Carrington’s gift to psychiatrist surfaces after decades
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In Santander, Spain, Faro Santander is exhibiting ‘Villa Pilar’, a painting Leonora Carrington created in 1940 while a patient at Dr. Morales’ psychiatric sanatorium.
Carrington, a surrealist painter, gifted the oil painting to the doctor, and it was occasionally shown while he lived, but hadn’t been publicly displayed until now. Researchers at Faro Santander contacted the doctor’s heir to borrow the work for the “Leonora Carrington: el surrealismo sintomático” exhibition, alongside other art she made during her hospital stay.
Vanessa Boni, the exhibition’s curator, believes the painting offers a chance to re-examine Carrington’s complicated relationship with Dr. Morales, suggesting she may have given it to him as an expression of gratitude for his encouragement of her art during her treatment. However, Boni also acknowledges the artist experienced brutal psychiatric treatments at the sanatorium, and her account of her time there shows how traumatic it was.
Carlos Martín, curator of a previous Carrington exhibition, noted a possible “Stockholm syndrome” dynamic in their connection, citing an account of the doctor’s invasive behavior and Carrington’s subsequent attraction. The painting features a horse, hyena, peacock, and white dog within a lush garden. Boni interprets the figures as representing different facets of Carrington’s changing self, and sees the peacock as potentially alchemical in symbolism, representing the completion of a process or a flourishing transformation.
Carrington entered the sanatorium after fleeing Nazi-occupied France in August 1940, and staff encouraged her to draw as a means of processing her thoughts and communicating with them. The exhibition frames Carrington’s work as a visual expression of experiences difficult to articulate directly, linking it to psychoanalytic concepts of symptoms as indirect communication from the unconscious.
