Down Below Contributor(s): Carrington, Leonora (Author), Warner, Marina (Introduction by) |
|
![]() |
ISBN: 1681370603 ISBN-13: 9781681370606 Publisher: New York Review of Books OUR PRICE: $14.36 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: April 2017 |
Additional Information |
BISAC Categories: - Biography & Autobiography | Artists, Architects, Photographers - Biography & Autobiography | Personal Memoirs - Biography & Autobiography | Women |
Dewey: 823.914 |
LCCN: 2016026859 |
Series: Nyrb Classics |
Physical Information: 0.3" H x 5.1" W x 8" (0.20 lbs) 112 pages |
Themes: - Sex & Gender - Feminine |
Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
Publisher Description: 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. |