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A STONE FOR UNICA ZURN

Unica Zürn has long been a semi-mythical figure. Little known and in many ways unknowable, she is inevitably associated with the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer, whom she met at a Berlin show of his work in 1953. Obsessed throughout his career with realistic female dolls whose body parts could be endlessly manipulated, penetrated, removed, multiplied, decorated and otherwise reconfigured to posit flesh and bone as the material of a recombinative fetishism, Bellmer had worked and lived with other women before Zürn. (He’d also been married, and had fathered twin daughters.) But upon meeting Zürn he declared, ominously enough, “Here is the doll.”


From that moment on, their fates were intertwined—or, one could say, Unica Zürn’s fate was sealed. She was 37, Bellmer 51, when she moved to Paris to share Bellmer’s two rooms in the Hotel de l’Espérance, 88 rue Mouffetard. There the pair embarked on their own special variation on the Surrealist amour fou. They have been described as companions in misery who inspired each other. No doubt this is true. Zürn’s life before meeting Bellmer was troubled, to say the least. Born in 1916, she grew up in Grünewald, the daughter of an adored but mostly absent father, a cavalry officer posted to Africa, and his third wife, whom she detested. During the Nazi period, Zürn worked as a dramaturge at UFA, the German film company, married a much older man in 1942, bore two children and lost custody of them in a divorce seven years later; she then made a meager living writing short stories for newspapers and radio plays.

She also painted and made drawings in the late ’40s and early ’50s, independently lighting upon the Surrealist technique of decalcomania. Malcolm Green, in his introduction to the English version of Zürn’s novel The Man of Jasmine (Gallimard, Paris, 1971; English translation Atlas Press, London, 1977), describes this period of Zürn’s life as “happy.” She reestablished contact with former UFA colleagues, had what may have been an amiable social life, and enjoyed the work she did as a writer and artist.

One has to wonder, though only to wonder, how much of Zürn’s life transpired above the threshold of the dissociative states and debilitating depressions that later entrapped her. The writings for which she is best known reflect an excruciating mental state, relieved solely by fantasies and hallucinations; reality, in her description, is unbearably harsh and punitive, a realm of grotesquerie in which, she writes in Dark Spring (Merlin, Hamburg, 1969; English translation Exact Change, Cambridge, Mass.,2000), she is “mocked, derided and humiliated.” And while the narrator of that autobiographical novel avers that “pain and suffering bring her pleasure,” Zürn’s inner torment led many times to long spells in mental hospitals, and finally to suicide by throwing herself from Bellmer’s sixth-floor window in 1970, when she was 54.

Like Artaud, Zürn possessed penetrating insight into the nuances of madness without finding any way to escape them. If Bellmer’s idée fixe, amplified by alcoholism, was the female doll, Zürn was focused on what she called “the man of jasmine,” a dream lover and/or father figure incarnated in the poet and artist Henri Michaux, whom she met through Bellmer in 1957, and with whom she took mescaline several times.

Zürn’s drug experiences with Michaux, apparently, precipitated the schizophrenic episodes that recurred throughout her final years. So she, at least, believed, though being trussed with cordage like a slab of meat for a famous series of Bellmer’s photographs may not have contributed much to her psychic equilibrium. As muse for Bellmer’s technically impeccable paintings and drawings as well as his photographs, Zürn underwent innumerable imaginary rapes, eviscerations, mutilations and monstrous transmogrifications, becoming an emblematic pornogram. Willing to be such, she certainly was; in that long ago time, few women could secure even a marginal place in the Paris art world, much less the Surrealist group, except under the auspices of a male artist. And, yes, Bellmer seemed to instinctively comprehend Zürn’s masochistic psychology in each of its twists and turns.

While prolonged contact with the Paris Surrealists might have spurred an effulgence of creative productivity in Zürn, it undoubtedly contained a corresponding toxicity. Given their representation of women as passive receptacles of “mad love,” the elegant reification of female insanity in the writings of Breton and the canonization of de Sade as the movement’s preeminent patron saint, it seems unlikely that a woman with Zürn’s fragile emotional structure could keep her sanity intact very long within the Surrealists’ circle, mescaline or no mescaline.

