{"id":698280,"date":"2026-05-28T01:02:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T01:02:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/698280\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T01:02:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T01:02:09","slug":"leonora-carrington-work-painted-during-psychiatric-confinement-to-go-on-show-for-first-time-leonora-carrington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/698280\/","title":{"rendered":"Leonora Carrington work painted during psychiatric confinement to go on show for first time | Leonora Carrington"},"content":{"rendered":"

A recently discovered painting by the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington<\/a>, made during her confinement in a Spanish psychiatric hospital during the second world war, will go on public display for the first time in London this summer.<\/p>\n

Known as Villa Pilar, the work was painted in 1940 while Carrington was a patient at sanatorium Morales in Santander, after fleeing Nazi-occupied France after the arrest of her partner, the German artist Max Ernst.<\/p>\n

Carrington suffered a psychological breakdown in Madrid and was admitted to the institution, where she underwent traumatic psychiatric treatments that she later described in her memoir Down Below.<\/p>\n

But encouraged by her psychiatrist, Dr Luis Morales, Carrington sketched each day, and created two paintings, Down Below and Villa Pilar, which depict the psychiatric hospital as a symbolic underworld. Carrington described her \u201cdown below\u201d period as an experience akin to \u201cbeing dead\u201d.<\/p>\n

Villa Pilar will join the exhibition Leonora Carrington \u2013 the Symptomatic Surreal at the Freud museum, where Sigmund Freud spent the final year of his life after escaping Nazi-occupied Vienna. To mark the unveiling, the exhibition has been extended until 10 August before travelling to Faro Santander, a new arts centre in the northern Spanish city, in September.<\/p>\n

Carrington, who was born into a wealthy Lancashire family in 1917, rebelled early against the expectations placed on upper-class women. She studied at the Chelsea School of Art before meeting Ernst at a dinner party in London<\/a> in 1937, when she was 20 and he was 46. The two began a relationship that scandalised their respective social circles and moved together to Saint-Martin-d\u2019Ard\u00e8che in the south of France, where they lived and worked until the German invasion.<\/p>\n

She also found kindred artistic spirits in renowned surrealists like Andr\u00e9 Breton, Salvador Dal\u00ed, and Man Ray, who, like her, were fascinated by dreams, the subconscious and the occult. When she eventually settled in Mexico in the 1940s, she became one of the country\u2019s most celebrated artists and part of an influential community of women creatives working outside the male-dominated European surrealist movement \u2013 alongside figures including the Spanish painter Remedios Varo and the photographer Kati Horna.<\/p>\n

Carrington was later embraced as a feminist icon, and she always resisted attempts to reduce her to her gender, once remarking: \u201cI didn\u2019t have time to be anyone\u2019s muse … I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.\u201d She died in Mexico City in 2011, aged 94.<\/p>\n

Carrington gave Villa Pilar to Dr Morales when she left the sanatorium, and it remained in his family for decades. It was only rediscovered during research for the exhibition by the Faro Santander team, who persuaded the Morales family to loan it publicly for the first time.<\/p>\n

Down Below, 1940, was also painted during Carrington\u2019s time at the sanatorium. Photograph: 2026 Estate of Leonora Carrington \/ ARS, NY and DACS<\/p>\n

Vanessa Boni, curator of the exhibition, said Carrington created the work as \u201ca parting gift\u201d to thank Morales for helping her recovery, despite the \u201cbrutal\u201d treatments she endured, including cardiazol injections.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs we know from her memoir, it was really traumatic,\u201d she said. \u201cDr Morales kept the painting his entire life, and when he passed away, it was handed down to his daughter.\u201d<\/p>\n

The work depicts the hospital as being populated by hybrid human-animal figures moving through vivid green gardens \u2013 imagery that would become central to Carrington\u2019s later practice. \u201cIt speaks to ideas of inner transformation, metamorphosis and otherness,\u201d Boni said. \u201cBoth paintings are set in a verdant green landscape, including a green sky, which was a symbolic colour for her.\u201d<\/p>\n

After leaving Santander, Carrington travelled through Lisbon and New York before settling in Mexico, where she became one of the leading figures of surrealism. In 2024, one of her paintings was auctioned for \u00a322.5m<\/a>, a record for a UK-born female artist.<\/p>\n

While in New York, Carrington gave her Santander sketchbooks to the surrealist collector Julien Levy, whose collection was sold at auction and dispersed into private collections in 2004. This exhibition marks the first attempts since then to bring the contents together for a major public display.<\/p>\n

Daniel Vega P\u00e9rez de Arlucea, director of Faro Santander, said: \u201cThis is not simply a matter of showcasing the work of one of the most important surrealist artists, but of recognising and revisiting a chapter of her life deeply rooted in this city.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A recently discovered painting by the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington, made during her confinement in a Spanish psychiatric…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":698281,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,49,48,356,75],"class_list":["post-698280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-design","tag-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=698280"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698280\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/698281"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=698280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=698280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=698280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}