeared on a local TV show with breathless news. On his morning run through Chapultepec, Jose Perez had noticed a park bench heaped high with dry straw. He'd gasped when he brushed it all aside to uncover the stern face of Corrunus. Several deep cracks marred its wing-like antlers and the face had been badly scraped, but, after hasty restoration, it was restored to the exhibition last week.
"I am very glad it has been returned," said Ms Carrington, 82, her accent revealing her past life as a debutante (albeit a bolshy one, whose nanny once arrived in a submarine to get her out of a wartime jam on the Continent.) "If I knew the identity and reputation of the person who took it, I might even be flattered." Unlike her contemporary, Frida Kahlo, Ms Carrington has been spared a cult following. One of the last of the founding surrealists, she still relishes her anonymous strolls on the streets of Mexico City. "I am not a public person. All that fuss comes after one dies," she told me. "I am quite old, but not dead yet."
---Jan McGirk, 14 Feb 2000, The Independent
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