Down Below -

Leonora Carrington

NYRB Classics

2017

112 páginas

3h 44m

ISBN-13: 9781681370606

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.

Resenhas (1)

4 (Muito bom)

Uma artista em um episódio muito triste

Entrei no mundinho Leonora Carrington e Remedios Varo, grandes pintoras do Surrealismo e amigas, e não quero sair mais. O trabalho das duas é lindíssimo. Quando descobri que a Leonora também escrevia, logo já quis ir atrás de ler tudo dela. Esse não é ficção, mas um relato muito forte sobre sua estadia em um manicômio por conta de uma crise psicótica. Achei a escrita muito bonita. Ela consegue nos emergir no desespero, no sofrimento e nas associações malucas que a mente de artista dela fazia com o que ela estava vendo e presenciando. Também é perceptível o quanto ela era uma mulher à frente do seu tempo. Ansiosa para ler mais dela.