This is not to deny that Bellmer encouraged her work, nor that the Surrealists were receptive to her art and included it in many exhibitions. The superb, fantastic drawings Zürn produced, often during her hospitalizations, have recognizable affinities with Bellmer’s linear finesse as well as Michaux’s calligraphic spontaneity. More specifically, Zürn adopted Bellmer’s use of the “cephalopod,” a variable, amorphously shaped humanoid form. But she gave the techniques she adapted from others a crispness and bite all her own, particularly in her rendering of eyes, veins beneath flesh and colors suggestive of lividity and bruising. While Zürn produced some paintings in tempera and oil during the early 1950s, her preferred mediums were colored inks, pencil and gouache on paper. Many works were produced in notebooks given to her by Michaux when Zürn was at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris. Between hospitalizations, she made a quantity of large-scale drawings; while they are always startling, one can’t really say they “develop”—rather, they elaborate a fixed set of obsessions.

The liberatory, lubricious energies the Surrealists discovered in plumbing the irrational extracted a harsh toll from many individuals—René Crevel and Artaud come instantly to mind; it seems worth noting, also, that Bellmer and Zürn lived together in conditions of extreme poverty, in claustrophobic quarters, and that Zürn seldom ventured outside unless she was in Bellmer’s company. Her dependence upon Bellmer reflected an unassuagable loneliness—an isolation that his companionship did little to ameliorate.


The literature about Zürn—for example, translator Caroline Rupprecht’s preface to Dark Spring, Renée Riese Hubert’s Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism and Partnership (University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1994), and Agnès de la Baumelle and Laure de Buzon-Vallet’s chronology in Hans Bellmer (Hatje Cantz, Ostfildern, 2006)—suggests that Bellmer did his best to support her, emotionally, artistically and financially, but both, at various times, attempted to end their relationship, which lasted 17 years. Their symbiosis was at once creatively productive and terribly burdensome. They devoted themselves to art that pressed beyond any safe psychic boundaries, Bellmer undoubtedly with greater detachment, Zürn with a fierce identification with the fantasy world she created.

Much more could be (and has been) written about their relationship, which involved interventions by such figures as the psychiatrist Gaston Ferdière, who had treated Artaud. A close reading of Zürn’s texts, including Hexentexte (Galerie Springer, Berlin, 1954), a book of anagrams, reveals a brilliant poetic mind, a preoccupation with death and a yearning for childhood, a time when, despite its difficulties for her, miracles and wonders could present them- selves without lethal consequences—benign events not realized in her fiction and anagrammatic poetry.

Zürn’s drawings—49 of which have been assembled at the Drawing Center in New York, along with three paintings—exemplify the obsessional, skillful weirdness of one variety of “outsider art,” a mode characterized by fastidious excess and disciplined compulsion. Sometimes whimsical and “light,” Zürn’s drawings depict persons, animals and other subjects in states of metamorphosis or fusion; dense coagulations of forms; and sentience as multitudes of eyes that stare at the viewer like those of fantastic organisms peering through transparent yet impenetrable barriers. Her pictures do not politely invite us into her private world, but rather pull us into it with desperate insistence, demanding our recognition of an intolerable state of consciousness. Even Zürn’s most playful works convey a disturbance in which seduction and horror battle for predominance.

The Drawing Center show, curated by João Ribas, is the most extensive gathering of her drawings in New York to date, though her work has also been shown here at Ubu Gallery (in 2005); Zürn had four drawing exhibitions in Paris between 1956 and 1964, and has been included in many surveys of Surrealist art. At the Drawing Center, several vitrines containing photographs, publications and letters provide a sense of Zürn and Bellmer’s shared milieu. The total effect of the exhibition is one of freakish aggressivity mixed with a daft, teasing elegance.

