Unica Zürn: Art, Writing and Postwar Surrealism 9781350989597, 9780857726469

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Esra Plumer completed her PhD at the University of Nottingham, on the work of Unica Z¨urn and her development of the technique of automatism as an artistic strategy. She is the leading expert on the artistic work of Z¨urn with an extensive background in the history of psychoanalysis and psychiatric treatment methods. She has taught at the University of Nottingham, the European University of Lefke and The Courtauld Institute of Art.

‘Esra Plumer’s illuminating study swiftly escapes the claws of psychobiography. Instead, she opts for an informative account of Unica Z¨urn’s oeuvre (both visual and textual) as an outcome of a conscious artistic strategy, at times infused by her mental illness, rather than a product of such illness per se. What emerges is a well-overdue portrait of an exceptional artist who was far more than just la femme de Bellmer, as demonstrated in Plumer’s astute analysis of the complexities of artistic and personal collaboration.’ Kamila Kuc, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow in New Media, Goldsmiths, University of London ‘Esra Plumer’s comprehensive study of the literary and artistic works of Unica Z¨urn is highly informative. She presents Z¨urn as an autonomous artist and also reviews her early period in Berlin. One particular merit is that it at last enables the English-speaking world to share an insight into the surrealistic oeuvre of an exceptional German-French artist.’ Dagmar Schmengler and Isabel Fischer, curators of the exhibition Unica Z¨urn – Camaro – Hans Bellmer in Berlin: Early works at Camaro Haus, Berlin (2016)

¨ Unica Zurn Art, Writing and Postwar Surrealism

Esra Plumer

BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY VISUAL ARTS and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published by I.B. Tauris in Great Britain 2016 This paperback edition first published by Bloomsbury Visual Arts 2022 Copyright © 2022 Esra Plumer Esra Plumer has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. ix–x constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover image © Johannes Lederer, Archiv Brinkmann & Bose Berlin All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-7845-3036-5 PB: 978-1-3502-9695-4 ePDF: 978-0-8577-2646-9 eBook: 978-0-8577-3972-8 Typeset by Aptara

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Contents List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Foreword by Mary Ann Caws

1 2 3 4 5 6

Introduction Beginnings of Change Exhibitions and Exposure ‘Femme de Bellmer’: Critical Reception from 1984 to 2014 Anagrams Automatism after 1945 Notes on Unica Z¨urn’s The Man of Jasmine and Other Narratives Epilogue

Appendix Notes Bibliography Index

vii ix xi 1 13 41 62 90 119 155 186 189 195 229 253

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List of Illustrations 1 Eric Laupenm¨uhlen, ‘Indianermutter und Katrin’ [‘The Native Indian Mother and Katrin’], 1946. Photograph, unknown dimensions. Private collection. 2 Eric Laupenm¨uhlen, ‘Untitled’ [portrait of Z¨urn], c.1940. Photograph, unknown dimensions. Ruth Henry collection, Paris. 3 Christa Tiede, Ursula and Annemarie Schnell at the Berlin Zoo, 1956. Photograph, 10.2 × 15.2 cm. Annemarie Schnell Frank Collection, Berlin. 4 Alexander Camaro, ‘Unica Z. I’, 1950. Ink on paper, 86.4 × 61.2 cm. Alexander and Renata Camaro Foundation, Berlin. 5 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Die verzauberte Prinzessin’ [‘The Enchanted Princess’], 1950. Watercolour on paper, 37 × 26 cm. Karin and Dr Gerhard Dammann collection. 6 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Untitled’, 1963. Chinese ink, 65 × 50 cm. Private collection. 7 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Untitled’, 1966. Ink and white gouache on paper, 64.6 × 49.5 cm. Amanda Filipacchi collection, New York. 8 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Zoobiologique’ [‘Zoo Biology’] in Boite Alerte, EROS exhibition catalogue, 1959. Lithographic drawing, unknown dimensions. Biblioth`eque Kandinsky. Mus´ee d’Art Moderne, Georges Pompidou, Paris.

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15

27

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35 37

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9 Hans Bellmer, Tenir au Frais, 1958. Collage and gouache on masonite, 23.4 × 23.9 cm. Ubu Gallery, New York and Galerie Berinson, Berlin. 10 Hans Bellmer, Unica Litog´ee [Unica Bound], 1957/8. Photograph. Sheet: 23.5 × 17.6 cm. Image: 16.2 × 16.2 cm. Printed by Roger Vuillez. 1983. Private collection. Ubu Gallery, New York and Galerie Berinson, Berlin. 11 Man Ray, ‘Unica Z¨urn’, 1956. Photograph, unknown dimensions. Private collection. 12 Hans Bellmer, ‘Portrait of Unica Z¨urn’, 1954. Pencil on paper, 42 × 32 cm. Private collection. 13 Hans Bellmer, ‘Untitled’ [Z¨urn with Portrait by Bellmer], c.1956. Photograph, 8 × 12.7 cm. Ubu Gallery, New York and Galerie Berinson, Berlin. 14 Hans Bellmer, Unica Litog´ee [Unica Bound], 1957/8. Photograph. Sheet: 23.5 × 17.6 cm. Image: 16.2 × 16.2 cm. Printed by Roger Vuillez. 1983. Private collection. Ubu Gallery, New York and Galerie Berinson, Berlin. 15 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Eisenbahnheft Paris-Berlin-Paris’ [‘Railway exercise book’], 1960–70. Mix-media notebook, 22 × 16.8 cm. 174 pages. 16 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Norma’, 1957–9. Ink and gouache on musical notes, 27 × 17.5 cm. Private collection. 17 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Untitled’, 1965. Chinese ink and white gouache on paper, 65 × 50 cm. Succession of Z¨urn, Berlin. 18 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Untitled’, Orakel und Spektakel, Book IV, 1960. Ink and gouache on paper notebook, 32.9 × 25.2 cm. Ubu Gallery, New York and Galerie Berinson, Berlin. 19 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Untitled’ [No. 47 notepad], 1957. Ink drawing on rose paper, 13 × 8.4 cm. Deutsches Literaturearchiv Marbach. 20 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Untitled’, 1963. Chinese ink on paper. 64 × 50 cm. Joachim Kersten collection, Hamburg. 21 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Plan of The House of Illnesses’, 1958. Ink on paper, unknown dimensions. Atlas Press. 1993.

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66 72 72

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144 152 169

Acknowledgements A number of people have been instrumental in the realisation of this book, beginning with my doctoral supervisor Anna Lovatt, who provided constant support and invaluable critical insight throughout the infancy of my research project. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for their financial contribution towards my research travels to Paris and Berlin, where I gathered the primary material on which this book is based. I am equally indebted to the School of Humanities at the University of Nottingham for their financial support throughout my doctoral studies. Many thanks to Richard Wrigley, Mark Rawlinson and the Art History Department at the University of Nottingham for providing a productive and intimate place to work. Thank you to Simon Baker for contributing to the early stages of the thesis, and to Gavin Parkinson who guided my vision in expanding the potential of the thesis to enable it to be transformed into the present book. I would like to extend my gratitude to Adam Boxer, Erich Brinkmann, Annemarie Schnell Frank, Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain, Jo˜ao Ribas, Jan Hoet and Katrin and Peter Ziemke for opening their homes, collections and generously sharing their time and stories with me. Thank you to the Biblioth`eque nationale de France, Paris, those at the Biblioth`eque litt´eraire Jacques Doucet archive, Jacques Fraenkel, Martin Baumg¨artel at the RIAS archive, Hendrik A. Berinson at Galerie Berinson, Gerhard Dammann, Gisela Kaufmann at Librairie Buchladen and Elke Pfeil at the Akademie der K¨unste Archiv for their kind provision of material. Thanks to my copy-editor Pat FitzGerald ix

¨ UNICA ZURN x

and my French tutor Ayse Ozyasa for her assistance in translating and interpreting French resources. I would also like to thank the copyright holders for granting me permission to reproduce the artwork in this book, namely Herback and Haase Literarische Agentur on C Verlag Brinkmann & behalf of the Unica Z¨urn Estate; copyright  Bose, Berlin and DACS on behalf of the Man Ray Trust copyright  C ADAGP, Paris/DACS, London and the Hans Bellmer Estate, C ADAGP, Paris. I wish to thank the Association of Art copyright  Historians for the Image Grant that contributed financial support for reprographic and copyright expenses. I am also grateful to those who have allowed me to present my research at various conferences and those who have provided valuable feedback, namely the Association of Art Historians Student Members’ Committee, the Association for Research in the Fantastic, Dawn Ades, Sian Barber, Celeste Marie Bernier, David Calvin, Roger Cardinal, John Fagg, Rob Fisher, Phil Fitzsimmons, Mel Francis, Suzy Freake, Felicity Gee, Kamil Kopania, Kamila Kuc, Silvia Loreti, David Lomas, Lars Schmeink, Robert Short, Catriona McAra and Gaby Neher. Special mention must be made of Mary Ann Caws, whose writings I have long admired, which made her contribution all the more special, adding invaluable quality to the book before and during its realisation. And finally, my deepest gratitude remains to my network of support that is my family; thank you for always being there.

¨ Foreword: Unica Zurn UnBound Of course, Unica Z¨urn, among all the uncompromising, surrealising, fantasising, artist-writers of modern times, was awaiting a full-scale book of her own in English. Over and over, for years, she was introduced – as if she had to be ‘introduced’ into a company of women drawing and writing with their own genius – as the partner of Hans Bellmer. He was the one mainly written about and celebrated as the maker of dolls, among whose represented and created bodies Unica was gathered in. Numbered, as it were, as one of them. And spectacular it was and she was, unfailingly. There she was, bound up, her buttocks enstringed, decorating the front of a Surrealist magazine, deliciously an object of erotomania, the observer’s – that is, ours – and that of the creator, her sadistic other. Never mind that it was also her own creation, for she was just as much and, from my point of view, more captivating by far than Bellmer, and equally involved in the stringing up. She was brilliantly complicitous, not a passive object at all. As Esra Plumer points out in this engrossing study, some of the photographs in this series of bindings, graphically entitled Unica Ligot´ee or Unica Bound Up, show Unica’s hands holding the ends of the strings, her hair falling over her shoulders and herself radically involved in the presentation. The business of self-display and self-observing sets out full sail here, so that the whole and enormously complicated history of theatrical performance as it entangles itself with both madness and the strategy of conscious use of that madness takes over. What a tale. xi

¨ UNICA ZURN xii

Esra Plumer deliberately eschews the temptation to dwell on the drama of Z¨urn’s suicide and even much of the drama of the institutions where Z¨urn was housed, and from which she was discharged, the day before her fatal leap from a Paris balcony. In fact, this writing borders on, illustrates, the theory that what you omit from your narration is what gives it its most genuine and interesting play. As if set free from its own institution. And yet the necessary quotations, at a minimum, enlighten, with their black humour. In her several conversations with Ruth Henry, Z¨urn had made it perfectly clear that she lacked both the strength and the will to face old age, and wrote in her journal: ‘Old age and childhood are beginning to resemble one another. I was never young. I am an aging infant.’ Thus the fairy tales and fantasies, essential to her being, her creative being. Esra Plumer has the courage to take up the history of automatism and that of the Berlin cabarets ‘Die Badewanne’ (1949) and the successor-cabarets ‘Die Quallenpeitsche’ and ‘Das Atelier’ as well as the strangeness of the anagrams and hexagrams. Madness and miracle, the latter is a key word for Unica Z¨urn. We are taken into Z¨urn’s universe, and her drawings and tales, with explanations and interpretations, each bearing its own telling research: we see Henri Michaux and Antonin Artaud as their works of madness and genius are allied with those of Z¨urn, as in the exhibition in Herford, Germany, entitled Loss of Control: Crossing the Boundaries to Art from Felicien Rops to the Present. Much is about control and the processes of production, as opposed to the uncontrolled, about the predictable repetitions and multiplications – and who has to distinguish between intention and infliction? Between strategies and suffering? Between the automatic and the ordered? So much is here: how the Indian headdress may rise up from Z¨urn’s childhood reading of The Last of the Mohicans, and other Indian references to her following of White-Horse Eagle, how Jacques Lacan’s recounting of the case of ‘Aim´ee M’ links with Henri Michaux, the White Man and the Man of Jasmine, and her own pseudonym of Angela Mortens, how one of her inventions, ‘the Games for Two’ or 1967 relates to Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Norma . . . It is like a large gathering of all the interested parties, not just about Surrealism, not just about women artists and creators, but about psychoanalysis and in its Freudian and Lacanian aspects, about violence and the erotic: Plumer has read them, absorbed them and dealt with

¨ UNBOUND FOREWORD: UNICA ZURN

their dealings with Z¨urn, from one of her psychoanalysts in the hospital of Sainte-Anne, Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain, with whom she discussed her subject, to the gamut of others: Jessica Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, F´elix Guattari and Luce Irigaray, with whom she ( justifiably) argues, through to the works of Susan Bassnett and Jill Stephenson on societal issues and Patricia Heminghouse on literary ones. They are all here, on the role and place of women, from all over: H´el`ene Cixous, Xavi`ere Gauthier, as well as Susan Suleiman, Renee-Ri`ese Hubert, Anna Balakian, Sarah Wilson and Alyce Mahon, on the role of women in Surrealism, and Susan Gilbert on mad women. It’s certainly not about a text all cluttered up with names for the sake of names. Everything has a purpose, and Unica Z¨urn continues to be as mysterious a character and creator as before, thanks be. It’s enough to make you believe in signs: when I was writing my catalogue essay for the 2009 exhibition at the Drawing Center of Unica Z¨urn’s ‘Dark Spring’, I hied me off to the New York Public Library to consult a book by Dr Gaston Ferdi`ere, whom I had met at an Artaud conference at Cerisy-la-Salle in France. He had told me about choosing the most crazed texts of the ‘Jabberwocky’ for Artaud to translate, to keep him involved and insofar as possible within the limits of sanity; we didn’t discuss his much-criticised electroshock techniques but hovered around them. And it was missing, this volume. Of course, again, of course. A lot less is missing now. Mary Ann Caws

xiii

Introduction In 1983, a review in Le Monde asked the question: ‘Have you met Unica Z¨urn?’1 Over 30 years later, the question still stands. Born on 6 July 1916, Nora Berta Unika Ruth Z¨urn grew up in the suburb of Gr¨unewald-Berlin, writing her first short story at the age of 17. Over the next ten years, she worked at the Universum Film Agency (UFA) in different positions and left work after marrying in 1942. As a writer, Z¨urn’s artistic career took off after World War II in Berlin, where she became a recognisable figure among the Surrealist cabaret Die Badewanne. At the end of 1953, Z¨urn moved to Paris and over the course of the next two decades produced a wealth of textual and visual material. Taking her own life on 19 October 1970, she left behind an elusive oeuvre that makes it all the more difficult to really ‘know’ Unica Z¨urn. There are ways of introducing this German writer and graphic artist that go beyond known perceptions of her work; though beginning with my own encounter with the name ‘Unica’ seems appropriate. It was the year 2006. Walking through the Hans Bellmer exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, in its very last section, I came upon the image of Unica Z¨urn for the first time. Unknowingly glaring at her bare flesh – inadvertently asking what ‘it’ was. These photographs, as I would later discover, were a series titled Unica Litog´ee (1958); taking shape as a result of a collaboration between Z¨urn and her long-term life partner Bellmer. Even though Bellmer continued his artistic practice until the late 1970s, the images were included in the exhibition to represent the end of Bellmer’s career; the rest 1

¨ UNICA ZURN 2

of his work seemed rather insignificant, repetitive and certainly not as intriguing as Unica Litog´ee. A year later, in an attempt to identify a research topic and shuffling through my notes on artists who had received psychoanalytic treatment, I encountered ‘Unica’ once again, albeit by means of Bellmer, who had received treatment from Dr Gaston Ferdi`ere, and had been in a clinic for alcoholism. Next to Bellmer’s name there was a small annotation about Unica Z¨urn, who had also been ‘treated’ by Ferdi`ere and incarcerated in several mental hospitals in both France and Germany. Diagnosed with schizophrenia in the 1960s, Z¨urn was largely known as Bellmer’s female counterpart, despite being a prolific writer and artist herself who produced a wealth of anagrammatic poems and graphic notebooks full of powerful drawings. My initial research came into being from my interest in psychogenic processes in the making of artistic products. A psychogenic process implies having a psychological origin or cause rather than a physical one. The association of the psychology of the producer with the definition or understanding of the product led me to look more closely at artists who have undergone treatment for certain mental conditions. At first, I began re-examining objects that were labelled and exhibited under pseudo-scientific terminology; observing the definition of the processes of production and the reception of art objects within certain psychoanalytic contexts. This drew my attention closer to specific artistic strategies that were based on psychoanalytic interpretations and analyses such as automatism as practised by the French Surrealists in the twentieth century. Initially, the parameters of my research included the practices of three artists: Antonin Artaud, Henri Michaux and Unica Z¨urn – who had all, at one point, been associated with and/or interested in mental illnesses. The first two figures, whose lives and work can be directly related to Z¨urn, built an interesting triumvirate for exploring different aspects of the employment of mental illness in art production. However, Artaud and Michaux remained comparatively well-known figures on whom a large number of literature exists and therefore carried the risk of overshadowing the work of Z¨urn.2 At the end of 2008, I travelled to Herford, Germany, for the first exhibition that showcased the works of Artaud, Michaux and Z¨urn together under the title Loss of Control: Crossing the Boundaries to Art from Felicien Rops to the Present.3 Following this visit and my interview with curator Jan

INTRODUCTION

Hoet, I became more intrigued by Z¨urn’s enigmatic drawings and their placement within art-historical definitions. Over the course of that year, I came to know Z¨urn’s prose writings – narratives that explored the extremities and as well as the banalities of mental illness. The House of Illnesses (1958), Dark Spring (1968) and The Man of Jasmine (1971) are the three seminal pieces of writing by Z¨urn. They have been translated into several languages and are the only books to be published in English. These narratives have become defining sources for introducing and interpreting Z¨urn’s life and work. In the 1990s, when the books were first made available to a wider audience; there was a seismic shift in focus away from Z¨urn’s visual work towards her literary narratives. Discussed in Chapters 2 and 3 at length, the dissemination of Z¨urn’s graphic works by means of exhibitions during her lifetime continued into the 1980s with a small number of posthumous retrospectives. However, with the late publication of The Man of Jasmine in 1977 in Germany, and the breaking down of the language barrier at the end of the 1980s into the 1990s, the way was opened to a revival of her literary narratives, often read as semi-autobiographical accounts. Together with the growing interest in the lives of women Surrealists, an emphasis on Z¨urn’s partnership with Hans Bellmer and her experiences with mental illness determined the reception of her life and work over the previous 30 years, leaving a gap in scholarship that attempts to ‘get to know’ Z¨urn as an independent figure against the backdrop of some of the most significant historical milestones of the twentieth century. The new millennium brought a rise in innovative curatorial spaces in major cities that rekindled an interest in Z¨urn’s graphic works. In the summer of 2009, I travelled to New York for the first solo exhibition of Z¨urn’s drawings and paintings in North America.4 The exhibition Unica Z¨urn: Dark Spring and my interview with curator Jo˜ao Ribas contributed greatly to my understanding of Z¨urn’s work and the approach I would later decided to take. Importantly, this visit also provided indispensible advice on accessing further resources. During this trip, I visited one of the major galleries that represent Z¨urn’s work: the Ubu Gallery, examining their collection of notebooks, drawings, paintings and ephemera in detail.5 From my trip to New York, I gathered enough information to understand that the majority of resources were in Paris and Berlin.

