Leonora Carrington’s “Villa Pillar” Will Be Seen Publicly for the First Time in More Than 80 Years
A 1940 painting by Leonora Carrington (1917–2011) is about to reenter public view after more than eight decades in private hands. “Villa Pillar,” made during the artist’s hospitalization in Santander, Spain, will go on display at the Freud Museum in London on July 1 as part of “The Symptomatic Surreal,” an exhibition that has already been extended through August 10.
The show follows Carrington’s work from 1938 to 1941 through sketchbook drawings and letters, a period marked by flight, confinement, and reinvention. After escaping Nazi-occupied France, Carrington was hospitalized at a sanatorium in Santander, where she drew daily under the care of psychiatrist Luis Morales. It was there that she created “Villa Pillar” and “Down Below,” works that reflect the psychological strain of the period and the artist’s own description of the experience as akin to “being dead.”
Carrington later gave “Villa Pillar” to Morales, whose family kept the painting until researchers connected it to the forthcoming Faro Santander art center in Spain. Their efforts persuaded the family to lend the work, allowing it to be shown publicly for the first time. According to curator Vanessa Boni, the painting remained with Morales until his death, then passed to his daughter.
The exhibition also includes Carrington’s Santander sketchbooks, which were given to dealer Julien Levy after she moved to New York and were later sold in 2004. At the Freud Museum, they are being shown in a major exhibition for the first time, adding a rare documentary layer to Carrington’s wartime years.
After its London run, “The Symptomatic Surreal” will travel to Faro Santander, where it will be among the institution’s inaugural exhibitions when it opens in September. For Carrington scholarship, the show does more than recover a lost painting: it restores a crucial chapter in the artist’s development, when Surrealism became inseparable from survival, memory, and psychic rupture.