While “outsider art” usually connotes untrained naiveté and beguiling clumsiness, Zürn’s virtuosity is that of an artist willing her madness to manifest itself on paper, rather than a mad person exuding symptoms in the form of pictorial expression. Her pictures are radically skewed and shattered self-portraits that mirror the splitting of her personality. They duplicate her face and body, or parts of them, amid or inside avian predators, felines, vegetal accumulations; these Unicas sport claws, razor teeth, multiple mouths, extra limbs, several breasts, antennae. It’s often as if Zürn has internalized as self-image the profuse, mutant doll parts of Bellmer’s paintings and sculptures, replacing herself with the freakish assemblages of her lover’s imagination—as if she has become the doll and, in retribution, invested Bellmer’s reinvention of her with an autonomy and visionary power he withheld from it.

The muffled scream that issues from Zürn’s drawings is surely the cri de coeur of a woman denied: deprived the love of her monstrously distant mother and the companionship of her absentee father, separated from her two children and refused possession of her own body by its transformation into a pot roast, among other things, by Bellmer. Her revenge is assimilation of the deformities these deprivations caused—her adamant presentation of herself as the twisted and manipulated creature that others have imagined.

Of course this amazing, ungovernable being had to be hospitalized, medicated, isolated for her own good. One has only to read Zürn’s account, in The Man of Jasmine, of what those hospitalizations were like to understand that “for her own good” and “outworn her usefulness” probably amounted to the same thing. She could not go back, in the end, to any “happier” time, and she could not go forward. Her final crisis occurred at the end of 1969, when Bellmer, who had had a stroke, could no longer look after her. She returned to the asylum for a month; discharged, she was offered, Malcolm Green writes, “the option to leave Bellmer and return to Germany or be placed in a mental hospital as a preventative measure.” She chose the hospital, for a final four months of institutionalization. Upon release, she could find no one with whom to stay. Bellmer allowed her to return for a few days, until she could sort things out; according to Green, “they spent the first evening in quiet conversation, and in the early morning she committed suicide.” It was a death foretold in the suicide of the 12-year-old girl in Dark Spring, in the defenestration of her father’s first wife, Orla Holm, in the suicide of her uncle Falada, with whom she describes identifying in The Man of Jasmine.

Zürn left us an unnervingly precise record of her time on earth in her writings, drawings and paintings, and in the work of other artists and writers. Rainer Werner Fassbinder dedicated his 1978 film Despair “to Antonin Artaud, Vincent Van Gogh, and Unica Zürn,” and rightly so. Despair, though based on Nabokov’s novel, was in Fassbinder’s eyes about the recognition that, after a certain moment in life, the future will only offer more of what has already been, or the options of madness, misery, suicide. For many sensitive souls, the possibilities of self-reinvention are exhausted long before any sort of natural death. Unica Zürn was one of these.

[Currently On View “Unica Zürn: Dark Spring” at the Drawing Center, New York, through July 23.]
Gary Indiana’s seventh novel, The Shanghai Gesture, was published in April by Two Dollar Radio.

gary indiana

— Art in American Magazine



The Chimeras of Unica Zurn


“Unica Zürn: Drawings from the 1960s,” Jan. 13-Apr. 16, 2005, at Ubu Gallery, 416 E. 59th Street, New York, N.Y. 10022

During the 1960s, when she was well into middle age, the German painter and writer Unica Zürn (1916-1970) made a series of psychologically intense line drawings that combine Surrealist automatism with the mania of Outsider Art and a certain residue of contemporary experiments in psychedelic drugs. Erotic and trancelike, the works depict fantastic chimeras, bizarre creatures with double faces that represent multiplications of herself, either repeated across the page or set in intricate dream landscapes of mystic animals and otherworldly plant forms.

Zürn’s life reads a bit like a Freudian case study. She grew up in a well-to-do family in Weimar Berlin, surrounded by exotic objects collected by her father, a cavalry officer stationed in Africa, who was also an avid traveler and a writer. Zürn was herself equipped with a vivid imagination and, inspired perhaps by Oedipal yearnings, developed a rich interior fantasy life that is evidenced in her later drawings.

