A stunning work of memoir and a n 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.
Like Daniel Paul Schreber\'s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness , Down Below brings the hallucinatory logic of madness home..
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.
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.
Facing the approach of robots, of thoughtless, fleshless beings, she packed a suitcase that bore on a brass plate the word Revelation .
As the Germans neared the south of France, a friend persuaded Carrington to flee to Spain.
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.
She wept for hours.
Carrington suffered a psychotic break.
In 1940, the invading German army arrested Ernst and sent him to a concentration camp.
The two fell in love and soon departed to live and paint together in a farmhouse in Provence.
At a dinner party, she met the artist Max Ernst.
A stunning work of memoir and a n 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
