While being treated for a serious mental breakdown in 1940, Carrington passed her days by filling sketchbooks with art that reimagined the hospital as an “underworld” inhabited by strange, hybrid beasts. These drawings would eventually inspire her 1940 painting Down Below.
Long scattered across private collections, works and letters from this period have been reunited for an exhibition at the Freud Museum, the one-time London home of Sigmund Freud, legendary founder of psychoanalysis. “Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal” is the first institutional show in London dedicated to the British artist since 1991.
Born in northern England in 1917, Carrington broke free from the constraints of her privileged upbringing by moving to Paris in 1938 to be with her lover Max Ernst. It would not be long, however, before war broke out across Europe, forcing Ernst to flee to the U.S. and leaving a heartbroken Carrington to find refuge in Spain. There, her mental state deteriorated rapidly and, after experiencing psychosis, she was admitted into an sanatorium in Santander where she underwent brutal Cardiazol shock therapy.
Luis Morales, the doctor who administered this treatment, also encouraged Carrington to draw obsessively during her stay. Several works of art, as well as a memoir published in 1972, reflect on this experience of being trapped “down below.” As is typical of her oeuvre, Carrington used symbolism from the occult, mythology, and tarot to probe the depths of her psyche and process a time that she later described as “very much like having been dead.”
The sketchbooks contain two preparatory drawings for Down Below, revealing how she first conceived some of the hybrid human-animal beasts that would populate the painting. Horses also appear frequently across the pages, “in shifting and unstable forms,” according to the exhibition’s curator Vanessa Boni.
Soon after being discharged from the sanatorium, Carrington spent a brief stint in New York before moving to Mexico, where she lived most of her adult life. While in the U.S., the artist gave her Santander sketchbooks to the collector Julien Levy, who looked after them for 60 years. They were eventually auctioned in 2004 and dispersed across several private collections. The Freud Museum exhibition marks the first time in over two decades that much of this material has been reunited.
Freud’s psychoanalytic theories had a profound influence on the Surrealists, in particular his writing about dreams and repressed desires. Although Freud did not have a direct influence on Carrington’s Santander sketchbooks, Boni noted that the drawings “touch on experiences—trauma, breakdown, the dissolution of the self—that have often been interpreted through a Freudian, psychoanalytic lens.”
The curator added that Carrington’s drawings also resist this kind of interpretation, by “transforming her inner conflict into a kind of personal, symbolic mythology.”
At the Freud Museum, Carrington’s work has been placed alongside antiquities from Freud’s collection with which they share some affinity. These include an ancient Egyptian statue of Anubis, the half-jackal, half-man deity of the underworld, and several horse figurines that speak to the psychoanalyst’s “fascination with objects that might illuminate aspects of the human mind,” said Boni.
Being Jewish, Freud also had his life upended by World War II, fleeing Vienna after his home was raided by the Gestapo. He resettled in London’s Hampstead with his family in 1938, spending the last year of his life before dying in 1939 in the residence that now houses the Freud Museum.
“That shared context of displacement makes the museum a particularly charged setting to view this body of work,” said Boni.
“Leonora Carrington: The Symptomatic Surreal” is on view at the Freud Museum, 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, London, through June 28.