As a young woman, Zürn found employment as an editor at the German national film company, and supposedly was oblivious to the horrors of Nazism until 1942, when by chance she heard an underground radio report about the concentration camps and their horrors — a revelation that unmoored her psychologically. She was married during the war, had a two children and then divorced, with her husband obtaining custody of their offspring. By 1949, Zürn was on her own, earning a marginal existence as a journalist.

Her life changed in 1953, when she met the Paris-based, German Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. Their paths intersected at the opening of an exhibition of his work at the Maison de France on the Kufurstendamm in Berlin, and it was “mad love” from the start. Zürn immigrated to Paris to live with Bellmer, becoming his collaborator and muse. Bellmer discusses their unusual relationship in his revealing book Petit trait de l’inconscient physique ou anatomie de l’image, published in 1957.

In the late 50s Bellmer turned from using dolls as models to real women. The poet Nora Mitrani opened her legs for him while he obsessively photographed her genitals, and Zürn submitted her naked torso to a tight binding that transformed her body into a kind of “human-rolled-roast.” When a work from the latter series, a photograph of Zürn bound on a bed, appeared on the cover of Le Surrealisme, mme in 1958, the mock-cannibalistic caption advised, “Keep in a cool place.” The artist explained these sadomasochistic images as “altered landscapes of flesh.”

Zürn became a member of the Paris Surrealist circle, which included Breton, Man Ray and, most significantly, Henri Michaux. A poet and a painter, Michaux had been taking mescaline as part of his personal research into human consciousness. In 1957, Zürn’s participation in these experiments led to the first of what would become a series of mental crises, some of which she documented in her writings. By Zürn’s own account, her fateful encounter with Michaux triggered the beginning of the mental illness that plagued the last 13 years of her life.

She was diagnosed as a schizophrenic and underwent intermittent hospitalization in Berlin, Paris and La Rochelle. Many of the drawings on view at Ubu were made during these institutionalizations. Additionally, Bellmer may have been threatened by Zürn’s romantic feelings for Michaux, with his jealousy further aggravating her instability.

Despite these difficulties, Zürn continued to participate with the Paris Surrealists, exhibiting at the Galerie Le Soleil dans la Tte and taking part in the 1959 International Surrealist Exhibition devoted to “eros” at Gallery Daniel Cordier. But she was equally known for her writings, which include Hexentexte, a 1954 book of anagrams, and two powerful psychological narratives, Sombre Spring (1969) and Jasmine Man, which was published posthumously in 1971 with a frontispiece by Bellmer.

With lines as provocative as, “Who knows if tonight the skeleton will not climb along the ivy up to her window and crawl into her room?” Somber Spring is an autobiographical novel that “reads more like an exorcism than a memoir,” according to the cover notes. Chronicling a young woman’s simultaneous introduction to both sex and mental illness, the book touches on Zürn’s several obsessions: the idealized, exotic father; the contemptible, impure mother; and a troubled girl’s “masochistic fantasies and onanistic rituals.”

In the 1960s, Zürn experimented with the Surrealist “automatic” drawing technique and delved into the depths of hidden meanings that she found in cryptic anagrams and coincidental correspondences. Her increasingly frequent portrayal of aggressive creatures and uninhabitable places testifies to an ongoing mental illness, however, one that ultimately led to her suicide. In a letter in 1964 to Gaston Ferdiere — the French psychiatrist who was Antonin Artaud’s as well as Zürn’s doctor — Bellmer confesses the strange way in which the malaise of his companion was transferred to his own body and contributed to his addiction to alcohol.

