Down Below |
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| Author:
| Carrington, Leonora |
| Introduction by:
| Warner, Marina |
| Series title: | NYRB Classics Ser. |
| ISBN: | 978-1-68137-060-6 |
| Publication Date: | Apr 2017 |
| Publisher: | New York Review of Books, Incorporated, The
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| Imprint: | NYRB Classics |
| Book Format: | Paperback |
| List Price: | USD $15.95 |
Book Description:
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A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness byone of Surrealism's most compelling figures In 1937 Leonora Carrington-later to become one of the twentieth century's great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild-was a nineteen-year-old art student in London, beautiful and unapologetically rebellious. At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst. The two fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together in...
More Description A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness byone of Surrealism's most compelling figures
In 1937 Leonora Carrington-later to become one of the twentieth century's great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild-was a nineteen-year-old art student in London, beautiful and unapologetically rebellious. At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst. The two fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together in a farmhouse in Provence.
In 1940, the invading German army arrested Ernst and sent him to a concentration camp. Carrington suffered a psychotic break. She wept for hours. Her stomach became "the mirrorof the earth"-of all worlds in a hostile universe-and she tried to purify the evil by compulsively vomiting. As the Germans neared the south of France, a friend persuaded Carrington to flee to Spain. Facing the approach "of robots, of thoughtless, fleshless beings," she packed a suitcase that bore on a brass plate the word Revelation.
This was only the beginning of a journey into madness that was to end with Carrington confined in a mental institution, overwhelmed not only by her own terrible imaginings but by her doctor's sadistic course of treatment. In Down Belowshe describes her ordeal-in which the agonizing and the marvelous were equally combined-with a startling, almost impersonal precision and without a trace of self-pity. Like Daniel Paul Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, Down Belowbrings the hallucinatory logic of madness home.