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With the support of an AHRC Travel Abroad grant, I spent most of 2010 in Paris, consulting French material that has not been translated and remains largely unknown; much of which consists of handwritten manuscripts, letters and rare books. While visiting valuable collections in private homes, archives and libraries, I was unable to visit the collection of Z¨urn’s drawings and ephemera held by Jean-Marie and Doriane Bilh-Bellmer, who manage the estate of Hans Bellmer. Later that year, I spent time in Berlin, exploring sources in the national archives as well as in private galleries and collections. I conducted several interviews with collectors, friends and family of Z¨urn and Bellmer, acquaintances, curators and researchers. Friends and relatives of Z¨urn seemed overjoyed to share their memories and to allow me to view their collections. However, not all arranged meetings took place. My scheduled meeting to visit the collection of Katrin and Peter Ziemke, Z¨urn’s daughter and son-in-law, was cancelled due to Katrin’s deteriorating health. In July 2014, I revisited Berlin to meet Peter Ziemke, who shared intimate stories that have shaped the characterisations of Z¨urn’s personal traits in this book. Following these events, the finding of a relatively small yet fascinating set of sources led me to place Z¨urn’s work as the central focus of my research. Having realised the lack of a comprehensive resource on Z¨urn’s life and work in English, I decided to focus on her as an individual case-study that ultimately led to gathering a promising collection of research to form a monographic study. Certainly, placing Z¨urn at the centre of my study was a strategic choice that has proved to be a very productive move. This move was then integrated into the general theoretical approach of the present book, which seeks to isolate Z¨urn’s work as a unique practitioner whose work is distinct from that of her partner Hans Bellmer and other male counterparts associated with her practice. This has become one of the central aims of the book – to revise the reading of Z¨urn as an extension of Bellmer and the perception of her as a figure on the margins of Surrealism. How I came to know Unica Z¨urn’s work through this indirect route points to the fact that it has become almost customary to introduce and get to know women artists who were known companions of male Surrealists as annexes to their partners. In fact, it could even be said that it has become the canon of art historical accounts on women Surrealists, which in more recent studies is put under scrutiny.

Unica Z¨urn is a seminal figure in the history of Surrealism and German and French literature during the mid-twentieth century who often took up the subject of mental illness in both her writing and drawings. Questioning the reading of Z¨urn as individual ‘subject’ (in reference to psychoanalysis), her work, as a record of her experiences of mental illness and the process of producing objects or representations of an ‘inner psyche’ or the ‘unconscious’ by means of automatic drawing,6 became my focal point. Whilst the dissociation of the self was inherent in early definitions of automatic writing, the ‘self ’ was central to the work and to the process of automatism. In retrospect, this close association becomes clearer in the original Greek term automatos [act of one’s own will], where the place of the ‘self ’ is inherent. I became interested in the seeming contradiction between the Surrealist definition and use of automatism as liberation from repressed society, and the later reputation of psychoanalysis (from where the term is borrowed) as a repressive system as it became known in the second half of the century. This led me to focus on the practice of the strategy along with another technique of writing she used extensively; anagrams, in a postwar, post-psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatric context. Z¨urn’s work captures a fascinating perspective within this history, encapsulating the changing notions of the ‘self ’ within experiences of extreme social conditions. Another strategic method of approach is the way I handle the biographical information on the artist that is closely interwoven into her work. From the outset, my interest in Z¨urn as a mentally ill artist was in her deployment of psychogenic processes in producing art objects. This initial conception was transformed with my closer understanding of the differences between what is termed as ‘outsider art’, the ‘art of the mentally ill’ and cultural objects made with artistic strategies that employ affinities with psychological conditions and psychoanalytic theory.7 Therefore, it became very important for me to acknowledge a distinction between reading works as direct products of an illness (which is often done in reading Z¨urn’s work) and reading works as products of intentional artistic strategies that are intertwined with experiences of mental illness. This distinction becomes clear in my reading of Z¨urn’s literary and visual work, where ‘madness’ is

INTRODUCTION

¨ Approaching Unica Zurn

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recognised as both subject matter and part of the process of production rather than a cathartic source. This is the second central claim this account supports; that Z¨urn’s work, distinct from ‘outsider’ or ‘naive’ art, carries an intentional methodology which, in the early stages of my research, showed signs of flux and development over a period of time. Upon discovering a wide range of original material during my research travels to France, Germany and the United States, I decided to confine the study to a period of 20 years: from 1949, the year Z¨urn began her career as an independent writer, to 1969, a year prior to her death. My exclusion of the final year of Z¨urn’s career and life is tied to the strategic decision not to engage with the extremities of her mental illness, to avoid a psycho-biographic reading. In other words, this is a choice to emphasise her consciously employed artistic methodology rather than illness as a creative source. Whilst I include and at times rely on biography, sensationalistic representations of Z¨urn’s experience of mental disturbances and concentration on her ultimate suicide are strictly avoided. 1970 was certainly a productive year in Z¨urn’s career but nonetheless, I do believe it goes beyond the intention of this book, and should be taken up as an individual study. Z¨urn’s proximity to illness and treatment in mental institutions is a complicated yet fascinating aspect that makes up the content and method of her artistic production. Understanding and building on the theoretical richness of her œuvre with historical references and material has certainly been a challenge and a learning experience. I suggest Z¨urn’s experience with mental illness and of various treatment procedures, among other historical events, as having been influential on the development of an artistic method that employs anagrammatic composition and automatic drawing as techniques that promote anti-psychiatric and anti-psychoanalytic ideas. Recontextualising Z¨urn within broader art-historical movements and events is another central point put forward which presents previously unknown material as well as rethinking some familiar material in relation to this new context.

Sources

6

The book compiles and outlines both artistic materials and first-hand reviews on Z¨urn’s artistic output that are based largely on primary research carried out at the following locations: Akademie der K¨unste Archiv (Berlin), Biblioth`eque Kandinsky at Centre Pompidou (Paris), Biblioth`eque Litt´eraire Jacques Doucet (Paris), Biblioth`eque

INTRODUCTION

nationale de France (Paris), British Library (London), Galerie Berinson (Berlin), Dieter Brusberg Kunsthandel (Berlin), Halle-Sainte Pierre (Paris), MaRTA (Herford), RIAS Archive at Deutschlandradio Kultur (Berlin), Sainte-Anne Hospital (Paris), Sammlung Prinzhorn (Heidelberg), The Drawing Center (New York) and Ubu Gallery (New York). In addition, several interviews were conducted, with Hendrik A. Berinson, owner of Gallery Berinson; Jan Hoet, former curator of MaRTA; Martin Baumg¨artel, archivist at the RIAS archive; Eric Bolzan, coordinator, and Marie-Anne Dubois, director of Center d’Etude de l’Expression at Sainte-Anne Hospital; Sabine Mechler, archivist at the Prinzhorn Collection; Joanna Kleinberg, assistant curator and Jo˜ao Ribas, former curator of The Drawing Centre; Adam Boxer, owner of Ubu Gallery and Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain, psychoanalyst and former friend of Hans Bellmer and Unica Z¨urn; Annemarie Schnell Frank, daughter of Ursula and Robert F. Schnell, who were close friends of Z¨urn throughout the early 1950s to the end of the 1960s; and last but not least Peter Ziemke, Z¨urn’s son-in-law and successor to her oeuvre. Perhaps the most difficult stage of reading Z¨urn’s work has been the theoretical dimension. The richness of the material invites fascinating and insightful thoughts; however, the nature of the work itself, in its fragmentary, unfixed nature, made it hard to adopt any one coherent theoretical approach. It appeared to be most appropriate in this case to focus on theories that were historically relevant, such as Lacanian theory, which I have included only as it may have been encountered and related to Z¨urn contemporaneously. This historical approach has been followed in all possible references, except in certain subjects such as domination and subjectivity, where I resort to current scholars who have greatly contributed to the fields of feminism, psychoanalysis and subjectivity, such as Jessica Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze and F´elix Guattari. In such cases, these influences on my reading are evident in Chapter 3, where I revaluate selected accounts on the interpretation of Unica Litog´ee that raise issues of collaboration, partnership and subjectivity. The work of Mary Ann Caws, Ren´ee Riese Hubert, Susan Rubin Suleiman on women and Surrealism, Davis Lomas on Surrealism, psychoanalysis and automatism, Hal Foster, Georges Didi-Huberman on hysteria, Victoria Appelbe, Roger Cardinal, Ruth Henry and Jo˜ao

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Ribas on Z¨urn have been particularly influential and inspirational. Jessica Benjamin and Juliet Mitchell have been resourceful in my understanding of gender roles and power relations, and played crucial roles in my reading of Z¨urn’s work through feminism and psychoanalysis. German sources have not been central to my research for practical reasons. German scholarship emerged after Z¨urn’s publication of The Man of Jasmine in 1977, and a retrospective exhibition of Z¨urn’s visual work was held over 20 years later in 1999 in Berlin. These sources have not been translated into French or English and are outdated. Here, I focus on more recent scholarship taken up in France and North America, mainly in response to the largest retrospective exhibitions taking place in Paris and New York. In previous studies, there have been a variety of approaches that have taken up Z¨urn as a subject of interest; from discussions on literary models, autobiographic studies, psychoanalytic and psycho-biographic readings, to feminist reexaminations of women in Surrealism. However, writings on Z¨urn and her work are rarely comprehensive and inclusive of her œuvre, and are often short or superficial accounts that at times become redundant, with a particular format; presenting her work to be the product of a life destroyed by mental illness. Even in such a variety of disciplines, the focal topics of discussion around Z¨urn are mainly based on her status as ‘mentally ill woman’, more specifically as ‘schizophrenic’, and as the companion of Hans Bellmer. By highlighting Z¨urn’s individual role as artist and writer within a rich historical context, this monograph contributes a source for those who are interested in twentieth-century art, postwar Surrealism and women artists that encapsulates some of the most notable influential developments in (post-)structuralism, French thought, psychology and art in the twentieth century.

Structure of the Book The book consists of six thematic chapters, presenting primary materials gathered from international archives, accompanied by critical reevaluations of existing bilingual scholarship (mainly in English and French) across multidisciplinary fields such as Art History, Comparative Literature, Psychology and Gender Studies. Moving beyond the familiar model of the overlooked ‘significant other’, Z¨urn is re-introduced in Chapter 1, ‘Beginnings of Change’, as 8

INTRODUCTION

a young professional. The chapter touches on her personal experiences and early work experiences that later influenced her artistic career and persona. Starting with the year 1946, Z¨urn is introduced as a young mother, providing a glimpse into her childhood upbringing, and investigates the historical context of Z¨urn’s practice in light of the women’s movements as well as the rise of feminist theories in Europe. The late 1940s represents an overlooked segment of Z¨urn’s early life and career in Berlin, particularly her involvement with the Berlin Surrealist cabaret Die Badewanne in 1949. Moving towards the 1950s, the chapter offers an overview of Z¨urn’s short stories and radio tales which, though equally encapsulating, are often overshadowed by her later writings. Chapter 2, ‘Exhibitions and Exposure’, gives a detailed overview of group and solo exhibitions held during Z¨urn’s lifetime between the years 1956 and 1967. Discussing first-hand accounts and reflections on Z¨urn’s feelings on becoming a known artist, this chapter reveals significant aspects of ways in which to understand Z¨urn’s individual artistic production that form the grounds for a longer discussion on the multiplicity present in her work. A synopsis of posthumous exhibitions from 1970 to the present day focuses on the exposure and reception of available works during the 1980s and 1990s by evaluating contemporaneous reviews, academic interpretations and general impressions. This examination is taken further in Chapter 3, ‘“Femme de Bellmer”: Critical Reception from 1984 to 2014’, which focuses on Z¨urn’s reception over a 30-year period as a means of understanding and revising the current interpretation of her work, based on her semi-autobiographic narratives and her partnerships with Bellmer. Here, a particular branding of Z¨urn as ‘Bellmer’s woman’ is taken up and re-thought by means of a close inspection of the photographic series Unica Litog´ee. The photographs are discussed through the lens of contemporary commentators, which provides a basis for reconsidering her artistic subjectivity as a dispersal of the concept of a single, unified subject. I refer to the interpretations on these photographs offered by Alyce Mahon in ‘Twist the body red: the art and lifewriting of Unica Z¨urn’,8 and in ‘Hans Bellmer’s libidinal politics’,9 and Caroline Rupprecht in ‘The violence of merging: Unica Z¨urn’s writing (on) the body’,10 to draw from their analysis and move into a broader discussion on Z¨urn’s artistic practice. The chapter can be read as a literature review that pays particular attention to questions

9

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of collaboration and subjectivity together with the issue of mental illness. The discussion of the critical reception of Z¨urn is concluded by revisiting the writings of Luce Irigaray. Irigaray’s essay ‘A natal lacuna’11 is one of the first critical accounts on Z¨urn’s life and work to offer a hostile condemnation of her as a woman artist. A new perspective on Z¨urn’s work is offered as a way of rethinking Irigaray’s early text, posing some of Irigaray’s seminal concepts of multiplicity against her critical account. The next three chapters in the second part of the book consult specific works within a theoretical discussion on the techniques of constructing anagrammatic poems and producing what have previously been labelled as ‘automatic’ drawings. The techniques of anagrammatic composition and automatism form the pillars of Z¨urn’s creative output, which carry her artistic work into a wider theoretical frame, specifically in relation to psychoanalytic theory and (post-)structuralist thought. Chapter 4, ‘Anagrams’, gives an account of Z¨urn’s encounter and fascination with anagrams in light of her individual experiences with World War II, postwar Surrealism, and the implications of this constrained form of writing in psychoanalysis and linguistics. The discussion reveals the wider aspects of her practice in relation to known artists such as Hans Bellmer, Antonin Artuad and Henri Michaux, and well-known psychiatrists Gaston Ferdi`ere, Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain and Jacques Lacan. A closer look at the method of anagrammatic composition reveals a fascinating narrative on the history of psychiatry, its intersections with postmodern theory and the social implications of mental illness on the production and reception of visual art. Strong parallels are drawn between anagrammatic composition and the automatism, which is explored in Chapter 5, ‘Automatism after 1945’. Here, the reader will find a detailed reading of the graphic notebooks, suggesting a shift from the early definitions of automatism to a more deformative and complex use of the technique in drawing. Automatic drawing, as a specifically Surrealist tool of creativity, is diverse within itself, and Z¨urn’s appropriation encompasses many of the historical intricacies and contradictions of the technique. A close examination of Z¨urn’s notebooks and other works on paper allows us to reconsider the graphic image in a postwar context, its processes of production, structure of display, content, material and motive, along with highlighting recognisable qualities that are unique to Z¨urn such as repetition and multiplicity. Over the past decade, the wider dissemination of Z¨urn’s

INTRODUCTION

visual work has prompted various discussions that have questioned the automatic quality of her work, and this is taken up as an anchor for contemplation. The final chapter, Chapter 6, ‘Notes on Unica Z¨urn’s The Man of Jasmine and Other Narratives’, brings together the observations and impressions gathered throughout the book to build a notion of subjectivity that is dispersed within an anti-psychiatric and (post-)structuralist context. Introducing previously undiscussed texts such as MistAKE, the chapter offers new perspectives with which to read Z¨urn’s literary narratives. The Man of Jasmine, as Z¨urn’s seminal text, is presented with a background on how the book came into being, suggesting direct links to other short texts that all revolve around states of experiencing mental or physical illness. Z¨urn’s use of multiplication and fragmentation, as emphasised in her adoption of anagrammatic composition and automatism, is taken further into a reconsideration of the representation of the female body with the use of fragmentary tools in forming multiple ‘subjects’, a variety of ‘selves’ and subjectivity. The Man of Jasmine and other narratives such as Dark Spring have previously been regarded as an (in)direct autobiographical representation of Z¨urn. Examining the theoretical and philosophical implications of ‘madness’ in relation to literary writing methods, I propose reading Z¨urn’s narratives as critical re-appropriations of discourses on madness. Each chapter is signposted with specific subheadings, allowing the reader to locate particular subject matters or material of interest. Chapters are self-contained and can be read individually or the book can be read as a whole, reflecting on different themes and periods of Z¨urn’s career. Though each section can be read in any order, readers will find that there is a build up throughout the book that proposes a distinct presentation of Z¨urn. Chapter 3 in particular was written as a continuation of Chapter 2, and they can be identified as two parts of a whole. Overall, the book offers the most comprehensive account on Z¨urn’s work to the Anglophone reader, spanning the most significant decades of her artistic career from the later 1940s to the late 1960s. Anagrams and automatism are observed in Z¨urn’s practice as strategies in exploring new notions of the self. New interpretations of Z¨urn’s work are offered by introducing original material and proposing new approaches by means of recontextualising this material in different historical moments. Therefore, without claiming to offer a conclusive account, the book engages with the history of psychiatric

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treatment, women’s movements, Surrealism, the interchange of text and image, the dissolution of the single authorial-subject and notions of subjectivity. Observing the life and work of Unica Z¨urn over the span of 20 years, the book can be viewed as a useful sourcebook, gathering primary sources, anecdotes and first-hand observations, as a contribution to existing research as well as a springboard or catalyst for future interest.