All of her works on view at Ubu Gallery were made during this intensely productive period, marked by Zürn’s deteriorating mental health and the unraveling of her relationship with Bellmer. Her 1970 suicide (which in retrospect was foretold in Jasmine Man) occurred while she was on a five-day leave from a mental institution. Unwilling to deal with her deteriorating mental illness and despairing over her relationship with Bellmer, who was partially paralyzed and bed-ridden following a stroke, Zürn lept to her death from the window of Bellmer’s Paris apartment on Oct. 19, 1970 (see Sue Taylor’s biography, Hans Bellmer, The Anatomy of Anxiety, published by MIT Press in 2000).

After a long illness, Hans Bellmer died of bladder cancer on Feb. 24, 1975, and was buried next to Zürn in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Their common marble tomb is marked with a plaque inscribed with the words Bellmer wrote for Zürn’s funeral wreath, five years before: “My love will follow you into Eternity.”

Valery Oisteanu

— Marioneta de papel



Unica Zürn "Dark Spring" at the Drawing Center

In 2006 the Halle Saint-Pierre of Paris exhibited over 100 drawings and watercolors by Unica Zürn, reviving her vast collection of work as an overlooked extension of Art Brut. Zürn was known, initially, as the wife of Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer and spent much of her life reeling from tragedies that tore at the core of her own identity. Born in Berlin, Germany on July 6, 1916 after the start of World War I, Zürn became the embodiment of Berlin Modern, the Weimer society of the Post World War I era, that flourished and crumbled, attracting artists and writers from different countries while the larger populace was torn asunder by the economic fall-out generated by war reparations.

In 1929 when Zürn was thirteen years old, her family’s house, situated in Berlin-Grunewald, was auctioned off with all of its furnishings intact, signifying the loss of her family’s middle class status. Not very long after, she and members of her family became involved with the National Socialist Party. One year after the birth of her first child in 1943, Zürn’s house was bombed. Her second child was born in 1945. As other members of her family died either at war or internment camps, Zürn divorced her husband and fled her family for Paris after meeting Hans Bellmer in 1953. From that point, Zürn began creating a series of poetic anagrams that gradually evolved into elaborately drawn and painted imagery, characterized by marks marks of distortion. For Zürn, art became the ultimate means of expression, which revealed the war she waged in her life.

Zurn’s art was last exhibited in New York at the Ubu Gallery in 2005. Totemic yet mystical in appearance, her work posed a challenge for writers to sum up since it does not exist within the scope of fine art as we know it, but in the realm of Art Brut, where imagery automatically flows from the mind while entirely independent of both trends and movements. As seen in two untitled works from 1961, Zürn mapped a series of falcon-like forms that each bear an infinite number of eyes. Set up as a dense pattern, the eyes and faces quickly disappear into larger unknown forms. In the catalogue from 2006, Barbara Safarova wrote, “The ‘I’ appears as an effect of signs, insecure in its continual metamorphosis: it can not be fixed.”

The face, in general, became a sight of memory and experience when the artist recollected, for example, the brother who raped her as a child, her grim reaction to the experience of abortion, the memory of her father, and other close colleagues who unexpectedly faded out of her life. When passing strangers in the street, Zürn would imagine these known faces. But eventually no matter how many drawings she created, a sense of satisfaction was not there leading Zürn to tear up some of her art. Barbara Safarova and Terezie Zemankova both suggest: “Some creators show us in their works that perceiving our body as a unified whole, distinct from the rest of the world, is an illusion.” Zürn’s consistent thickly braided lines continually opened up new forms that distorted rather than constructed, while lacking any overt context.

From 1960 to 1970, Unica Zürn was at her most prolific while visiting several hospitals for long periods of time. In her narrative titled, “Man of Jasmine,” (1971) Zürn described her process thus: “Hesitant at first, the pen ‘swims’ above the white surface, and locates the spot where the first eye is to be drawn. It is only when something gazes back at her from the paper that she starts to orientate herself, finding her motifs flowing effortlessly forth.” Wolfgang Knapp has described her art as the product of a psychic state that maintained an aesthetic frame of mind. By the late 60s, Zürn applied heavy black lines as contour and captured beings that bore a resemblance to Hindu iconography.

