Down Below
leonora Carrington
New York Review Books
<b>A stunning work of memoir and a<b>n unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by</b> one of Surrealism's most compelling figures</b><br>In 1937 Leonora Carrington&#8212;later to become one of the twentieth century's great painters of the weird, the alarming, and the wild&#8212;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. <br> 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 <i>mirror</i> of the earth"&#8212;of all worlds in a hostile universe&#8212;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,"...</br></br>