Villa Pilar, a newly discovered painting by Leonora Carrington, will be shown for the first time at the Freud Museum in London starting 1 July. The work was created in 1940 while Carrington was hospitalised at the Morales sanatorium outside Santander in northern Spain. She was admitted after the arrest of her partner, Max Ernst, who was detained by the Nazis as an “enemy alien.” After a severe psychological breakdown in Madrid, Carrington sketched obsessively under the encouragement of psychiatrist Dr Luis Morales, depicting the hospital as an underworld filled with hybrid human-animal beasts. During a six-month stay, she also made Down Below and later gave Villa Pilar to Dr Morales when she left.
"Villa Pilar was made in 1940 while Carrington was a patient at the Morales sanatorium located outside Santander in northern Spain. The artist was admitted to the hospital following the arrest of her partner, the German artist Max Ernst who was classified as an “enemy alien” by the Nazis and detained late 1939 at the Camp des Milles in Aix-en-Provence."
"Carrington subsequently suffered a severe psychological breakdown in Madrid, ending up in the Santander hospital. Encouraged by her psychiatrist, Dr Luis Morales, Carrington sketched obsessively, depicting the psychiatric hospital as an underworld dotted with hybrid human-animal beasts. During her six-month stay, she also made two paintings- Villa Pilar and a companion piece, Down Below, which is also the title of her memoir describing her harrowing time in the hospital (first published in 1944)."
"Carrington gave Villa Pilar to Dr Morales when she left the sanatorium. Carrington's cousin and biographer Joanna Moorhead mentions the newly discovered painting in her book Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington (Thames and Hudson, 2023), and references an interview she did with a friend of Dr Morales, who talked to the psychiatrist towards the end of his life about his relationship with Carrington."
"“Morales told her that the two of them had kept in touch, by letter and even by phone, for some time after Leonora's departure [from Spain],” she writes. Moorhead says the painting"
Read at The Art Newspaper - International art news and events
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]