1 Beginnings of Change ‘The Native Indian Mother’ Seated on the grass, clutching her folded legs with her hand, Unica Z¨urn gazes over her daughter Katrin, as the child is animated in their game of role-playing. Taken in the summer of 1946 by Erich Laupenm¨uhlen, this photograph (Fig. 1) is a postwar memorandum of the desire to return to a simpler time of innocence. In 1942, Z¨urn married Laupenm¨uhlen, who worked for the German optics company Leitz Cameras. The company, owned by Ernst Leitz, was the manufacturer of the Leica camera, known in the 1930s for its softfocus lens.1 Laupenm¨uhlen (b.1897), who enjoyed photographing his family and friends, was an older man around the same age as Z¨urn’s father Ralph. The couple met at a funeral in the late 1930s, possibly the cremation of Ralph Z¨urn, who died in 1939.2 They had two children during their short marriage, a girl in 1943 named Katrin and a boy in 1945 named Christian. The picture was previously reproduced in Gesamtausgabe, an eightvolume collection of Z¨urn’s oeuvre and personal documents published in its entirety by Brinkmann and Bose Publishing House (1988–2001). Recorded under the title ‘Indianermutter und Katrin’ [‘The Native Indian Mother and Katrin’], the photo presents Z¨urn as the Indian mother, and the child as herself, suggesting that the little girl is not the (only) one role-playing. Here, Z¨urn is wearing a white-feathered headdress with a beaded band, reflecting the whiteness of the tepee in the background. In the bottom left corner of the black and white photograph, we observe the drawings made on the surface of the 13

¨ UNICA ZURN Figure 1 Eric Laupenm¨uhlen, ‘Indianermutter und Katrin’ [‘The Native Indian Mother and Katrin’], 1946. Photograph, unknown dimensions. Private collection

tepee-canvas of a hunter with a spear in hand, chasing wild animals. Whilst the tent and costume indicate a playful setting, Z¨urn’s pensive gaze carries the weight of war-torn memories lurking in the shadows of the mind. As will be revealed in the following pages, the performative aspects of role-playing – of a particular role consciously as part of a game, or the act of pretending, unconsciously in accordance with the perceived expectations of a society – carry heavy connotations in Z¨urn’s life and work. While the title’s attribution is ambiguous, an additional subtitle reads: ‘When we were children, the garden appeared to us an extensive wilderness.’3 The title as well as the accompanying subtext suggest that Z¨urn is not merely looking after her child, but is participating in the game herself. Childhood and the endless possibilities of youth and imagination play a central role in Z¨urn’s early literary work. The image of the ‘Native Indian’ is a recurring image in Z¨urn’s later texts and images, indicating her constant return to the games of her childhood. In the return to childhood, the fear of ageing and losing touch with the creative imagination become recognisable concerns. The figure of 14

BEGINNINGS OF CHANGE Figure 2 Eric Laupenm¨uhlen, ‘Untitled’ [portrait of Z¨urn], c.1940. Photograph, unknown dimensions. Ruth Henry collection, Paris

the ‘Native Indian mother’ reappears in another photograph of Z¨urn taken by Laupenm¨uhlen, in around 1940 (Fig. 2); here, we see a threequarter profile of Z¨urn, gazing sternly ahead, with the white feathers of the same headdress extending out of the picture frame. Growing up in the suburb of Gr¨unewald, Z¨urn had a rich literary upbringing. Z¨urn’s father, Willkomm Ralph Paul Z¨urn (b. 1900), studied literature and became a journalist and writer. Travelling across the world, Ralph Z¨urn served as a lieutenant of cavalry in Namibia, where he met Felix von Luschan – an anthropologist and trafficker of body parts. He had limited talent and success as a writer; however, Lieutenant Z¨urn was renowned for the furniture and unique objects he brought back from his trips to Asia and Africa. In January 1904, he was accused of fomenting a revolt during the Herero uprising and consequently relieved of his command, returning to Berlin. Recorded in von Luschan’s journals, Lieutenant Z¨urn is said to have been a known grave-robber who ordered his men to exhume skulls from Herero graves at Okahandja, which may have been the cause of the early termination of his duties.4 Unaware of the dark associations, Unica Z¨urn often wrote about her childhood home as a haven for 15

¨ UNICA ZURN

mysterious objects from the Orient and beyond: ‘She runs her hand over the furniture her father brought back from his trips to Asia and the East; this furniture turned the house into a magic cavern where her imagination could run free.’5 Much to her dismay, in 1929 the belongings of Z¨urn’s childhood home were sold at auction, and her cherished memories were disparaged and dispersed. After his divorce from Dorrit Strohal in 1910, Ralph Z¨urn married Helene Pauline Heerdt (b.1892) in 1913. Ralph and Pauline had two children; Unica Z¨urn’s older brother Horst in 1914 and Unica in 1916. Ralph Z¨urn’s literary background and his earlier marriage to the writer Strohal (b.1882), who wrote under the pseudonym Orla Holm, greatly influenced Z¨urn’s interest in literature. Z¨urn admired her father and his interests from an early age, often writing that he was the first man she ever loved and owing much of her imagination and her creative skills as a writer to her childhood home and the memories of her father: ‘Her father is the first man she comes to know . . . she loves him from the very first day.’6 Though Ralph was mostly absent on trips abroad, tales of travel and adventure such as Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870) by Jules Verne and Moby Dick (1851) by Hermann Melville, as well as stories from the Orient, particularly One Thousand and One Nights (1704), remained some of Z¨urn’s favourite books.

The Working Girl: 1933–42 at the UFA In 1933 Z¨urn began working at the German film agency UniversumFilm-AG (UFA), first as a steno-typist, and was later recruited to write screenplays for publicity films as dramaturge from 1936 onwards. Universal Film Agency (UFA) initially began during World War I as part of the German High Command and the Deutsche Bank in 1917, and continued to function for 28 years until the end of World War II. The Deutsche Bank, which held the majority stock, had to sell to right-wing media giant Alfred Hugenberg, who was to become the key ally of Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s. During the Third Reich, UFA became a Nazi propaganda instrument and by 1937 it was formally bought by the Nazi regime.7 Z¨urn’s father Ralph joined the National Socialist German Workers Party as early as 1 November 1932. Shortly after, Z¨urn began working at the Universum Film Agency Studios, which was taken under the control of the Party. Subsequently, Z¨urn became a member of the 16

BEGINNINGS OF CHANGE

Deutscher Frauenarbeitsdienst [German Women’s Labour Service] in 1935, the women worker’s sections of the Nazi Party, and spent six months in Gr¨unzig working as a volunteer. She was closely associated with people from the inner social circles of the Nazi party; Helene Pauline Heerdt, Z¨urn’s biological mother married Heinrich Doehle in 1931, who was the under-secretary to Paul von Hindenburg, the president of the Reich. It is hard to know Z¨urn’s precise attitude towards the Nazi women’s organisations at that time. It has been noted that during her years at UFA, although Z¨urn and her close relatives held the party line, she was ‘unaware of the true nature of the Nazi ideology’.8 After the war ended in 1945, the atrocities of the concentration camps were revealed to Z¨urn while listening to a pirate radio station in Berlin.9 It is in this year that Z¨urn is said to have slumped into mental disarray, caused by shock and guilt regarding her blind involvement with UFA and the German Women’s Labour Service. Z¨urn expressed great remorse in her later writings, often reproducing violent and horrific images of victims from the concentration camps. Her husband would later use her first breakdown as leverage to claim custody over their two children. She was made to take a Wartegg Zeichen test in 1951, a projective drawing test developed in the 1920s by psychologist Ehrig Wartegg, based on the assumption that the content and the qualitative aspects of the drawing can reflect the personality of the person drawing.10 It has been claimed that Z¨urn’s defeat in her battle for custody was a consequence of the drawing test, which was used for both personnel selection in recruitment and in clinical psychology personality evaluations: These drawings, produced almost a decade before her supposed initial psychotic episode, very well may have been used as part of an evaluation to determine her suitability as a mother . . . Z¨urn is supposed to have had an emotional collapse on hearing about the Nazi concentration camps . . . she claimed to have no knowledge of the atrocities while working for the German film company Ufa, or as a member of German Women’s Labour Service. This trauma, she claimed . . . was later responsible for her fits of madness.11

Jo˜ao Ribas cites an anecdote written in her diary notebook ‘Cr´ecy’ (1970) noting the source as ‘apocryphal’ due to Z¨urn’s disintegrating ability to tell the difference between reality and fantasy.12 In the 1940s, 17

¨ UNICA ZURN

social policies in Germany were likely to favour granting custody to men, due to their greater financial stability and ability to provide for childcare. Z¨urn filed for divorce on grounds of suspected adultery; however, at the time she did not have a job or any means for income. Though the reason for and outcome of the Wartegg Zeichen test remains conjectural, Z¨urn’s experience or an accusation of mental illness prior to her first psychiatric internment in 1961 invites a revision of the biographical facts that feed into her critical reception.13

Social Change: Women’s Liberation in Germany In the immediate postwar period in Germany relationships within the family were under stress and gender relations were in disarray. Z¨urn can be seen as a radical figure at this time – divorced in 1949, when it was very unusual, and working as a single woman in Germany, demonstrating a strong resistance towards the traditional ideals that governed the majority of German women. This historical background invites us to reconsider the association of passivity and submission with women, and to rethink previous claims about Z¨urn as a submissive character. Z¨urn subverted the traditional submission of the woman as mother and housewife by escaping family life and taking on new positions in favour of building an artistic career. During the 1950s, the concept of the Fluchtburg Familie [Nazi Family Policy] portrayed the family as a castle, a place of refuge from the outside world – a retreat into the smallest social circle spread.14 A sociologist of the time, Helmut Schelsky, studied the effect of the war on the family in 1955 and claimed that marriage was viewed as an equal partnership/comradeship. However, in reality, single, widowed and divorced women were seen as surplus and ‘marginal’. The marital status of a woman had a direct relationship to her occupational status; with rising unemployment levels (1.5 million annual average), married women were denied the opportunities of most jobs while single women were removed from their paid position on the day they married.15 Z¨urn’s domestic and professional life follows the historical statistics as outlined above; she worked from 1933 up until 1942, the year she was married. Along with many other women, Z¨urn left work and became a housewife and mother. A few years later, in 1949, she divorced and began working again as a writer. In the following decades, the increase in manufacturing injected by American 18

BEGINNINGS OF CHANGE

companies also increased levels of consumerism in the German home. Whilst by the 1980s 87 per cent of all working age women were either studying or employed, it was not until the late 1960s and through the 1970s that work placements were made available for married women. These working women were encouraged to contribute financially to ‘building the family home’.16 The split between domestic and public occupational roles of women carries significance in what would later be termed the ‘schizophrenic’ characterisation of women as a direct result.17 During Hitler’s supremacy, women’s place was carefully circumscribed. In The Nazi Organization of Women, Jill Stephenson states that in 1933 Nazi policy towards women showed anxiety about the need to make women more politically aware because women were apparently resistant to National Socialism. Organisations such as the women worker’s sections of the Nazi Party, as well as propaganda posters and advertising, sought to bring women together to support the circumscribed ideologies of the party for women.18 Stephenson writes: It was partly Hitler’s personal attachment to the image of women as “mothers of the nation” which delayed and then vitiated the introduction of labour conscription for women during the Second World War, although in his G¨otterd¨ammerung [the downfall or collapse of a society or regime] mentality early in 1945 he was prepared to see women enlisted as soldiers and sent to the front.19

A discriminatory ideology directed policy making and the social makeup of Germany, where women were confined to the role of caretaker and home educator, excluded from roles assigned to men such as politics and academia. The ‘woman question’ in the Third Reich as a problem of family and population politics continued up to the 1970s, resulting in the endorsement of laws and support for the protection of women as mothers.20 In 1946, East Germany had an under-population problem and mounted campaigns to encourage women to produce more children while at the same time encouraging them to continue working outside the home. A year later, in 1947, the Demokratischer Frauenbund Deutschlands (DFD) [Democratic Women’s Federation of Germany], a group of anti-fascist women’s committees and workers (65 per cent under the 19

¨ UNICA ZURN

age of 35) was formed. In her discussion on the experiences of women in East Germany, Susan Bassnett writes: What seems to have happened is that an older generation of women has not made the adjustment to a sense of socialist sisterhood, thus the tradition with regard to the role a women is expected to play both inside and outside the home that divides GDR society in a very striking way has been maintained.21

Meanwhile, in West Berlin the Federal Republic of Germany was greatly influenced by the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, adopted by organisations such as the Socialist German Students League. These groups were also impregnated by ‘New Feminism’, and rejected earlier associations of discrimination with class struggle, instead opting to link socialist analyses of capitalism with an extensive criticism of patriarchy.22 Z¨urn grew up in a suburb southwest of Berlin and later, as an adult, moved to Charlettonberg, West Berlin. She was part of a generation of women in Germany who were split between an older group that supported the conventional role of women as mothers, and a younger anti-fascist group that rebelled against these traditional notions. Within this historical context, there have been two opposing sides to feminism in Germany, one being what Bassnett calls a ‘bourgeois feminism’, which began to concentrate on the ‘moral role’ of women, in line with Hitler’s brand of ‘anti-feminism’ that had women followers even before 1933.23 The other offered a more radical opposition that followed in the tradition of American and French influences and the New Left. The term ‘feminist movement’ was commonly used in English- and Frenchspeaking areas, whereas the adjective ‘feminist’ in German implied a connotation of radicalism generally only attributed to the new feminist movement.24 This ‘new feminist movement’ consisted of a fragmented series of organisations. There were no women’s movements in either East or West Berlin; instead there were a number of women’s organisations such as Aktion 218 that gathered and expressed the voice of German women. In West Germany, anti-authoritarian thinking was particularly important for the New Left, where . . . women’s resistance in the nineteenth century in the social environment of the middle class shifted from the collective protest in public (hunger

20

homoerotic friendships, and religiosity.25

Thus, the key activities of such groups were to endorse mental change, campaign against sexual violence, struggle for abortion and seek to claim a symbolic feminism that supported an individual and collective liberation such as a specific feminine use of language.26 Divisions in social life and domestic expectations led to a generation of women writers who dealt prominently with the side effects of social issues, such as the identification of women with schizophrenia and an alleged epidemic of identity crises. Prevailing problems in women’s changing attitudes were mainly towards the abortion law, trying to escape the image of woman as mother and trying to regain control over their bodies and voices whilst questioning notions of equality and sameness. In the late 1960s, a series of women writers published books on the social condition of women in the GDR, including the moralistic novels of Anna Seghers and Christa Wolf, focusing on interviewing women and making women’s voices heard without any authorial intervention.27 In her article on the representation of women in the German novel, Patricia Herminghouse identifies three phases in women’s prose style. The first is the Aufbauroman [the building novel] of 1950s, with writers like Christa Wolf who take up issues of the period when the socialist state was being forged, where the prose narrative tends to focus on positive heroines who serve as role models for the newly emerging society. The second is the Aukunftroman [the arrival novel] of the 1960s that focuses on campaigns for improvement in women’s education, showing how heroines tend to be professional women, and emphasising the problems working women have in adapting to their new roles and balancing the needs of society with their own personal ones. And lastly, the Verandertesbewussteseinsroman [the changing-consciousness novel] of the late 1960s, when women’s movements began to emerge in the West and consequently the emphasis shifts to writing about personal conflict and the crisis of identity.28 What Herminghouse terms the ‘changing-consciousness novel’29 reflects the tendencies of the new feminist movement who, in decentred, fragmented groups, sought to endorse mental change, raise awareness about sexual violence, abortion and support individual and collective liberation by means of a specific feminine use of language.

