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A recently discovered painting by a surrealist artist Leonora Carringtonwhich was created while he was in a mental hospital in Spain during World War II, will be shown in public for the first time in London this summer.
Known as Villa Pilar, the work was painted in 1940 when Carrington was a patient at the Morales Hospital in Santander, having fled Nazi-occupied France after being arrested by his friend, the German artist Max Ernst.
Carrington suffered a mental breakdown in Madrid and was admitted to the institution, where he received the pain medication he later described in his books Below.
But encouraged by his psychiatrist, Dr Luis Morales, Carrington painted every day, creating two paintings, Downstairs and Villa Pilar, which depict the mental hospital as a symbolic place. Carrington explained to him that “underneath” his time was like “dying”.
Villa Pilar will join the Leonora Carrington – Symptomatic Surreal exhibition at the Freud museum, where Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life after fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna. To mark the unveiling, the exhibition has been extended until 10 August before traveling to Faro Santander, a new art center in northern Spain, in September.
Carrington, who was born into a wealthy Lancashire family in 1917, quickly rebelled against the expectations placed on upper class women. He studied at the Chelsea School of Art before meeting Ernst at a dinner party London in 1937, when she was 20 and he was 46. The two began an affair that disrupted their social circles and moved together to Saint-Martin-d’Ardèche in the south of France, where they lived and worked all the way to Germany.
He also found familiar spirits in famous artists such as André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Man Ray, who, like him, were fascinated by dreams, consciousness, and the occult. Settling in Mexico in the 1940s, she became one of the country’s most prominent artists and part of a pioneering group of women working outside of the male-dominated world of Europe – alongside figures including the Spanish artist Remedios Varo and artist Kati Horna.
Carrington was later embraced as an icon of feminism, and always resisted efforts to reduce her to a man or a woman, once saying: “I didn’t have time to be someone else’s museum … I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.” He died in Mexico City in 2011, at the age of 94.
Carrington gave Villa Pilar to Dr Morales when he left the hospital, and it remained in his family for many years. It was only discovered during the investigation of the show of the group of Faro Santander, who persuaded the Morales family to rent it in public for the first time.
Vanessa Boni, the show’s curator, said Carrington created the project as a “promotional gift” to thank Morales for helping her recover, despite the “cruelty” she endured, including cardiazol injections.
“As we know from his writings, it was tragic,” he said. “Dr Morales kept the paint all his life, and when he died, it was given to his daughter.”
The work depicts the hospital as filled with human-animal hybrids roaming the lush green fields – images that would form the basis of Carrington’s later works. “It speaks to the idea of inner change, evolution and so on,” Boni said. “Both paintings are set in a lush green environment, including a green sky, which was symbolic to him.”
After leaving Santander, Carrington moved through Lisbon and New York before settling in Mexico, where he became one of the leading figures in the sport. In 2024, one of his paintings sold for £22.5mprofile of a UK-born female artist.
While in New York, Carrington gave his Santander sketchbooks to the surrealist collector Julien Levy, whose collection was sold at auction and dispersed among private collections in 2004.
Daniel Vega Pérez de Arlucea, director of Faro Santander, said: “This is not just an exhibition of the work of one of the most famous surrealists, but to recognize and re-examine the part of his life that is rooted in this city.”