On October 18th, 1970 Zürn took a temporary leave from the psychiatric clinic at the Chateau de la Chesnaie and returned to see Bellmer at their apartment in Paris, located at 4 Rue de la Plaine. The next day, the artist threw herself over the balcony and died. Whether chased by visions, voices or her own memories, Zürn had lived a broken life. In mid-April the Drawing Center will host, “Dark Spring,” a selection of 50 drawings and watercolors. Titled after the book that captured her life in the third person, the drawings in this exhibition will reflect the sporadic nature of the artist’s mind as well as the various figurations that it took while wandering along the surface of a page.

JILL CONNER


        



Exposé tenu le 18 septembre 2004 à Dresde, dans le cadre de l'exposition "MON CORPS" 





Unica Zürn est née à Berlin en 1916. Victime d'une enfance assez tourmentée marquée par un viol et le divorce de ses parents, elle doit très tôt arrêter ses études pour apprendre un métier. Elle devient par hasard archiviste, scénariste à la Ufa-film.


En 1942, Zürn se marie avec Erich Laupenmühlen et arrête de travailler. Deux enfants naissent " sous les bombes " de cette union.


En 1949, le couple divorce. Laupenmühlen se remarie avec sa maîtresse. Les enfants sont confiés à leur père. Zürn mène alors " une vie de bohème " : Elle gagne sa vie en écrivant des récits pour les journaux. Elle se fait des amis dans le milieu artistique berlinois.


En 1953, elle rencontre Hans Bellmer, c'est un coup de foudre réciproque. Elle quitte Berlin et l'accompagne à Paris. Bellmer lui fait connaître les surréalistes:


" Arp, Breton, Matta, Meret Oppenheim, Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Marcel Duchamp, Victor Brauner, Man Ray, Patrick Walberg, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Bona, Leonor Fini, Wilfredo Lam et également Henri Michaux ".


En 1960, alors qu'elle se rend à Berlin pour avorter, Zürn fait sa première crise schizophrénique, elle a 44 ans. De nombreux autres séjours en hôpitaux psychiatriques suivront. Zürn demeure néanmoins très productive : lors de ses internements elle dessine à l'encre de chine et peint. Elle s'inspire par ailleurs de ses crises dans plusieurs de ses écrits notamment Der Mann im Jasmin.


Avec Bellmer, les difficultés de vie vont se multiplier. Si bien qu'après un acte de violence Zürn est placée de force à Maison Blanche. Elle ne souffre alors d'aucune crise.


Internée pendant presque un an dans différentes institutions, une permission de sortie de cinq jours lui est autorisée le 19 octobre 1970 pour réorganiser sa vie. Après une journée sans incident, Zürn met fin à ses jours en se défenestrant.


A travers cette destinée, l'art apparaît comme un élément médiateur face à une souffrance presque indicible. La figuration du corps y est l'objet d'un questionnement sans cesse renouvelé. Celui de l'autre, d'abord, qui permet d'appréhender le monde mais aussi sa propre identité. Puis le propre corps de l'artiste dont l'unité est en permanence mise en danger par la maladie mentale, le corps fonctionne alors comme une force unificatrice sans cesse mise en péril par des crises.


Il faut aussi ajouter que l'œuvre de Zürn s'étend dans différents domaines artistiques : à la fois plasticienne et écrivaine, elle réalise des dessins à l'encre de chine, elle peint et elle écrit des textes en proses relevant de la fiction, de la poésie et de l'autobiographie. Dans chacun de ces domaines, le corps est présent. Questionner le rapport d'un artiste à son propre corps revient donc à s'intéresser à ces différents supports comme moyens spécifiques d'expression.


Trois moments structureront donc cette intervention :


Nous nous attacherons, d'abord, à familiariser l'auditoire avec le mode particulier qu'utilise Zürn pour représenter les corps.


Nous analyserons, ensuite, certains de ses dessins qui peuvent s'interpréter comme des autoportraits. Nous nous pencherons, enfin, sur son œuvre écrite.

— La Mer Gelée