BEGINNINGS OF CHANGE

strikes, carnival-like rituals, and public mockery), to private forms of protest such as individual denying of norms, excessive reading, illness, sexual refusal,

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Along with the multiplicity of organisations, ‘the idea of duality, of division of the whole into two parts, recurs again and again in German women’s writing’.30 Division and fragmentation as well as multiplicity therefore came to emphasise the separateness of women’s experience from that of men in literature. Bassnett notes that: ‘German women writers are producing a literature that appear to exemplify the kind of writing demanded by feminist theoreticians such as H´el`ene Cixous, who proclaimed “women must write herself: must write about women and bring women to writing”.’31 Xavier Gauthier saw it as an imperative tool for women to gain autonomy and recognition: ‘As long as women remain silent they will be outside the historical process. But if they begin to speak and write as men do, they will enter history subdued and alienated.’32 For Bassnett, women’s writing, which emphasises the importance of the fragmented form, is a mirror of the more fragmented life experience of women, divided as they are between a variety of roles.33 The search for identity and the division between roles was a recurring theme in much of the literature. ‘Identity crisis’ was regarded as a result of the sudden expectation placed on women to ‘leap out of their homes into the public arena’ after years of living with second-class status. Work for women during this period was not solely a means of earning money, but was a valued social interaction which brought personal recognition: ‘These women did not want to give up working, because “just having one life with the family isn’t enough”.’34 For German women, the figure of the housewife and mother who submitted and subsumed her own individuality in the service of others was being left behind as part of the traditional role of exclusive domesticity. This historical multiplicity in women’s roles can also be seen as an active choice, an aspiration towards growth outside their domestic lives. Proactive choice was not a right these women had at the time; the right to abortion was not sanctioned until 1972 in East Germany and 1974 in West Germany.35 The women’s liberation movement of the 1960s redirected women’s voices towards the dictates of womanhood. The catalyst was the anti-abortion law Article 218 of 1871.36 The infamy of the law grew increasingly apparent, together with what was referred to as the ‘schizophrenia’ of women’s new role.37 The new ‘schizophrenic’ role characterised the expectations of society for women to be workers, perfect housewives, good mothers and also sexually active to satisfy their husbands. In narratives such as Dark Spring

BEGINNINGS OF CHANGE

and The Man of Jasmine, Z¨urn contemplates the division of women into these expected characteristics and introduces subject matter such as rape and domestic violence. It was not until 1971, the same year The Man of Jasmine was published in France, when French women openly declared their experiences of abortion and demanded their right to free medical care. Though women’s groups in France were publishing articles and actively speaking about the subject within a feminist context, women in Germany were initially hesitant to voice such concerns. The rejection of Z¨urn’s novel for publication in Germany is an example of this. Z¨urn’s geographical relocation from Germany to France broke her silence, and she wrote openly about issues such as abortion and sexual abuse in her later diary, published as ‘Cr´ecy’: For a long time she had been suffering from two complexes that crystallise her hallucinations into fits of madness: the criminal Nazi period, together with the fact of belonging to that people; and the three abortions she had because of her poverty and her lack of confidence in the father of the embryos, her unbroken silence regarding them, and the problems resulting from breaking this unjust law.38

Following the participation of three out of four women’s groups in Germany with slogans like ‘My belly belongs to me’, a large population of women gathered to fight for their rights over their bodies.39 Project 218 was a historical campaign that marks the first steps of German women’s involvement in what would become a fight across all Western countries for women’s right to abortion. Z¨urn’s move to Paris allowed her to write freely and reflect upon about her experiences in Germany. Geographic fragmentation of subjective experience becomes an integral part of Z¨urn’s artistic strategy, where travelling between cities, and writing between languages, form the basis of both her written and graphic works.

‘Notes of an anaemic’ Postwar Berlin resembled a wasteland, where fragments of ruined buildings and lives covered the city like a heavy blanket. The concepts of tragedy and imperfection resonate in Z¨urn’s expression in a tangled web of marvel and self-disdain, and would continue as prominent issues throughout her work. In the postwar period, the number of suicides 23

¨ UNICA ZURN 24

was rising and the existentialist attitude was vigorously adopted in Europe; the writings of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus were widely disseminated, reflecting the sense of disorientation and confusion which became an influencial philosophical state of being. In Berlin, the Die Badenwanne collective (discussed later in the chapter) expressed their interpretation of this growing epidemic by performing theatrical ‘suicide numbers’, where artists like Wolfgang Frankenstein would enact different ways of committing suicide. These young artists in no way took the matter lightly; however, the presence of black humour in, for example, Paul Rosie’s drawing ‘Der brauchbare Fund’ [‘A Useful Tool’] (1948), of a man tying a noose of rope around his neck reflects an apathy towards life. In their exchange of letters, Ruth Henry notes that Z¨urn often expressed her fear and contempt for old age: ‘she had made it perfectly clear in the course of several conversations that she lacked both the strength and the will to face old age’. During their friendship between 1965 and 1970, Henry noticed that ‘the child must survive within [Z¨urn] all the more so because she feels the frightening impact of the ageing process and the lack of an unsheltered adulthood’.40 The significance of childhood increased all the more when dealing with physical and mental illness, which become reoccurring issues that mediate an attempt to disrupt the expectations of social conformity in adulthood and psychiatric treatment. In a short journal entry, Z¨urn writes: ‘Old age and childhood are beginning to resemble one another. I was never young. I am an aging infant.’41 Blurring the boundaries between old age and youthfulness, the image of the eternal child emerges. The Romantic notion of ageing as a process of decline and disintegration captures the attitude of writers such as Goethe and Nietzsche, who embraced tragedy, imperfection and decline in their subject matter.42 In ‘Notes of an anaemic’, Z¨urn describes the year 1949 as the beginning of her dreams full of horror and catastrophic visions. She describes ‘wishes, hopes for solidarity, Utopian community, a new order of things, purification and reconciliation’43 as treasures that bring as much torment as serenity. These ideas can be recognised in the themes of her stories for children. In fairy tales, we find an element of ‘willingly becoming children’, as described by Marina Warner – a return to the pleasures of youth through tales of magic and enchantment.44 In Z¨urn’s stories, magic is the transformation of daily life into ‘miracles’ where extraordinary events are at times ordinary

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and likewise waiting for enchantment can be equally ‘disenchanting’ and dull. ‘Notes of an anaemic’ is dedicated to the ‘miracle’.45 Here, Z¨urn discusses her constant expectation of encountering ‘the miracle’, which is directly related to a state of childhood. In the first paragraph of the text, Z¨urn divides her life into two, the first portion of which she spends sleeping and the next ‘waiting for a miracle’. From the 1950s onwards, Z¨urn was prescribed medication which she used on and off for several years. She often wrote about the side effects of such heavy medication, which she claimed to have prevented her from having or remembering dreams. Because of the removal of the element of dream from sleep, she carried the encounter with miracles into everyday activities. The crossing of boundaries is taken further by separating the outer body from inner mental experiences; even though the exterior body can lose its ‘childhood’ rapidly, the interior mind never loses these childhood influences. She writes of reading Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales over and over again, and refers to the sorrow of Henri Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes [The Magnificent Meaulnes] (1913), the classic French narrative that encompasses the mysterious world between childhood and adulthood. Suspended between the physical consequences of old age and the melancholic hopes of an eternal child, Z¨urn’s metanarrative defines her understanding of the ‘miracle’ and the ‘marvellous’. The ‘miracle’ in Z¨urn’s definition takes on a subversive characteristic that encompasses images and phenomena that are not necessarily pleasing or extraordinary. ‘Miracles’ are the regeneration of images, places and even illness, where fixed characteristics such as identity, maps and symptoms are modified and manipulated. This amorphous term, which does not offer a single definition, is used by Z¨urn to describe various instances and events such as the characteristics of an ever-changing face, the dream-image of a terrifying yet marvellous half-woman-half-snake creature, winter melancholy, death instinct and fantasy, all of which are transformed, like the enchantment of a fairy tale, to ‘make an elephant out of a fly, five hens out of a feather’ and, in Z¨urn’s case, ‘a miracle out of anaemia’.46 The expectation of and encounter with a ‘miracle’ arrives by means of an estrangement from her surroundings and her ‘self ’. The early children’s tales, which mark the beginning of Z¨urn’s creative practice and a general tendency towards Surrealist ideas, can be read in relation to postwar Surrealism in Berlin.

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The Berlin Art Scene after 1945: Die Badewanne Previous studies on Z¨urn have marked 1953, the year she met German artist Hans Bellmer, as the starting point of her artistic career. However, the foundations of Z¨urn’s artistic achievements remain overlooked and unexamined. A closer look at her early career reveals a series of short stories and children’s tales written for newspapers and national broadcasting that convey an interest in Surrealist ideas, which prefigures her actual encounter with members of the Parisian Surrealist group. This can be traced back to her involvement with the collective Die Badewanne [the Bath Tub], a Berlin-based cabaret who considered themselves a new wave of German Surrealists. By reconsidering the year 1953 as merely a milestone in her artistic development, the year 1949, when she joined Die Badewanne, marks the beginning of Z¨urn’s artistic practice, revising the chronology that links Z¨urn’s birth as an artist to her meeting with Hans Bellmer and the Surrealist circle in Paris.47 After the war, Surrealism was considered to be over, as many of its adherents were in exile and others were disillusioned. However German artists, many of whom were young and newly out of school, were full of life and wanted to revive the Surrealist spirit. Similar to the motivation behind the Dada art movement after World War I – and following in the tradition of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, which had played a central role in its formation – a group of German artists found each other in Berlin. The Berlin bohemian set usually gathered in the homes of artists and writers. The homes of Robert Wolfgang Schnell, writer and painter (b.1916), and Johannes H¨ubner (b.1921), writer and translator of Surrealist texts, in Charlottenburg, Westend, became the main locales frequented by many famous personalities. Annemarie Schnell (Frank), daughter of Robert W. Schnell, talked about her childhood home being a hub for the bohemian set in Berlin: ‘Our house was always crowded with famous artists and writers, to the degree that I could not bring my friends over from school because there was no room in the house!’48 Their 60 m2 home became a shelter for many artists, including Z¨urn, who stayed there on her extended trips to Berlin in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Before moving to Paris, Z¨urn became good friends with Ursula (also known as Ulla) Schnell and R.W. Schnell, attending book readings and jazz nights with them in

BEGINNINGS OF CHANGE Figure 3 Christa Tiede, Ursula and Annemarie Schnell at the Berlin Zoo, 1956. Photograph, 10.2 × 15.2 cm. Annemarie Schnell Frank Collection, Berlin

the early 1950s. Ursula and Robert met at Johannes H¨ubner’s house in 1952 at a book reading and married in 1954, six weeks before the birth of Annemarie (Fig. 3). Ursula and Unica would later become very close friends, spending time talking about books and life in general while Robert and Hans Bellmer would be out drinking. Ursula Irmgaro Emma Reiche (b. 1911) was born to a wealthy family in Dresden, owner of the famous Aktie ‘Blechdose’ manufacturing factory. The factory provided moulds and hand-painted boxes for the chocolate makers to the whole of Germany, the Sarotti company, and had over 1,000 designs for different moulds. Ursula was educated in private schools in Germany, spending a year in Plymouth learning English and another year in Switzerland learning French. She later earned a professional certificate in librarianship and worked at a bookshop in Berlin. Annemarie recalls Lothar Kl¨unner, his younger brother Joachim Kl¨unner and Hans Laabs as some of the figures who were close friends with her parents and who would later become the members of the collective Die Badewanne. On the last day of 1948, Johannes H¨ubner hosted a New Year’s Eve party at his house for his friends, including Katja Meirowsky and Alexander Camaro. Whilst talking about the need for an art 27

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collective in Berlin, the three decided to form a cabaret where artists could meet, collaborate and exchange ideas. Soon after, Meirowsky began searching for a venue and rented a small space called Femina. The cabaret held a number of events, from theatrical performances to literature nights. Kafka evenings were often held on Thursdays, where members would read chosen stories and illustrate parts of the text. Musical performances and jazz nights were held on Saturdays. Theo Goldberg was known for his musical performances on these nights, where long classical operas were converted into short sevenminute recitals. Following the atrocities of World War I, artists sought to overcome the consequences of rationalism and logic; Surrealists announced ‘pure psychic automatism’, free association, dreams and the play of thought as solutions to what they believed were the fundamental problems of social and individual life. After World War II, Berlin Surrealists wanted to revive the idealism of the early Surrealist group, who were thought to be tired veterans. Johannes H¨ubner’s ‘Automatic Text’, written in 1949, became a manifesto for the cabaret that celebrated and commemorated French Surrealism: ‘The bathtub is the memory of a rainy night in Paris at the dirty underwear of a hamburger port premises where the flowers of evil put in all button punches.’49 Key Surrealist texts such as the First Manifesto (1924) and The Magnetic Fields (1919) were translated into German. Andr´e Breton ´ and Paul Eluard’s The Immaculate Conconception (1930), translated by Joannes H¨ubner, was favourited Die Badewanne members for its series of ‘simulations’ of various types of mental instability. These translations were disseminated to members, often forming the premise for their own artistic works and performances. Galerie Gerd Rosen played a central role in the formation of the cabaret, supplying a gateway to sources of and information on French Surrealism that influenced the group. Die Badewanne’s activities centred on reading and reviving visual predecessors and the literary charms of what they considered to be the ‘Golden Age’ of creative production. For them, Surrealism represented the forward-thinking and liberal state of being and becoming that they sought to emulate. However, the activities of the group were not purely based on praise and imitation. Their works can be seen as a critical re-appropriation that injects a darker sense of tragicomedy, the carnivalesque bordering on parody.50 Performances, referred to as

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Po`eme-illustr´e, used reproductions of earlier paintings by masters like Chirico or Joan Mir´o as stage props, where theatrical performances would simulate the paintings, literally bringing them to life. The objective of the group was to bring a dynamic energy into art in order to resuscitate the public by injecting life into art. There were older members of the cabaret who were experienced artists previously known as Expressionists; Jeanne Mammen (b. 1890), Alexander Camaro (b. 1901), Werner Heldt (b. 1904), Liselore Bergmann (b. 1905), Mac Zimmerman (b. 1912), Hans Thiemann (b. 1913) and Heins Tr¨okes (b. 1913). Camaro, as one of the foundling members of the cabaret, took a leading role in many of its activities. Z¨urn met Camaro in 1949 and the two became infatuated with one another. Camaro encouraged Z¨urn to paint, supplying her with materials: Her painter friend Alexander Camaro, whom Werner Heldt called ‘the adorable bohemian’, gave her a box of paints and big white sheets of drawing paper as a present . . . She painted passionately all night and for weeks on end and could no longer live without this pleasure that cost her nothing.51

At a time of poverty, painting was a cheap and enjoyable pastime for Z¨urn who often painted with friends and their children. In my conversation with Annemarie Schnell Frank, daughter of Ursula and Robert Schnell, she recalled painting together with Z¨urn on their kitchen table.52 Using found materials such as cardboard from boxes and wrapping paper from condiments, the bottom of a cardboard box with a large heart painted in pink was drawn on one of these occasions and subsequently hung on the wall with a thumbtack for several months.53 Although there are only a few known paintings and drawings by Z¨urn that date back as early as 1950, these have often been overlooked and overshadowed by discussions on her experimentation with automatism solely as subsequent to her introduction into French Surrealism. By extending previously assigned parameters and introducing a new set of associations, namely Z¨urn’s inclusion in Die Badewanne, grounds for new discussions can be discovered. After the Wall was erected in 1961, Z¨urn was unable to return to Berlin due to ill health. Nonetheless, she remained in close correspondence with writers, actors and publishers from both West Berlin and the Eastern Bloc.54 29

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Short Stories and Radio Tales Following her divorce in 1949, Z¨urn earned her living as a freelance writer, completing 132 stories for newspapers and eight tales for the radio. Z¨urn’s early work from the late 1940s, is composed of short stories published in newspapers and stories that were read on the radio.55 These tales, addressed particularly to children, also capture adult anxieties and social issues reminiscent of the tales and songs of the founding Surrealist member Robert Desnos.56 The newspapers she worked for such as Der Sozialdemokrat and Berliner Stadtblatt were based in West Berlin. During her years as a story writer, Z¨urn remained an active member of Die Badenwanne, contributing short stories to performances and publications. Many of her published stories were saved as newspaper clippings by her friends, including Camaro, to whom she occasionally posted letters and drafts of manuscripts, some of which were written under her pseudonym ‘Angela Mortens’. These letters indicate a creative exchange between Z¨urn and Camaro and echo their intimate relationship; in a letter dated April, 1951, she attaches flowers and a lock of her hair with the inscription: ‘Das sind die Locken eines Dichterhauptes’ [‘These are the locks from a poet’s head’]. Unica Z¨urn’s first published story was dated 11 October 1949 and published in the Social Democrat newspaper. The title of this tale was Die Braut [‘It is brewing’]. These short stories were not all fictional but could be subtle records of acts, performances and events surrounding her. The story ‘Das Clown’ [‘The clown’] is partly based on and gives an interpretation of Alexander Camaro’s one man tragicomedic performance Der Kleine Clown [The Little Clown], where he played a sad circus clown. Z¨urn’s account of one of Camaro’s most well-known numbers is an example of the artistic exchange in the cabaret; ‘She provided suggestions and interpreted performances in her short stories. Camaro in turn returned the favour by painting a portrait of the artist in 1950’57 (Fig. 4). Unica Z¨urn’s radio tales were broadcast from 1950 to 1954 by RIAS, the radio station of the American sector in Berlin, as part of the re-education programme. Only four of the eight original scripts remain in the RIAS (now known as Radio-Berlin) archive. According to Martin Baumg¨artel, the director of the archive, due to the limited amount of materials of the time period almost all tapes were reused, and

BEGINNINGS OF CHANGE Figure 4 Alexander Camaro, ‘Unica Z. I’, 1950. Ink on paper, 86.4 × 61.2 cm. Alexander and Renata Camaro Foundation, Berlin

therefore none of Z¨urn’s recordings remain.58 Most of her published newspaper stories and her radio tales have been reprinted in an eightvolume collection of works edited by Erich Brinkmann in 2001.59 In his introduction to the radio tales, Brinkmann notes that Z¨urn’s work for the radio and her published stories act as a metaphor for her feelings about life. These radio tales, regarded as ‘light fiction, filled with a longing for encounters with the strange and marvellous’,60 invite us to reconsider Z¨urn’s artistic career and experimentation with automatism, to invert the assumption that her practice began inside the Surrealist circle, looking out and to first present Z¨urn as on the outside looking in. The first radio tale by Z¨urn was broadcast on 3 April in 1950. ‘“Jochen”: a story for our days’ is a 30 minute story that follows the dream adventures of a young boy, Jochen, who uses his imagination to escape the chores of his daily life and fulfil his desires. The games of children and the tales told to them, such as Little Red Riding Hood, reveal Z¨urn’s interest in the process of sleep and dream-states, where the imagination is revealed. Some of Z¨urn’s radio tales were previously 31

