Down below
Carrington, Leonora, 1917-20112017
Book
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 marvellous 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.
Main title:
Down below / Leonora Carrington ; introduction by Marina Warner.
Author:
Carrington, Leonora, 1917-2011, authorWarner, Marina, 1946-, author of introduction, etc
Work:
Imprint:
New York : New York Review Books, 2017.©1988
Collation:
xxxvii, 69 pages : illustrations ; 21 cm.
Series title:
Series:
New York Review Books classics
Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages xxxv-xxxvii, 69).
ISBN:
9781681370606 (pbk)9781681370606 (paperback)
Dewey class:
759.2B
Language:
EnglishFrench
BRN:
518048
| Location | Collection | Call number | Status/Desc |
|---|---|---|---|
| East Melbourne Library | -Biography | BIOG 759.2 CARR | On loan - Due: 11 Jul 2026 |
| Library at the Dock | -Biography | BIOG 759.2 CARR | On loan - Due: 27 Jun 2026 |
| North Melbourne Library | -Biography | BIOG 759.2 CARR | Available |