Down Below

A stunning work of memoir and an unforgettable depiction of the brilliance and madness by one of Surrealism's most compelling figuresIn 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...