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published as short stories in the newspaper, which were then adapted for broadcasting. ‘The Stallion Florent: as well as other stories of animals and people’ (‘Der Hengst Florent’) aired on a Thursday evening at 21:00, on 22 June 1950. The story had previously been published in 1949 and is noted on the radio script to be identical to the previously published three stories ‘Der Hengst Florent’ [‘The Stallion Florent’], ‘Die Fraulein Panunzi kommen vom Berge’ [‘Miss Panunzi came from the mountains’] and ‘Kater will sterben’ [‘Kat will die’]. In this tale Z¨urn gives an apartment a radiophonic voice. The houses on MaxmillianStrasse have had enough of their tenants. These anthropomorphic houses decide to escape from the burden of human dispute. The houses escape to the forest, and encounter various animals, which become their new inhabitants. The tranquillity of the forest is seen as paradise and slowly, after the animals begin to inhabit the houses, artists, composers and poets join them, transforming the buildings into a studio and exhibition space inspired by nature. Z¨urn’s early interest in the play of language can also be read in the characters of the radio tales. In ‘The Flight of the Houses’, ‘Professor fine-ear’ is a researcher of strange and tricky word associations. As will be discussed in Chapter 3, her early literary tales and more so her anagrammatic poetry can be seen as predecessors to the activities of the literary collective Oulipo, and more specifically to Georges Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual (1978), which examined individual yet interrelated conditions of human life inhabiting a collective yet fragmented space.61 A similar ‘escape tale’ is told from the perspective of an adult in ‘Die Swindelmark’. This radio tale, which aired in 1954, addresses a more serious issue albeit, with a playful tone thanks to a play on words in the title. The title manipulates the word ‘Deutschmark’, which was the official currency of West Germany. The Deutschmark was issued in 1948 by the Federal Republic of Germany after the unification of the sectors controlled by France, United Kingdom and the United States of America. The East German Mark (known as the Mark der DDR or also referred to as the Ostmark) was the currency of the German Democratic Republic. In a critical tone, Z¨urn is making a political comment on the Federal Republic of Germany by exchanging the word ‘Deutsch’ with ‘Swindel’, which means liar or trickster. The tale is likely to be a response to the poverty caused by the Berlin Blockade between the years 1948 to 1949, which was the first major

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international crisis of the Cold War. Other members of Die Badewanne used art as a means of expressing a playful yet strong critique of Germany, namely Wolfgang Frankenstein, who had lost his family in concentration camps, and the caricatures of Paul Rosi´e, such as Entlassung aus amerikanischer Kriegsgefangenschaft [Released from American Captivity] (1946), which depict the division between people in society. It was a difficult time for Z¨urn, as for the populace of Europe, suffering poverty and the after-effects of the war. As a writer, Z¨urn told stories at a time when stories seemed to be the only escape. In a collection of her autobiographical journal entries, Vacances a` Maison Blanche [Holidays at the White House], Z¨urn writes of her struggles in the third person: ‘It was in Berlin at the time she was dying of hunger, she began painting for the first time, while working frantically on her stories that the newspapers bought for almost nothing.’62 Living in extreme poverty and working for very little money, living conditions in Germany were becoming hard for Z¨urn: ‘What was left except writing – badly paid work – here in Germany? “Handful of rice” – that is her daily fare in Berlin.’63 Her stories often told tales of dreamadventures and miraculous transformations, of enchanted princesses and princes. Though all her stories reveal the ‘marvellous’, they reflect the problems of everyday life – poverty and class division – with a utopian approach to unification and equality by means of the imagination, word-play, fairy tales and the significance of childhood in general. Role-playing, costume, the forest and transformation are some of the prominent and recurring themes of the tales, coming up in almost every story. Each typescript includes a specific set of instructions, where the age and tonal requirements of speakers as well as musical instruments and sounds are specifically chosen and directed to the story line.64 The anthropomorphic voices of the houses and their act of flight are regarded as ordinary by the tenants, while the creative activities that occur in the forest are described as magical. The forest as a place of encountering the marvellous is a continuous theme in Z¨urn’s tales, from Johen’s games with Michel to the houses of Maxmillian-Strasse. The forest again plays a prominent role in 1953, in ‘Das Wundertier’ [‘The wondrous animal’]. ‘The wondrous animal’ aired on a Saturday afternoon, 23 May 1953. This light-hearted tale, which follows a similar plot to that of Robert Desnos’ Blondine dans la Forˆet Enchant´ee [Blondine in the

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Enchanted Forest], is also in the form of a dialogue between characters accompanied by song verses and evocative background music. The tale begins with a princess walking through a park wishing for something miraculous and wonderful to happen. Upon her wish, she suddenly turns into a small horse with pointed ears that resembles a donkey. The princess expresses great joy when realising her transformation and describes herself as a ‘beautiful animal’. This transformation is described as a joyous event, replacing the traditional image of bestiality as punishment.65 The park, like the garden of The Indian Mother and Katrin of 1946, becomes the place of an ‘extensive wilderness’ where the marvellous is encountered. Z¨urn’s tale fully encompasses the reversal of fear and assurance. One of Z¨urn’s earliest paintings, which dates back to 1950, titled ‘Die verzauberte Prinzessin’ [‘The Enchanted Princess’], is a direct illustration of this particular tale (Fig. 5).66 In Barbara Safarova’s short entry on The Enchanted Princess, she quotes Z¨urn’s comments on this watercolour, discussing it as ‘a selfportrait: a graceful animal with long hair, long ears and a long neck’. Though Safarova does not refer to Z¨urn’s metamorphosing subject in her radio tale ‘The wondrous animal’, she makes a brief reference to Charles Perrault’s tale Donkey-Skin, relating this painting to her later work, stating: ‘The monster that she presents to us here is more of an outer covering, a monstrous vision, whereas she would later attempt to represent herself and others in a more interiorized and introspective manner.’67 The representation of the self as animal could be regarded, as Safarova suggests, as an outer covering, a kind of disguise produced by a vision similar to the ‘monstrous vision’ of Perrault’s Donkey-Skin, as a protective shield. The enchanted princess, now an animal, can only sing the truth – and can no longer speak; thus language is used as an indication of her transformation. Losing all sense of reality, the princess enters into an enchanted place where she meets a clown who brings her to a circus full of other curious animals.68 The story is summarised as a possible mistake of a wizard who may have turned the princess into a donkey inadvertently, by chance. The emphasis on ‘mistakes’ and ‘chance’ is another persistent quality of Z¨urn’s work; they are tools for exchanging rationality and progression with events that can be described as ‘miracles’. Z¨urn’s tale of 1951, ‘The coat (not from Gogol)’ describes the curious encounter of an impoverished man with a doctor. Broadcast

BEGINNINGS OF CHANGE Figure 5 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Die verzauberte Prinzessin’ [‘The Enchanted Princess’], 1950. Watercolour on paper, 37 × 26 cm. Karin and Dr Gerhard Dammann collection

together with Renate Hass-Juon’s story ‘Faust (not from Goethe’), the tales are noted as ‘devilish stories’, while Z¨urn’s story is said to be a factual event. The account of an encounter with the doctor raises issues of authority, conformity and treatment, where external voices that are only heard by the poor man enter the script towards the end, implying a state of hallucination or possession. In the same year, on 22 July 1951, Z¨urn took a Wartegg Zeichen drawing apperception test in Berlin. The story can be read as a reference to this event, which was one of Z¨urn’s first encounters with psychiatry. Estrangement becomes prominent, where the man, impoverished and misunderstood, is isolated by society and later estranged from himself, recalling early definitions of the Surrealist ‘marvellous’. 35

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Z¨urn’s final radio tale aired in 1954. ‘Fremdlinge in unserer Welt’ [‘Strangers in our world’] explored the concept of ‘strangers’, and estrangement in relation to children and childhood is addressed. Here, Z¨urn discusses the assumption that games and fairy tales belong only to childhood as wrong and calls this limitation ‘short-sighted’. She quotes Nietzsche’s suggestion of an ‘eternal child’ and claims the right to have fairy tales and games at any age. This is a recurring theme in four of her newspaper stories published in the same year, which is noted by Erich Brinkmann to be the motivation behind her later story ‘Katrin. Die Geschichte einer Kleinen Schriftstellerin’ [‘Katrin. The story of a young author’]. Z¨urn writes; ‘The best things come from children.’ The state of estrangement as miracle coincides with early Surrealist descriptions of the ‘marvellous’. In The Haunted Self, David Lomas states that ‘the marvellous is born from the refusal of a reality, but also from the emergence of a new rapport, of a new reality which this refusal has liberated. The new rapport thus established is surreality.’69 Lomas describes the ‘marvellous’ as a ‘subjective destructuration’, which involves a state of self-estrangement as well as an overall refusal of reality. He quotes Louis Aragon: ‘if by chance everything that is thus extraordinarily ordinary does reach someone who can experience its strangeness, its paralysing strangeness, this person will be considered ill’.70 Z¨urn plays on the realities of anaemia, whose natural side effects cause fatigue, melancholy and at times hallucinations. She draws on the realities of her illness, and extracts from it a series of miracles by estranging the ordinary stature of her surroundings and the torments of her body into beautiful and dangerous creatures. Somewhere between being; life and death, space; Ermenonville and Paris, and time; childhood and adulthood, Z¨urn encounters pendulums of the ‘marvellous’, suspended over binaries that merge and emerge in her visual language.71 In ‘Unica Z¨urn and Hans Bellmer’, Ren´ee Riese Hubert comments briefly on ‘Notes of an anaemic’, describing it as the product of a dynamic mental confusion that is linked to ‘the analogical principle of the anagram which brings forth a renewal out of old texts’.72 The text is described as ‘a threshold between an old and a new year so far as her hope for a miracle increases and abates’.73 By means of the ‘marvellous’, Z¨urn is able to reuse old texts, motifs and images. Her Indian headdresses as pictured in early photographs is reconfigured in

BEGINNINGS OF CHANGE Figure 6 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Untitled’, 1963. Chinese ink, 65 × 50 cm. Private collection

the form of various characters in her later Indian ink drawings. For example, in a drawing from the first publication of her anagrammatic poems, a head stands out that resembles the profile of a Native American chief, while a small drawing made on a rose paper notepad in 1957 is of a hunter with bow and arrow. Five other studies, ranging from 1963 to 1966 portray her childhood heroes, two of which resemble portraits of herself. The 1963 portrait is a male figure with a small face buried in his chest (Fig. 6). The two later 1966 portraits are slightly more feminine, with slender necks and prominent eyebrows (Fig. 7). One of these later portraits is reminiscent of Z¨urn’s stern gaze in her photograph of c.1940. The ‘Native Indian mother’ figure and these drawings recall characters from one of Z¨urn’s favourite books, 37

¨ UNICA ZURN Figure 7 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Untitled’, 1966. Ink and white gouache on paper, 64.6 × 49.5 cm. Amanda Filipacchi collection, New York

The Last of the Mohicans (1826) by American writer James Fenimore Cooper. The novel was first translated into German in 1899 with several film productions that followed.74 The story projected idealised images of heroes; with a plot that revolved around the representations of the sole survivor of a noble race. Characters such as Uncas and Magua were re-appropriated in Z¨urn’s stories, and also provided pet-names in her personal life; she wrote in several diary entries about her husband Erich Laupenm¨uhlen under the name Unkas. Two more drawings in Album 3, inscribed with the title ‘BIG CHIEF WHITE HORSE EAGEL [sic]’, depict portraits of a man with a smaller drawing of another man in his chest. The title is taken from the book We Indians: Being the Recollections of Big Chief White Horse Eagle, originally published in 1931.75 The chief, a Native American chief and 38

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Osage, later declared to be a fraud, was said to be a 107-year-old man capable of many feats, such as detecting metal with his body and reading ancient hieroglyphics. The autobiography of White Horse Eagle was elicited and edited by Edgar von Schmidt-Pauli, a German academic who was particularly interested in the Chief ’s exemplification of racial purity. The supremacist undertone of the autobiography was used by Schmidt-Pauli to defend racial theories of the time, such as the inevitable rise of the German race.76 Z¨urn’s drawings, particularly that dated 1963, may be of the Chief, with a smaller drawing of German Schmidt-Pauli’s face, who he is wearing like a badge of endorsement. Images of the Chief were widely circulated after his visit to Berlin in 1929, the same year the German photographer Emil Otto Hopp´e took what would become his postcard image; he had made a sensational arrival in Berlin on 18 April in full chief ’s array and a feather headdress of several metres in length. Later, the Chief fell into disrepute: His alleged tribesmen complained that he spoke not a word of their native language, that he knew nothing of Indian culture and religion, and that the only God he held dear was alcohol. Finally, it was apparently proven that he had African Americans among his ancestors. His age had never been believed, anyway.77

Blurring the lines between fact, fiction and fallacy, Z¨urn’s interest in the Chief can be seen as a parody of identity by means of role-playing. By wearing the headdress, Z¨urn becomes the ‘Native Indian mother’, just as the Chief had become the great tribesman Big White Horse Eagle. Every time Z¨urn revisits the headdress and the Native American characters from her childhood they are renewed within their familiar archetypes: in her narrative Dark Spring they appear as kidnappers that frighten her yet give her pleasure; in another vision described in Notes on her Last (?) Crisis, the mass of Native Americans appear as the ‘heroes of her childhood’.78 The ambiguous characterisations of Native American figures in her work oscillate between heroes and racial cases that were used as examples in accounts for white supremacism. The motif of the Indian headdress, and Z¨urn as the ‘Native Indian’ mother, represents the interjections of Z¨urn’s childhood that indicate an expectation of ‘miracles’ and subsequently a temporary escape from the grim realities of life. The significance of children’s games and stories 39

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begins with Z¨urn’s tales for newspapers and for the radio in 1949, and continues with her growing attachment to childhood as her age progresses. Z¨urn continues to wait for a ‘miracle’ that will ‘make an elephant out of a fly, five hens out of a feather’, adopting new strategies to record the ‘miracles’ of her illness.79

2 Exhibitions and Exposure Posthumous Exhibitions from 2005 to the Present The public dissemination of Z¨urn’s visual works, which consist of oil paintings, watercolours, notebook sketches, ink drawings and postcards, have been largely dependent on exhibitions. Unlike her writings, the visual works have seldom seen the light of day outside of private collections, auctions, gallery storage rooms and national archives. It is only very recently that these works have been made public by means of exhibitions and catalogues. While providing an important gateway to approaching Z¨urn’s visual products, the temporality and geographic specificity of display have left these graphic works mostly unknown and generally undiscussed. Early exhibitions that took place during Z¨urn’s lifetime have led the way to a number of posthumous exhibitions through the 1970s and 1980s that placed an emphasis on her visual oeuvre. After the publication of the entire collection of known literary works in the late 1980s and 1990s, the translation of her prose into English around this time prompted a shift in emphasis away from the visual material to Z¨urn’s literary narratives and in turn to her semibiographical experiences of mental illness. Despite this shift, Z¨urn’s visual work continues to draw interest over 40 years after her death, with a revived interest in her graphic works. In 2011, in a gallery in London, Z¨urn’s drawings were shown in a group exhibition alongside contemporary artists. A fairly small gallery, Ibid Projects, became one of the first spaces to introduce Z¨urn’s work to a British audience.1 Writing of the 2011 show in London, Kate Marris tells us the story of how co-director of Ibid Projects Magnus Edensvard 41

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discovered an unidentified legacy of Z¨urn in the works of five other female artists of different ages: Louise Despont, Jutta Koether, Alicja Kwade, Anj Smith and Marianne Vitale.2 Taking the ‘line’ as anchor to these artists working independently of one another, six of Z¨urn’s drawings from the 1950s and 1960s were displayed as quintessential examples of automatic line drawings. One can notice an eerie affinity between Z¨urn’s work and the others, especially Vitale, who had never heard of Z¨urn but whose works are in perfect synchrony. Z¨urn’s work has received particular interest in North America thanks to galleries like Ubu Gallery and collectors such as Daniel Filipacchi, who are the leading representatives of her work on the East coast. Adam Boxer, owner of Ubu Gallery and committed collector, first encountered Z¨urn’s work by chance in the late 1990s. Boxer began collecting works by Bellmer in the 1980s, with an original photograph from La Poup´ee series. In June 1991, Boxer visited Bellmer’s family to build his collection. Six years and 15 visits later, the gallery now owns over 180 works in partnership with the Berinson Gallery in Berlin.3 Becoming more familiar with Bellmer’s life, Boxer was introduced to Z¨urn through her partnership with Bellmer and acquired one of her drawings in the early 1990s for roughly US $ 7,500 at the time. In the early 2000s, John Zorn, American avant-garde composer and close friend of Boxer, walked through the door one day and asked for a drawing by Unica Z¨urn. The Ubu Gallery made its first sale, and has since continued to collect Z¨urn’s work in an attempt to monopolise it in the art market. The role of the gallery has been instrumental in the accessibility of Z¨urn’s work to curators and scholars alike, becoming the ‘go-to’ place for both academic and commercial exchange. In 2005, the gallery put on the first exhibition of their collection, showing approximately 80 works with a 50 per cent sales rate between 13 January and 16 April of that year. Unica Z¨urn: Drawings from the 1960s became one of the first introductions of her visual work to the public in North America, with a view to raising her artistic profile. Since then, Ubu Gallery has had three shows of Z¨urn’s work, presented independently in Unica Z¨urn: Twelve Paintings + Two Drawings (1–26 November 2010), together with Bellmer in Bound: Hans Bellmer & Unica Z¨urn (9 March 2012–19 May 2012) and most recently within a wider contextualisation of her practice among her contemporaries in Witnessing Visions: Brion Gysin, Henri Michaux, Judit Reigl, Unica Z¨urn (10 December 2013–21 March 2014).

