Page 49, Kay Sage, 1950
Jack Be Nimble, Jack Be Quick, Leonora Carrington, 1970
Alchemy or the Useless Science, Remedios Varo, 1958
Current reading is Down Below by Leonora Carrington (1917-2011), the great Surrealist artist and writer. It's a memoir of her flight from France ahead of the invading Germans in 1940, and of the subsequent mental breakdown that led to her incarceration in a brutal Spanish asylum. It's really an astonishing book. Rarely, if ever, has such horrible raw material been transmuted into such a triumph. Madness, for Carrington, was both a nightmare and an ecstasy, a journey through Hell into a new form of being. Along with her brilliant comic novel The Hearing Trumpet, this book is proof that she was every bit as great a genius with words as she was with oil paints.
Hera, Francis Picabia (1879-1953)
A Siren in Full Moonlight, Paul Delvaux (1897-1994)
Pandora's Box, René Magritte, 1951
Invisible World, René Magritte, 1954