Leonora Carrington Painting Made Inside Spanish Sanatorium Resurfaces After 80 Years

On July 1, London museumgoers will get a first look at a painting by Leonora Carrington not seen in over 80 years.

The 1940 painting, titled Villa Pillar, will appear in “The Symptomatic Surreal” an exhibition at the Freud Museum tracing Carrington’s development from 1938 to 1941 through her sketchbook drawings and letters. The exhibition had previously opened in March and has been extended to run through August 10.

A British-born Mexican Surrealist artist, Carrington has gained recognition thanks to a surge in attention towards women surrealists, a trend formalized with the 2022 Venice Biennale, curated by Cecilia Alemani with the title “The Milk of Dreams,” after a book by Carrington. Carrington died in Mexico City at the age of 94 in 2011.

The time period covered by the exhibition was critical juncture for the artist, as it follows her flight from Nazi-occupied France, her hospitalization at a sanatorium in Santander, Spain, and then her journey to New York in 1941 to reunite with her fellow Surrealists.

Villa Pillar dates to her time in the sanatorium, where, under the care of psychiatrist Luis Morales, she drew every day, and created the aforementioned painting as well as another, Down Below. She later described the period as being akin to “being dead,” a view expressed in both paintings.

Carrington gave Villa Pilar to Morales, whose family kept it until it was found by researchers at the forthcoming Faro Santander art center in Spain, where the show will travel after the London run. The show will be among the inaugural shows at the institution when it opens in September.

The researchers convinced the Morales family to loan the work so it could be seen publicly for the first time.

“As we know from her memoir, it was really traumatic,” curator Vanessa Boni told the Guardian. “Dr Morales kept the painting his entire life, and when he passed away, it was handed down to his daughter.”

Carrington gave her Santander sketchbooks to dealer Julien Levy after moving to New York; they were then sold as part of his collection sale in 2004. The Freud Museum exhibition is the first time the sketchbooks have been in a major exhibition.