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The number of Z¨urn collectors continues to rise with emerging galleries such as Gallery Diet in Miami Florida and Gallery Hus in Paris. Nonetheless, Ubu Gallery remains the largest holder, with approximately 45 pieces. Outside of traditional art market definitions, Z¨urn’s oeuvre is considered relatively small, with a total of 200 identified works in private collections plus ephemera in national archives.4 With an appeal to a niche audience, Z¨urn’s visual works have acquired a reputation over the years of being esoteric. After the 2005 exhibition at the Ubu Gallery, a review claimed that ‘[Z¨urn’s] work posed a challenge for writers to sum up since it does not exist within the scope of fine arts as we know it’.5 Despite this challenge, following the translation of literary works like The Man of Jasmine and Dark Spring in the 1990s, her œuvre has drawn growing attention in Anglophone countries. The first non-commercial solo exhibition of Z¨urn’s visual work in North America took place at The Drawing Centre, New York, in 2009.6 Curator Jo˜ao Ribas first came across Z¨urn’s literary work in a small bookshop in Paris in 2006. Randomly taking Sombre Printempts off the shelf, Ribas became infatuated with ‘the imagery and content of the book and the analytical vicinity and precision in the writing which was not the raving of a madwoman’.7 This discovery eventually led to the exhibition Dark Spring, called after the book. Three years in the making, the show was driven by the lack of information available with aspirations towards discovering a relatively mysterious figure at the time; a special emphasis was placed on previously unseen works and ephemera. The New York Times coverage in its first week raised the profile of the show and helped draw in audiences, bringing in 5,000 viewers over a three-month period. Whilst Ken Johnston’s review headlines with a generic introduction to Z¨urn as ‘an artist who became the living version of her lover’s malformed dolls’, it nevertheless invites the viewer to recognise her artistic abilities beyond the spectrum of Outsider Art, as a contender among names such as Andr´e Masson and Paul Klee.8 The exhibition was accompanied by events and talks such as ‘Dark Surrealist: a reading of Unica Z¨urn’s poetry & fiction’ with contributions by Mary Ann Caws, Pierre Joris, Jill Magi, Anna Moschovakis and Caroline Rupprecht. Ribas decribed Z¨urn’s work as the authentic representation of what Surrealism was trying to achieve through automatism, stating: ‘She had access to precisely the kind of imaginative power and psychic energy that they all wanted access to.’9

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Forty-nine drawings were displayed around the room in chronological order, with growing complexity in tandem with the size of the drawings. Beginning with one of her earlier untitled works from 1953, the show concluded with Les Insectes [Insects], the final drawing of her artistic career completed before her suicide in 1970. Insects depicts a combination of Z¨urn’s signature motifs, including snakes, birds and faces, with two poems; one written on the top right corner of the page facing up and the other written on the bottom left corner facing down, announcing ‘Il est dur, de mourir au printempts’ [It is hard, to die in spring]. As if projecting the images around them, ephemeral documents were displayed in the centre of the room, showing glimpses into Z¨urn’s life; photographs with her partner Hans Bellmer, letters and notebooks written during her internment at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris and a first edition copy of Dunkler Fr¨uhling. The genesis of Dark Spring coincides with the largest exposition of Z¨urn’s work in 2006, at the Halle Saint Pierre, Paris. In the exhibition Unica Z¨urn, 100 images in total were displayed, including drawings and watercolours. Halle Saint Pierre is an institution dedicated to Art Brut (also known as Outsider Art) and was created in 1986 to bring together a collection that establishes bridges between ‘naive art’ (often referring to a the art of the untrained and at times as the art of the mentally ill) and more academic forms of creation. Considering Z¨urn’s artistic aspirations alongside her experiences of mental illness, on which side of this bridge, then, was her work placed? In a review of the exhibition, Z¨urn was presented as an ‘overlooked extension of Art Brut’.10 Such a direct and perhaps limiting association raises questions on the implications the outlook of the institution has for her images, and whether her work is restricted within an erroneous historical context. Within the walls of institutions there are files that describe what is in them, with pages that use rational language to dress up even that which is almost incomprehensible in coherent language. The walls of the Halle Saint Pierre carry the tone of its Art Brut collection: the ‘art “outside” the mainstream, perceived as precipitating an “alternative” orthodoxy that is insistent on social isolation and autonomous creativity, devoid of external influences’.11 However, Z¨urn’s artistic identity was not developed outside of external influences, nor in complete social isolation. Art Brut came into being as a result of French artist Jean Dubuffet’s interest in ‘raw’ production by children, the ‘primitive’ and the

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mentally ill. He built a collection of children’s art in around 1940, and assembled works by psychiatric patients, mediums and other self-taught artists. Dubuffet was influenced by art historian Hans Prinzhorn, who was one of the first collectors of the art of the mentally ill. Prinzhorn wrote Artistry of the Mentally Ill in 1922, summarising his studies on what he observed as the different types of mental aberrations and certain configurations in pictures. The book very quickly became a popular source for artists, first and foremost for the Surrealists. The group was introduced to it by Max Ernst, who had brought a copy to Paris in 1922. The extent of the influence of Prinzhorn’s studies and the art from his collection on the member’s activities was showcased in the 2010 exhibition Surrealism and Madness, discussed later in this chapter. The source of Prinzhorn’s inspiration was Cesare Lombroso’s publication Genius and Madness in 1864, which argued that artistic genius was a form of hereditary insanity. The direct connection between Lombroso’s criminological approaches to Prinzhorn’s investigation reflects also on the basis of Art Brut. Thus, Dubuffet’s ‘radical outside to civilization’ is essentially built around the eugenics of art within a solid symbolic order.12 Eugenics – the belief that the genetic quality of the human population can be improved through controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of ‘desirable’ characteristics – was developed in the nineteenth century. In the 1930s it became a social philosophy that led to the practice of extreme sterilisation during the Third Reich under Hitler, who issued a decree to start euthanasia programmes such as ‘Operation T4’ (September 1939). These programmes evaluated the ‘value’ of patients in psychiatric hospitals, determining whether they had the capacity to contribute to the Voksgeminscahaff, the community of the people.13 A dangerous association was drawn between modern art and patients who were annihilated during the euthanasia programmes, condemning such artists as undesirable misfits. The Entarte Kunst [Degenerate Art] exhibition that took place in 1937, instigated by the National Socialists in Germany, ‘aimed to discredit the avant-garde by drawing attention to its similarities with the art of the “insane”’.14 Entarte Kunst is credited as the first example of curatorial practice associating mainstream and Outsider Art. Nearly 50 years later the Halle Saint Pierre exhibited the same collection with a positive connotation. Yet, Z¨urn’s art does not seem to fit in with either the extreme eugenics of art under ‘degeneracy’ or the ‘rawness’ of Art Brut.15 Nonetheless, the exhibition became a headlining event that

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was promoted by local press and media which re-introduced Z¨urn and her work to the contemporary art world, and consequently led to a revived interest in her in academia.16 Whilst Ribas missed the Halle Saint Pierre retrospective on Z¨urn by only a few days, the groundwork of many subsequent exhibitions, including Dark Spring, is to a degree indebted to the anthology and exposure the Unica Z¨urn show at the Halle Sainte Pierre offered to its successors. The ambiguous nature of Z¨urn’s artistic identity, oscillating between her having professional career and being a reclusive in-patient, has prompted an array of associations by ‘likeness’ to familiar, known categories such as Outsider Art. In a review of Dark Spring in 2009, Z¨urn’s drawings are described as exemplary of the ‘skilful weirdness of Outsider Art that is characterised by fastidious excess and disciplined compulsion’.17 Such comparisons are suggested by reading Z¨urn’s biography before examining the merit of her work. In fact, in 2008, Z¨urn was included in the exhibition Loss of Control: Crossing the Boundaries to Art from F´elicien Rops to the Present, which brought together 65 artists, patients and aspiring practitioners.18 Under the auspices of Outsider Art, Art Brut and a history of the Prinzhorn collection, Loss of Control attempted to draw similarities between forms of expression whilst failing to distinguish between different historical contexts and contradictions within them. Mixed media works – predominantly photographs and drawings by Antonin Artaud, Jean-Martin Charcot, Jean Dubuffet, and Adolf W¨olfli – all hung amongst works by local artists and psychiatric patients, including two drawings by Z¨urn. The theme and collection of works included in the exhibition hold particular relevance for the curator Jan Hoet, who explained that ‘through combinations you are telling your own history . . . So, many exhibitions are autobiographical’.19 With a psychiatrist for a father and an art collector for a mother, Hoet was raised in a household with seven children and five psychiatric patients. Hoet’s upbringing greatly influenced many of his other exhibitions such as Open Mind (Closed Circuit),20 as well as his lifelong views on art. Z¨urn’s inclusion in the show raised issues with the outdated association between creativity and ‘madness’, and pointed to the need to distinguish between the role of visuality in psychiatric treatment methods (i.e. Charcot), modern perspectives on mental illness as pure creative force (i.e. Art Brut/Outsider Art) and the fascination with and synthetic imitation of known symptoms as a boon to creative expression (i.e. Surrealism).21 The blind identification of

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Z¨urn’s place within this history is not sustainable because the deliberate interweaving of her work with experiences of mental disarray is further complicated by the use and identification of illness as subject matter in the majority of her literary and visual work. The 2006 show at Saint Halle Pierre in Paris and the 2009 show at The Drawing Centre in New York remain the two largest exhibitions dedicated solely to Z¨urn, and provide useful compilations of essays and images. Following such shows, there was a blog boom, prompting a range of commentary on Z¨urn’s life and work from amateur art fans to dedicated collectors and scholars.22 These entries and articles are noticeably similar to some of the earlier reviews of posthumous exhibitions just before the end of the century, which bring forward Z¨urn’s visual oeuvre as a product of a tragic tale, overrun with an ‘untamed’ and ‘poisonous’ mind.23

Other Posthumous Shows pre-2005 Three months after Z¨urn’s death, an exhibition was held in commemoration at the Galerie La Pochade from 17 December 1970 to 16 January 1971. Organised by Pierre Belfond and Alain Digard, a collection of drawings as well as a special introduction of the book Dark Spring were presented on the opening night.24 In the following months of that year, The Man of Jasmine was published by Gallimard. Though the publication was circulated in that year to a small number of artists like Max Ernst and Man Ray, Z¨urn’s longer narratives remained unknown to many in her lifetime. The availability of her prose and longer narratives in this period shed a new light onto Z¨urn’s reception, in addition to her suicide, casting a dark shadow across the representation of her life and work. As the first retrospective exhibition, it drew the interest of art critics as well as the wider press, drawing in several reviews that focused on biographical information. Placing particular emphasis on her lived experiences and her relationship with Hans Bellmer, JeanJacques Leveque described Z¨urn’s graphic work in his review as ‘halfway between Art Brut and Surrealism’, influenced by the works of Andr´e Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Wilfredo Lam, Roberto Matta and Dorothea Tanning.25 The reviews of Jean Dal`evge and Jean Bonnet carried a similar tone, presenting her life as ‘tragic’ and describing her works as ‘strange’ and ‘magical’.26 47

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A decade later, in 1981, Leveque dedicated his column ‘My Eye’ to Z¨urn and Gaston Chaissac, whose graphic works were published by Editions Jacques Damase in the same year as the exhibition of Z¨urn’s drawings at the Roi des Aulnes in Paris. Taking a more personal approach, Leveque offered intimate first-hand observations on Z¨urn as a person: She carried herself with a mystery, a silence, which were remote, but most importantly, protected from all of the attacks of others. Not finding her illness and dizziness in itself. It has since her shackles that has become her curse, and maintain it as a fever.27

He concluded the short account by branding her work as ‘a strange flower, the perfume poisonous’. This review was in reference to another exhibition titled Pour Unica Z¨urn held at the Goethe Institute in Paris from 6 December 1983 to 13 January 1984. Organised by Gunter Bar, the then-director of the Goethe Institute in collaboration with Nicole Bary, the Le Roides Aulnes Library gallery, the exhibition showcased Z¨urn’s drawings among lesser-known oil paintings and watercolours. The show borrowed works from La Pochade in Paris, the Werner Kunze in Berlin, Bertrand Rony in Paris and the Heinrich von Sydow-Zirkwitz in Frankfurt as well as private collections. The 1983/4 exhibition in Paris was the most comprehensive event dedicated to Z¨urn’s life and work at this time, including her books, notebooks, photographs and other archival documents. There was an accompanying publication of Z¨urn’s drawings and anagrammatic poems by Le Nouveau Commerce titled ‘Approche d’Unica Z¨urn’ as well as a major panel discussion at the Centre Georges Pompidou on 5 December 1983. The event, titled ‘Entretiens sur la creation a propos d’Unica Z¨urn’, included interviews with participants Jacquiline Cheni´eux, Jean-Pierre Faye, Luce Irigaray, G´erard Mac´e, Bernard No¨el and Claude Viart, with Georges Schlocker as moderator. Focusing on her life and the relationship between her oeuvre and mental illness, the discussion would lead to one of the most critical articles on Z¨urn, by Luce Irigaray in 1985. A series of accompanying events under the title ‘Profil d’Unica Z¨urn’ took place from 7–10 December 1983. These included ‘Conception and Realisation’ by Marcelle Fonfreide, which comprised the reading of extracts from The Man of Jasmine and Dark Spring 48

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and other writings such as ‘The Imaginary Letters’ (annex to Games for Two) and a selection of anagrammatic poems; photographs on display from the collections of Catherine Brousse, Claudie LeconteGili, Claude Bourquelot, Myriad Bath-Yossef and Annick Yaiche; and an audiovisual animation of an ‘Ecoutexvoir’ created by Jean-R´emy Zamponi and was accompanied by readers Christiane Rorato and L´ena Refalczyk. The short manuscripts enactments from ‘Games for Two’ and ‘Imaginary letters’ were performed.28 The short text written by Marcelle Fonfreide in the pamphlet gives a brief description of her life and work, referring to her as ‘mercury’ – perhaps in reference to Ruth Henry’s descriptions of Z¨urn’s ‘metallic style’ in her short texts.29 Fonfreide uses the metaphor to describe Z¨urn’s fragmentary representation of the ‘self ’ which is impenetrable and ‘breaks into a thousand pieces’.30 There is particular mention of Z¨urn’s psychiatric internments, presenting the production of The Man of Jasmine as a result of her experience, in other words as a ‘report of these visits’: ‘She writes in the third person without emotional commentary, with a lucidity which is ambiguously rich and disturbing.’31 Both 1971 and 1983 Paris exhibitions received interest in the press.32 A review of the show in Le Monde confronted its readers with the question ‘Have you met Unica Z¨urn?’ Under the headline ‘Discover Unica Z¨urn’, the review invited readers into the mysterious landscape of Z¨urn’s world by means of what became a popular book, The Man of Jasmine: ‘thirteen years after her suicide . . . a series of events attract attention to the strange window into this fascinating character revealed to us in 1970, in The Man of Jasmine’.33 The book, which was not published in its original German until 1977, remained a well-kept secret from her native country. Apart from the small collection of works at the Galerie Werner Kunze in Berlin, to that date there had been no major exhibitions of Z¨urn’s work in Germany. The first large-scale retrospective of Z¨urn’s work in Germany was in 1999. The exhibition opened on 10 January at the Museum Bochum in collaboration with the neue Geselleschaft f¨ur bildende Kunst, Berlin. Gathering 150 works from various collections across Europe, the show travelled to Gerhard Marck-Haus in Bremen (from 18 April to 13 May 1999). With an introduction by Wolfgand Knapp, (NGBK, Berlin) and welcoming note by Sepp Hiekisch-Picard, a number of accompanying events took place including a reading of Unica Z¨urn’s work by Irene Christ, from the ensemble of the Schauspielhaus Bochum, under the

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title ‘I is an Other’. Most significantly, this exhibition paved the way for the publication by Brinkman and Bose in the same year, acting as a catalogue for the exhibition and becoming the most comprehensive anthology of Z¨urn’s oeuvre to date. In addition to the eight-volume collection, more recently, an updated Unica Z¨urn Alben: B¨ucher und Zeichenhefte was published by Erich Brinkmann in 2009 and is the only catalogue of Z¨urn’s visual production, providing 180 reproductions, in colour facsimile, with a forthcoming second volume which expected to present the rest of Z¨urn’s unpublished works. In the 1980s, De Rambures’ review in Le Monde announced that it was ‘a great time to recognise Z¨urn and award her the place which is due to her’.34 German reviews in this period did not read very differently from the 1970s French reception of Z¨urn, echoing the expanding interest in literary narratives and more specifically Z¨urn’s descriptive accounts of her experiences with mental illness. Labelled as someone who was ‘both artist and schizophrenic’, her books were read as ‘clinical documents’ that dived into the ‘world of madness’. These seemingly harmless reviews would become definitive of Z¨urn’s reception over the coming decades.

Exhibitions between 1956 and 1967 The year after Z¨urn moved to Paris she became acquainted with the gallery owner Rudolf Springer. They became good friends and he bought one of her paintings, The Enchanted Princess, for five marks, reserving a few more to be sold in his gallery, The Springer Gallery. Springer went on to support Z¨urn’s work, also funding her first publication in 1954 of ten anagrammatic poems with ten drawings under the title Hexen-texte. In the following years, Z¨urn produced a wealth of drawings and poems that would be showcased in several solo exhibitions. Z¨urn had eight exhibitions between the years 1956 and 1967, five of which were solo exhibitions. These in particular have become a useful source in understanding Z¨urn’s exposure and reception as artist during her lifetime, as well as placing her work within a wider context. In conjunction with her growing interest in constructing anagrams, Z¨urn simultaneously became a prolific graphic artist, producing over 200 drawings over the course of 16 years. For a short period, between the years 1955 to 1957, Z¨urn also experimented with painting, the 50

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results of which have now become some of the most valued pieces of her oeuvre. In 1956 Z¨urn decided to give up writing for the press entirely to concentrate on visual art and more creative forms of writing. In that same year, she had her first solo exhibition and began to form a distinct artistic practice and persona. She would go on to produce the most recognised prose pieces of her career during the 1960s. In the meanwhile, following a series of solo exhibitions in Paris, her status as a visual artist also took off and she began participating in large group exhibitions.

