Down Below by Leonora Carrington

Down Below by Leonora Carrington

A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one 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 mirror of 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 Below she 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 Below brings the hallucinatory logic of madness home.

Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) was born to an industrialist father and an Irish mother in Lancashire, England. At her family's home, Crookhey Hall, she was nurtured on wonderful folk tales recounted to her by her Irish nanny. Before enrolling in art school in Florence, Carrington was expelled from two convent schools. She fled Europe after WWII and moved in Mexico, where she married and had two kids with photographer Imre Weisz. Carrington lived the rest of her life in Mexico City, where she was surrounded by like-minded artists such as Remedios Varo and Alejandro Jodorowsky.

A book, The Hearing Trumpet (1976), and two collections of short tales are among Carrington's published works. Her memoir, Down Below, is published by NYRB Classics, and her collection of short stories, Complete Tales, is published by Dorothy, a Publishing Project in the United States and Silver Press in the United Kingdom.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781681370606
ISBN 10	1681370603
Title	Down Below
Author	Leonora Carrington
Series	Nyrb Classics Ser
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The New York Review of Books, Inc
Year published	2017-04-18
Number of pages	96
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.