Leonora Carrington
A lost work by the surrealist painter Leonora Carrington will be put on display for the first time since its creation in a Spanish psychiatric hospital.
The Freud Museum in London is currently hosting an exhibition on Leonora Carrington, subtitled The Symptomatic Surreal. The show opened on March 25th and will run through August 10th. Located in the borough of Camden, the Freud Museum is located in the house where the Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud spent the last year of his life. He relocated there after the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. His daughter Anna continued to live in the house until she died in 1982. The house and its contents were later turned into a museum in 1986.
The Carrington exhibition focuses on the artist’s life and work between 1938 and 1941. During this time, she and her partner Max Ernst moved out of Paris to a small town in southern France. When the Nazis invaded France in 1940, the Gestapo arrested Ernst for being a “degenerate” artist. Carrington managed to escape to Spain, while Peggy Guggenheim secured Ernst’s release and safe passage to the United States. Ernst and Guggenheim would later marry, while he and Carrington would never see each other again.
Due to these events and several other traumatic incidents, Carrington suffered from a psychotic break in Madrid, leading her to be sent to a sanatorium in the northern coastal town of Santander. There, she was subjected to shock therapy and was made to take barbiturates. However, her doctor, Luis Morales, also encouraged her to continue drawing and painting. This resulted in what became known among Carrington specialists as the Santander sketchbooks, which she entrusted to New York gallerist Julien Levy before she moved to Mexico. They remained in the Levy family’s possession until 2004, when they were sold and scattered among several private collections.
The exhibition at the Freud Museum reunites many of these drawings and paintings for the first time in decades, exploring the works Carrington created while institutionalized. Curators focus on the recurring motifs drawn from mythology and esotericism, while also displaying these works alongside art and antiquities owned by Sigmund Freud. These works also feature human-animal hybrids, a recurring image in Carrington’s work. It is the first exhibition dedicated to Carrington to be held by a British museum since 1991.
One latecomer to the exhibition is the painting Villa Pilar. Along with another painting entitled Down Below, Villa Pilar presents a reimagining of Carrington’s time in the hospital using her iconic figures and hybrids. Carrington’s biographer, Joanna Moorhead, comments that in both paintings, “she blended her actual surroundings with the psychological turmoil she was going through, making it a fascinating time in her story and in her output.”
A museum dedicated to Sigmund Freud may be an unusual venue for an art exhibition. However, it’s important to remember that Freud’s psychoanalytic teachings proved an invaluable source of inspiration for surrealist artists. They sought to liberate the subconscious mind by blurring the barrier between dreams and reality. Carrington’s work, drawing from trauma, also connects her work to Freud’s writings. Furthermore, exhibition curator Vanessa Boni mentions how, with Freud escaping to London and Carrington escaping to Spain, both the Austrian neurologist and the British artist had a “shared context of displacement”.
Villa Pilar will be added to the exhibition on July 1st, while both paintings will appear together when the exhibition moves to the Faro Santander on September 8th.