Solo Shows in Paris Z¨urn’s first solo exhibition took place at the Soleil dans la Tˆete Gallery between 11 and 31 May 1956. At a time when Z¨urn and Bellmer were suffering from extreme poverty, this small gallery and bookstore presented a number of drawings by both artists for sale. It was after a few of the drawings were sold that Z¨urn was encouraged to produce more drawings to be exhibited. Following the success of her first exhibition, where she sold four drawings, Z¨urn was invited by the gallery to show a second time in October 1957. The second solo show was accompanied by printed invitations that were sent out to various contacts in Paris. Showcasing her works on paper including gouaches, postcards and selected pages from her notebooks, her visual work was thus exposed to a wider audience. In a letter written on 11 August 1957, Z¨urn expressed her exhilaration at the preparations for the exhibition. A preface written by Andr´e Pierye de Mandigues titled ‘Chenille pour Unica’ [Caterpillar for Unica], was printed on an elegant pink slip which was enclosed in the separate invitation that Z¨urn sent personally to each invitee.35 The invitation list included notables such as Breton, Victor Brauner, Gaston Bachelard, Wilfredo Lam, Matta, Michaux, Joyce Monsour, Francis Ponge, Man Ray and Jean Wahl. In her short account of the 1957 Paris exhibition, she writes about distributing copies of Hexen-texte to each visitor, showing that she not only promoted herself as graphic artist but also as an anagrammatic poet.36 In an undated letter to Ruth Henry, Z¨urn refers to Hexentexte as a sort of carte de visite, affirming its distribution as a form of advertising.37 The exhibition of 1957, which lasted for four weeks in the intimate space of the gallery, was a high point in Z¨urn’s artistic career in Paris, selling a number of works even after the exhibition 51

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had closed. The reception of her work in Paris was mostly positive and it gained interest from established artists. In another letter to Robert Wolfgang Schnell on 20 December 1958, Z¨urn wrote about the exhibition as a great success, proudly stating that six of the exhibited drawings were sold and that Victor Brauner bought an additional sketch from her notebook. In the letter, Z¨urn wrote of being particularly proud of Brauner liking her sketches.38 This success was very important to Z¨urn at the time, as it encouraged her to consider herself as a serious artist.39 Nonetheless, it is important to note that Z¨urn did not consistently promote her visual work throughout her career. In her afterword to Letters to Ruth Henry, Victoria Combalia states that even though Z¨urn had a number of exhibitions and had become an accepted artist among the Surrealists in Paris, her work remained largely esoteric until the publication of The Man of Jasmine in 1971.40 To the wider public, Z¨urn held a different persona that derived from the nature of her practice. Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain, a trained psychiatrist and close friend of Bellmer, noted several times that Z¨urn was a withdrawn and quiet figure and that many of their friends, including himself, did not know about Z¨urn’s artistic work.41 In her personal diary entries, however, we often find that Z¨urn was not very confident in her own work, making self-depreciating remarks such as that she is a bad artist whilst praising others. Despite her modesty or insecurity in her artistic ability, she did in fact produce prolifically and distributed her work to galleries in Paris, Berlin, Hannover and Frankfurt. Exhibitions were an important part of Z¨urn’s life in Paris, and her expressed pleasure in success proves that she was in fact an ambitious artist. Outside the close circle of Surrealism, and with her remaining correspondents in Germany, Z¨urn did not openly talk about or actively promote her work after the 1950s, becoming more reclusive during the 1960s when her mental illness fully determined her artistic performance and its subsequent reception. This distinction can be made in the catalogues and presentations of exhibitions during the 1960s, where an emphasis on her mental illness carries particular significance. Z¨urn had two solo shows in the 1960s in Paris, both held at the Galerie Pont Cardinal. In 1961, following a series of events in Berlin, Z¨urn returned to Paris and was admitted to the Jean Delay Ward at the Sainte-Anne Hospital on 26 September. She remained incarcerated

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within Sainte-Anne until 23 March 1962. The opening of Z¨urn’s third solo exhibition in 1962 took place in absentia on 9 January, and her work remained on display there until the end of the month. A catalogue was printed to accompany the exhibition, 60 of which included a signed engraving by Unica Z¨urn. Invitations were sent for the opening night by John Devoluy and Jean Hugues to a select list. The engraving was accompanied by an equally enigmatic calligraphic piece by Max Ernst, encoded in a secret language. Max Ernst, a German artist known as a founding member of the Dada group who later became a leading figure in the French Surrealist circle, was an admirer of Z¨urn’s work and described her as the most successful German poet of their time.42 The script, referred to as a ‘private joke’ between the two artists, retains a typographical structure, offering a heading title, indented paragraphs and punctuation marks.43 The format of the text that remains intact in any such layout implies the possibility of meaning, where the curiosity it engenders to decipher the preface mocks the reader. The secret language used by the artists expresses a shared interest in cryptology.44 The inscriptions of the preface are in black ink, while single signs are in red (paragraphs one, three, five and six). The red that stands out in Ernst’s cryptography reflects Z¨urn’s signature, also in red, inscribed under a black and white engraving of a multi-legged creature. While the inscriptions are all in hieroglyphic characters, Ernst’s preface reveals his name in the Latin alphabet. Gallimard Press intended to use Ernst’s preface for the debut publication of The Man of Jasmine. In a letter to Ruth Henry, Z¨urn discusses the possibility of asking Ernst to participate in the project and asks Henry to pass on a copy of the manuscript for his consideration.45 Though the preface did not appear in the posthumous publication of the book, The Man of Jasmine, he foresaw its realisation, supporting it in anticipation. In 1964, Z¨urn’s paintings, gouaches and drawings were shown for the fourth and final solo exhibition in her lifetime. A small invitation on folded rose paper was distributed for the opening night. The only known remaining copy of the invitation in the Bibliotheque Kandinsky in Paris is inscribed in Z¨urn’s handwriting with the anagrammatic poem ‘Dans Les bois d’Ermenonville’ [‘In the woods of Ermenonville’], written in 1959. The poem, which was originally written in German, is inscribed on the back of the invitation, whilst a translation of it in French is written on the interior fold of the leaflet. There is a signed

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drawing on the opposite page drawn with the same ink pen, integrating Z¨urn’s visual and textual practice onto the same surface.

1959 International Surrealist Exhibition: EROS One of the milestones of Z¨urn’s career is marked by her participation in the famous International Surrealist exhibition in Paris in 1959. In the journal entry ‘Meeting with Hans Bellmer’, Unica Z¨urn recalled the EROS (Exposition Internationale du Surr´ealisme) exhibition in detail, describing the crowded atmosphere at the Gallery Daniel Cordier and the events that took place on the opening night.46 The exhibition was put together by Andr´e Breton and Marcel Duchamp, with assistance from Jose Pierre. A number of international artists came together for the organisation of the show: Radovan Ivsic prepared the soundtrack that played throughout the event; Robert Benayoun took care of the montage; and Pierre Facheux was the chief operator. Faucheux had the idea of making the exhibition resemble a ‘sumptuous ceremony in an underground tavern’ and, together with Duchamp, created a cryptic cave-like structure with various chambers, each leading to the next.47 Z¨urn describes the first room of EROS: with its roof partially removed, the space was transformed into an immersive environment where the viewer entered into an anthropomorphised space. The room ‘breathed’ recordings of sexual sighs, with fleshy velvet walls suggesting a passage through the internal organs of the body. The ceiling was the idea of Duchamp, who had previously experimented with the sensory experience of the viewer with his soft sculptures, most notably the 1947 exhibition catalogue cover Please Touch. As the chamber throbbed and palpitated, a soundtrack chanted sighs recorded by the poet Radovan Ivsic.48 The velvet-draped walls heightened the corporeality of the room while the fine sand scattered on the floor sunk the viewer further into this sensory experience. Each room entrance was made to resemble the female vulva so that the viewers were to continuously penetrate the exhibition space as a metaphor for the female form. The Galerie Daniel Cordier was known to be a hub for unconventional art. The owner of the gallery, Daniel Cordier, described as a very generous and open-minded man, had a reputation for his particular interest in avant-garde erotic art.49 Cordier, who had intended to go against the vogue for collectors in 1950s Paris, rejected Abstract art and instead represented the controversial figures of the time such as 54

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Bellmer, Jean Dubuffet, Oyvind Fahlstrom, Bernard Schultze, Henri Michaux, Bernard Requichot and Jean Dewasne.50 Cordier was also known for representing relatively unknown female artists in the early 1960s; they were, however, always introduced with supporting texts written by established male commentators or artists as endorsement for their presence in the gallery.51 Nonetheless, Cordier was a forerunner in avant-garde collections and hoped that his exhibitions would ‘change the art scene, and direct it away from bland historical retrospectives towards topical thematic shows’.52 Other smaller galleries in Paris such as the Soleil dans la Tˆete, who represented Z¨urn’s work in the 1950s, shared Cordier’s vision of introducing new artists who experimented with more risqu´e themes. In the decade following World War II many of the Surrealist artists who had taken refuge outside their war-torn cities returned to Paris. The ambitions and morale of the group had been tainted by the war and the loss of cherished members like Benjamin Peret, Wolfgang Pauline and Jean-Pierre Duprey. Suicide, death and the ageing process weighed down those who had survived. The theme of the EROS exhibition, in celebration of the 140th anniversary of the death of Sade, was to rejuvenate the group’s morale in light of their early ideals. Freudian theories of repression and the unconscious were central for the Surrealist understanding of desire, and during the 1950s the sexualised/eroticised body became the main agent for the search for, and expression of, desire. In August 1959, Breton invited artists to take part by submitting their own works as well as proposing ‘suggestions which would benefit the indispensible preparation of the whole event’.53 Mimi Parent and Meret Oppenheim were leading representatives of the new generation within Surrealism and their renewed use of media such as found objects became prime examples of the centrality of performance and installation. Both Parent and Oppenheim drew the attention of Z¨urn as artists who reclaimed the female body and its representation. The exclusion of women from early French Surrealism has been widely discussed in the 1990s and early-2000s, creating a marginalised group of scholarship on ‘women Surrealists’ who had been identified as the partners of male members of the group. Accounts such as Whitney Chadwick’s early study Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement54 documents the reception of women in Surrealism as ‘outsiders’ to the group’s artistic activities. Chadwick states that:

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almost without exception, women artists viewed themselves as having functioned independently of Breton’s inner circle and the shaping of Surrealist doctrine . . . their involvement was defined by personal relationships, networks of friends and lovers, not by active participation in an inner circle dominated by Breton’s presence.55

In the postwar period, however, women artists experienced a growing presence as Surrealist members, became chief contributors to journal publications and were showcased prominently in exhibitions like the 1959 EROS show. A ‘Fetishist Room’ was organised by Mimi Parent, with a ‘wall’ that included various Surrealist objects such as Parent’s ‘MasculineFeminine’ (1959) and Meret Oppenheim’s ‘The Couple’ (1956). Z¨urn was most impressed by Breton’s daughter Aube Ell´eou¨et’s erotic object and Oppenheim’s ‘tangled boots’, saying that they were the most successful in the bunch.56 In an earlier piece, ‘Ma Gouvernante, My Nurse, Mein Kinderm¨adchen’ (1936), Oppenheim explores a similar theme to ‘The Couple’, where a pair of woman’s white shoes are bound together on a silver platter in a position simulating that of a nude woman on her back, with her legs spread and ‘dressed’ with paper frills. The sculpture was Oppenheim’s way of ‘getting even with a childhood nurse by tying her shoes together’.57 The sadistic bondage of the metaphorical nurse figure performs violence against the female form. Z¨urn, who was drawn to the representation of such desires by a woman artist, would later experiment with similar themes of (homo)erotic violence towards the female body in her narratives The Man of Jasmine and Dark Spring, discussed in Chapter 6. On the opening night, Z¨urn attended the private party hosted by Joyce Mansour, where Jean Benoit executed the ‘Grand Ceremonial’ at the end of the evening, wearing an astonishing costume where ‘primitive’ shapes mingled with a flawless aggression. Z¨urn describes Benoit stamping his chest with a branding iron in the name of Divine Marquis, and Matta, grabbing the iron violently and also branding himself.58 Z¨urn became fascinated with other displays in the exhibition, referring to Oppenheim’s ‘Cannibal Feast’ in particular at length. ‘Cannibal Feast’ was an elaborate installation of a life-sized female body laid bare on a table offering guests refreshments and food. The installation was brought to life with a live performance where a real woman model was laid bare on the table, offering food and champagne 56

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to be consumed off her naked body. The live performance – performed only once, on the opening night – was replaced by a mannequin for the remainder of the exhibition. Oppenheim’s re-appropriation of the female body as an extended use of mannequins in early Surrealist exhibitions pointed to the cannibalistic and crude nature of the objectification of the female body. The installation of two male mannequins fully dressed and seated at the table as guests, heightened this effect, emphasising a particularly male consumption of the female form. The catalogue for the EROS exhibition was distributed with a limited edition ‘prop’ in the form of a mailbox, Boite Alerte [Emergency Box], included a reproduction of the Oppenheim performance, which has been described by Ren´ee Riese Hubert as an installation displaying hunger for food and sex. While in exhibitions such as the 1938 International Exhibition of Surrealism the use of mannequins emphasised the eroticisation of women and the enthronement of male desire, Oppenheim’s use of the mannequin takes this notion one step further and opens a gap between the male object of desire and the woman artist who assembled it by placing the figure horizontally on a table in contrast to the upright position of early installations. In her discussion of the performance, Hubert wrote: Oppenheim’s mannequin, recumbent on a white cloth . . . surrounded by knives, forks, nuts, and apples . . . cannot escape cannibalisation . . . Oppenheim practices Surrealist displacement insofar as the white cloth serves at once as a sheet, as a shroud, and as table linen.59

Though Oppenheim often rejected all reductive interpretations of gender relations from her work, it plays with the male representation of the female body. By performing domination over the metaphoric nurse figure, an archetypal symbol of femininity, and the Surrealist mannequin, Oppenheim’s works take control over the female body, the installation transposing the carnal with culinary desire. One of the newcomers to the exhibition brought to the attention of Breton by Bellmer was Friedrich Schroder-Sonnerstern, a German artist who had been incarcerated in both prison and a mental hospital. In his letter to Breton dated 10 December 1958, Bellmer introduces the work of Schroder-Sonnerstern with high praise, claiming he is ‘a remarkable personality and perhaps very schizophrenic’.60 Several years after the exhibition, Bellmer, who had discovered the artist in 57

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1958, continued to support Schorder-Sonnerstern by writing a letter to Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain requesting a copy of the exhibition catalogue he had lent him in order to send it to Jacques Lacan. In her account of the exhibition, Z¨urn writes about Schroder-Sonnerstern’s portrayal at the Daniel Cordier gallery, where his work was accompanied by what is referred to as an ‘unsettling’ autobiography.61 Z¨urn insinuates that the unusual experiences the artist had lived through during his incarcerations drew a unique interest to his work. Observing the reception of an artist identified as ‘schizophrenic’, Z¨urn would later present herself in a similar manner, describing her experiences with mental illness in conjunction with the presentation of her visual work. In 1967, Z¨urn held her first joint exhibition with Bellmer in Hannover, for which an accompanying catalogue was produced.62 The catalogue comprises of a full inventory of exhibited works and biographical introductions to each artist. The two biographical sections are noticeably different from one another in content and structure. The first page introduces Z¨urn in a column titled ‘Biographical points on Unica Z¨urn’. The text is a very detailed description of her life, starting from her childhood and the various objects from her house, which are in fact highly visible in some of her literary and visual works. The text continues in detail about the influences of the Orient and Arabic culture in her drawings, directly illustrated in the drawing printed on the adjacent page. The rest follows a rudimentary chronology of her career, starting from 1949, listing various publications and exhibitions, including the International Surrealist exhibition and several artists that she had met. At the bottom of the page there is a note that outlines Z¨urn’s numerous internments at psychiatric institutions and treatments. The text is then interrupted by Bellmer’s curriculum vitae printed on the following page in a very neat and justified print layout alongside a photograph of the two artists posing with Bellmer’s painting ‘Double Cephalopod’ (1955). Z¨urn poses standing up – aligning her face to her representation with an equally vacant stare, as Bellmer is positioned under the painting recreating his portrait. The subsequent page of the catalogue is the continuation of the text on Z¨urn, which is now in the form of paragraphs that describe her illness. Z¨urn’s name appears at the end of the page, suggesting that she is the writer of the text. Looking at the content, this identification becomes certain. Here, Z¨urn deliberately describes herself as a mentally

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ill woman who endures ‘deliriums’ in a creative way. She describes these experiences as ‘short and very lovely, not frightening’. She continues to describe the illustrated drawing as a product of one of her deliriums, based on the news of the American president John F. Kennedy’s death. The drawing, made ‘under the impression of the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination’ in 1963, includes a number of political slogans such as ‘all countries for love and humanity’ and ‘sun for Vietnam’ at the top, and a list of composers and artists on both sides of the portrait. Names and titles are accompanied by symbols that are an amalgam of musical notes and hieroglyphic characters. Z¨urn also includes a description of the conditions in the institutions where she had been a patient, briefly noting the treatment methods. She advertises the book she is writing at the time ‘under the impressions of a mental malady’, which will later be titled The Man of Jasmine. The impact of Schroder-Sonnerstern’s biography on the reception of his work in 1959 was undoubtedly influential on Z¨urn. Along with Schroder-Sonnerstern, Richard Oelze, another German artist promoted by Bellmer in his letters to Breton whose work was publicised widely in Surrealist journals and activities, was included in the exhibition. In a letter dated 9 June 1959, Bellmer invited Andr´e and Elisa Breton to view ‘The Doll’ so that they might include it in the exhibition. Certainly the couple must have been impressed by the object to give it a prominent place at the entrance of the show. While Bellmer goes to great effort to promote his compatriots SchroderSonnerstern and Oelze as well as himself, he pays minimal attention to Z¨urn or her artistic adequacy. Despite this semi-exclusion from Bellmer’s letters, Z¨urn was indeed included in the exhibition. In fact, from the correspondence exchanged between Bellmer and Breton between 5 October 1957 and November of that year, it becomes clear that Breton also bought a drawing by Z¨urn at the exhibition, as well as requesting photographic negatives of additional images. Breton, who for Z¨urn represented a distant admiration of Surrealism throughout the years, demonstrated his approval by including one of Z¨urn’s drawings in the International Surrealist Exhibition the following year. From this it would not be far fetched to presume that Z¨urn had been formally initiated into the group. Among 74 participants from 24 countries, Z¨urn took her place within the category of German Surrealist art with one drawing that was printed in the exhibition catalogue. The drawing included in the exhibition, titled ‘Zoobiologique’, is of a creature

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¨ UNICA ZURN Figure 8 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Zoobiologique’ [‘Zoo Biology’] in Boite Alerte, EROS exhibition catalogue, 1959. Lithographic drawing, unknown dimensions. Biblioth`eque Kandinsky. Mus´ee d’Art Moderne, Georges Pompidou, Paris

undergoing metamorphosis (Fig. 8). The drawing is similar to one made at the Karl-Bonhoeffer-Nerveklinic in Berlin of a cat with boots, which is dated 1958 by Z¨urn, with inscriptions by the institution dating it as 1960. Z¨urn’s use of a singular metamorphosing figure is repeated in her other sketchbooks. The arthropodic body appears to transform before us. The figure, which has three or more faces, is stitched together by a spider web and has a caterpillar back and monstrous claws. There are some illegible inscriptions in German. The metamorphic face and donkey-like body recalls Z¨urn’s earlier radio tale The Wondrous Animal, which she had also represented in a water colour painting dated 1950. This possible reference suggests that Z¨urn’s drawing represents her as both artist and writer, again alluding to the drawing as a self-portrait. The catalogue is a slim book with images and essays by numerous participants, printed by Daniel Cordier. Z¨urn’s first name is mispelled 60

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with a ‘k’ (Unika), perhaps to enhance the Germanic origin of her work. Even though Z¨urn does not mention participating as an artist in her long description of the exhibition in ‘Meeting with Hans Bellmer’, she does reference this in other biographical texts. The countless accounts of the exhibition, including by scholars who identify the photographed model in Bellmer’s exhibited work Unica Litog´ee as Z¨urn, fail to mention her inclusion in the exhibition as an artist.63 Z¨urn’s overlooked inclusion in the exhibition not only disregards her present status and the reception of her work by her peers, but also excludes a unique account based on primary observation of a well-known Surrealist exhibition by a supposedly marginal figure. In the 1959 Surrealist celebration of EROS, the pride of place was given to Hans Bellmer’s ‘The Doll’ (1934). ‘The Doll’, suspended by invisible strings from the ceiling, hovered above the viewer as an omnipotent presence. A year before, Bellmer’s publication The Anatomy of the Psychical Unconscious presented the manipulated female form in an earlier drawing titled ‘Bound Victim’ (1956). Similarly disfigured and contorted, the two legged-creature with its white kneesocks and black girlish shoes confronted the viewer as a representation of a Sadean victim in sculptural form. Emerging out of the combining ends of the two pelvises, the torso and head of the doll heightened the effect of its eerie presence. Bellmer’s Unica Litog´ee series shared the same space with ‘The Doll’ for the exhibition, becoming part of this particular ensemble.

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3 ‘Femme de Bellmer ’: Critical Reception from 1984 to 2014 ´ and Other Representations of Zurn ¨ Unica Litogee Hans Bellmer’s Unica Litog´ee photographic series was exhibited for the first time at the Daniel Cordier Gallery in 1959. More recently, in 2012, the Ubu Gallery showcased a selection of over 50 works by Z¨urn and Bellmer under the title Bound: Hans Bellmer and Unica Z¨urn, including Bellmer’s Unica Litog´ee and the collage Tenir au Frais, both produced in 1958.1 The exhibition sought to display the exchange between the two artists during their partnership between 1953 and 1970. As suggested by the title of this exhibition (in reference to Bellmer’s series Litog´ee [Bound]), Bellmer’s photographs are definitive of the couple’s relationship, marking both the series and Z¨urn’s participation in it as a product of Bellmer’s œuvre. This is also reflected in the academic studies on the Litog´ee series and subsequently in the critical reception of Z¨urn’s individual practice. On the cover of Le Surrealisme, mˆeme, issue 4, there is a form that can only be identified as a body by the stretched skin revealing the bumps of a curved spine and a deep cut that splits a woman in two – two buttocks that are trussed up, like the wings or legs of a bird before cooking, tightly bound together (Fig. 9). This form belongs to Z¨urn and is part of a series of photographs taken by Bellmer, one of which was cropped into a collage titled Tenir au Frais for the Surrealist journal in 1958. Le Surr´ealisme, mˆeme was first published in 1956 with Marcel Duchamp’s ´ erotic photograph of what resembles a close-up of Etant Donn´es on 62

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Figure 9 Hans Bellmer, Tenir au Frais, 1958. Collage and gouache on masonite, 23.4 × 23.9 cm. Ubu Gallery, New York and Galerie Berinson, Berlin

the cover. Only five issues of this journal were printed over three years. All five covers were by male Surrealist artists: Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Molinier, Gabriel Max, Hans Bellmer and Hans Arp, all of which are of representational images of women, with the exception of Arp’s illustration, Piano arpocalyptique. Despite the gendered implications of this list, many Surrealist women artists and writers were included in the journal, with regular contributions from well-known names such as Leonora Carrington, Toyen and Nora Mitrani. Even though Z¨urn had already been associated with the group during these years, neither her literary nor visual works were published in the journal. In Tenir au Frais a singular continuous string wrapped around the flesh creates multiple cuts around the body, pluralising its form. The body and the multiplication of it by means of splitting are also key strategies for Z¨urn in her use of language and in her drawings. These strategies are employed within a different understanding of multiplicity and fragmentation, which will be discussed in Chapter 6. The collage is branded with his initials ‘H.B.’ like a tag, and the cover is inscribed ‘A tenir au frais . . . ’ [‘Keep in a cool place’] as a crude joke on the flesh as meat. On the cover of Le Surr´ealisme, mˆeme the tonal contrast of the photograph is exaggerated, darkening the background to partially lose the domestic setting of the photographs. The flesh now becomes an abstract form resting on a fabric that has preserved its brown chequered 63

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design despite the mutilated pigmentation. The brush strokes, visible around the form, give the flesh a plastic quality, a superficial reference to violence as in Bellmer’s first doll series Die Puppe in 1933, and the second series La Poup´ee in 1935. However, the photographs present the body in its actual flesh, in no way concealing its animate form. The series of photographs (from which the delicately hand coloured collage was constructed) are referred to with two different titles, both of which are consistent with the sadistic wit of the image. One of the series’ names is known to be Unica Litog´ee, meaning ‘Unica bound’ or ‘tied’. The verb ligoter, ‘to truss’, refers to the female body as meat, an object of desire, and points to the sado-masochistic relationship between the two artists. The second, less known title is La V´enus d’Ermenonville [‘The Venus of Ermenonville’].2 The title refers to the country house Z¨urn and Bellmer shared in Ermenonville, 58 km from Paris, where these photographs were taken in 1957. In 1959 Z¨urn wrote several anagrams in their cottage, one of which is titled Dans les bois d’Ermenonville [In the Woods of Ermenonville] inscribed on the invitation for her 1964 Paris exhibition. This title recalls Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s novel Venus in Furs (1870), prompting a discussion that moves away from the more stereotypical readings of Freudian fetishism, Surrealist misogyny and violence against the female body towards looking at corporeal experience and the depiction of ‘madness’ (erotomania, schizophrenia and obsession) and their relationship to the themes of domination and submission. These photographs prompt a re-examination in order to offer new perspectives into seeing beyond Z¨urn’s body into her body of work. In The Bonds of Love, Jessica Benjamin revises Freud’s question ‘What does a woman want?’ in order to ‘shift attention from the object of desire, what is wanted, to the subject, she who desires’.3 Benjamin begins her search for ‘woman’s desire’ by asking the question: ‘How is domination anchored in the hearts of those who submit to it?’4 Before going on to critically examine the psychoanalytic model of Freud, Benjamin acknowledges what she calls ‘Freud’s gloomy view’: that is, the equation of masculinity with desire and femininity with the object of desire. For Freud, femininity is constructed through ‘the acceptance of sexual passivity . . . woman’s renunciation of sexual agency and her acceptance of object status are the very hallmark of the feminine’.5 Benjamin correctly points to the fact that ‘femininity continues to be

‘FEMME DE BELLMER ’: CRITICAL RECEPTION FROM 1984 TO 2014

identified with passivity, with being the object of someone else’s desire, with having no active desire of one’s own’.6 In order to move away from this ‘gloomy view’, Benjamin directs our attention to a system of domination from two perspectives; the participation of those who submit to power and the participation of those who exercise it. With this in mind, the images Bellmer created together with Z¨urn and her body in Unica Litog´ee invite one to reconsider previous interpretations that view the images solely from Bellmer’s perspective. There are ten known photographs that exist in print from the series. The use of string to bind the body is a prominent characteristic, and has led to the insurmountable identification of the series with previous drawings, particularly Bound Victim. In ‘The anatomy of love’, the drawing is described as an illustration of a man tightly binding his victim’s ‘thighs, shoulders, and breasts with crisscrossed wire haphazardly causing bulges of flesh’.7 Whilst the act described by Bellmer is performed by a man (in the case of Bound Victim, drawn by himself ), there is no sign of Bellmer in the Litog´ee photographs. Instead, some of the photographs show Z¨urn holding the ends of the string that is wrapped around her body. Five of the ten photographs abstract the body into ‘bulges of flesh’, where the head and limbs are cropped by the frame of the picture. In the five remaining images Z¨urn is partially dressed with her arms actively engaging with the act of being tied up (Fig. 10). The latter also reveal more personal characteristics of Z¨urn such as her pressed lips and hair falling over her shoulder. The inclusion of Z¨urn’s arms portrays a distinction from the inanimate images of The Doll and even from the cropped photographs of her body. Here, Z¨urn is actively participating in a masochistic act that contests the identification of her role as a passive bystander to the objectification of her body. Two interrelated analyses of Bellmer’s work have been read into these photographs. The first, which derives from Hal Foster’s extensive writing on Bellmer and is echoed in the writing of Alyce Mahon, is his disarticulation of the female body as an escape mechanism from and a violent protest against the National Socialist regime in Germany during the 1930s.8 This interpretation comes from a short prose poem as written in 1936 but not published until 1958, in the same issue of Le Surr´ealisme, mˆeme as the Tenir au Frais collage. In this poem, called ‘Der Vater’ [‘The Father’], Bellmer spoke of his desire to escape the patriarchal order in the games that he played with his brother, where they would pretend to be little girls. Thus, the female body became

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¨ UNICA ZURN Figure 10 Hans Bellmer, Unica Litog´ee [Unica Bound], 1957/8. Photograph. Sheet: 23.5 × 17.6 cm. Image: 16.2 × 16.2 cm. Printed by Roger Vuillez. 1983. Private collection. Ubu Gallery, New York and Galerie Berinson, Berlin

for Bellmer a shelter or refuge to which he could escape. In the poem, Bellmer writes: we were probably rather adorable, more like little girls than the formidable boys we would have preferred to be. But, it seemed to be more fitting than anything else to lure the brute out of his place in order to confuse him.9

Thus, the exchange of gender consequently and intentionally effects the power relations between father and sons. Therese Litchenstein has argued that, as a mark of his rejection of the strict masculine models sanctioned in Germany in the twentieth century, Bellmer escaped into the female form to avoid submitting to these ideals. Here, passivity is aligned with dominant views of femininity, which Bellmer adopts as a chosen action; rejecting the domination by the ‘father’ as male and receiving it as female, consistent with a Freudian system of domination. This notion is developed further in the second analysis of Bellmer’s work in terms of his desire towards the ‘hermaphrodite’ body. Bellmer’s wish to become and experience woman is expressed in 66

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The Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious (published in 1957 but actually developed during the late 1930s), where he writes of a compelling desire to merge with the opposite gender in order to possess her: ‘At the moment we were one flesh, our love was woman . . . I possessed her within myself before actually possessing her . . . It seemed that I wanted to be reborn from her as the woman I invisibly was.’10 Bellmer’s definition of his body as the feminine body speaks of his desire to become it, in order to possess it. In the ‘The Anatomy of Love’, Bellmer clearly states that ‘a multiplication must first be experienced within the physical organism of the person looking, and that she belongs to his memory . . . the man must have lived the image of the woman physically before he can actually visualise her.’11 Thus, Bellmer’s compelling desire to merge with the opposite gender and to experience what the woman experiences in her body is a desire to possess the woman, a way of conquering by means of division. In a passage from ‘The Anatomy of Love’, which Bellmer describes as ‘abolishing the wall separating the woman from her image’, he writes: ‘A man to transform his victim, had tightly bound her thighs, shoulders, and breasts with crisscrossed wire haphazardly causing bulges of flesh, irregular spherical triangles, stretching into folds, unsavoury lips, multiplying never before seen breasts in outrageous locations.’12 The multiplication of the female form occurs in a unitary manner, where the breast is the main focus. The multiplied breast in its singular form transforms the torso into a hypersexualised sadistic ideal. In an earlier untitled drawing from 1946, a similar subject is studied. In this drawing, Bellmer again depicts his object of desire without head or arms, but this time including legs with long boots with heels. This reference to fetishism heightens the sexualisation of the mutilated form, similar to Bound Victim, tied and multiplied into lumps of breasts. The drawing published in The Anatomy and the earlier study of 1946 show the origins of the image that reappears in the Litog´ee photographs. However, despite this resonance, the change in medium from drawing to photographs of a real body complicates this initial association. Looking at ‘The Father’ and The Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, it becomes clear that the gender-political aspects of Bellmer’s work are restricted to seeing the female body as an extension of male desire, within a language that speaks ‘for’ woman (or for man in the guise of woman), as opposed to one that speaks ‘as’ woman. The partnership of Bellmer and Z¨urn, is read by Suleiman as ‘a double-voiced

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discourse, containing both a “dominant” and a “muted” story’.13 The critical reception of Bellmer’s work is projected on these photographs; therefore one could claim that not only is Z¨urn’s body bound by Bellmer, but the reading of her participation has been bound to the discourse of Bellmer. In order to really see ‘Unica Bound’, we must first untie the restrictions of such readings. In ‘The violence of merging: Unica Z¨urn’s writing (on) the body,’ Caroline Rupprecht considers Unica Litog´ee as Bellmer’s misogynistic attempt to turn the body into a ‘landscape’. In her discussion, Rupprecht turns to Suleiman who asks: ‘How are we to distinguish Bellmer’s sadism from Nazi sadism, both of them directed against “feminine”?’14 Thus she continues by referring to the photographs as evidence of Bellmer’s misogyny, where Z¨urn’s body is ‘reduced to a mountain of flesh’. Rupprecht ignores any possible questions regarding Z¨urn’s complicity or the possibility that her own ‘desire’ might be expressed in her participation. Instead, Z¨urn’s body is read as one of Bellmer’s dolls, as ‘embodiments of female passivity and victimatisation’. The series of black and white photographs captures Z¨urn’s body in compositions that undergo a sort of mitosis, repeatedly dividing and multiplying; however, the collage further crops and manipulates one of these images, resulting in an abstracted form that appears plasticised due to the application of paint. The difference between the two is clearly marked by the titles for each, Unica Litog´ee and Tenir au Frais, which also highlights the distinction between animate and inanimate. The presence of Z¨urn’s body, unlike the various drawings modelled from portraits discussed in the following pages, demonstrates a physical participation and a willed involvement in the photographic series. Therefore it could be said that Rupprecht’s reading disregards the symbolic value of different materials and mediums used in the series and the participation of Z¨urn in its production. In her claims of Bellmer ‘reducing Z¨urn into a mountain of flesh’, Rupprecht reduces Z¨urn’s body in these photographs to the inanimate figure in the doll series.15 In another account, Alyce Mahon interprets Z¨urn’s participation in the Litog´ee series as her exploration of the psychology of violence, similar to Bellmer’s ‘need to explore the psychology of fascism’.16 Rupprecht, citing Margaret Eifler’s studies on Z¨urn, claims that Z¨urn’s writings do not reflect political remorse in reference to the Holocaust but rather ‘act as metaphors for Z¨urn’s own personal anxieties’.17 Contrary to Rupprecht’s claims, in ‘Hans Bellmer’s libidinal politics’,

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Alyce Mahon interprets Z¨urn’s active participation in the Litog´ee series as her exploration of the psychology of violence and her own potential, as a German, to be ‘as terrible a murderer as the Nazis’.18 Mahon rightly notes that ‘to fully appreciate any work of art we must appreciate the complex political, ideological and psychological dynamics involved in its production’.19 While turning to the historical and political contextualisation of Z¨urn’s work, Mahon’s reading remains within the perimeters of an ‘exploration of the psychology of violence’, suggesting that Z¨urn’s exploration of physical and mental fragmentation is ‘similar to Bellmer’s need to explore the psychology of fascism’.20 However, the political and historical context of Z¨urn’s work exceeds the deconstruction of the totalitarian body politic of Nazi Germany that can be identified as a particular concern in Bellmer’s work. The socio-political aspects of Z¨urn’s work and her experiences with mental illness, which encapsulate wider concerns of the 1950s and 1960s in Germany and France, prompt further attention. Mahon’s account, where the main discussion is centred around Bellmer’s anagrammatic approach to the female form as a tool of political provocation and deconstruction, reduces Z¨urn’s artistic and literary practice to an extension of Bellmer’s work: ‘Z¨urn’s writing style involved that cutting and jouissance typical of Bellmer, twisting the normal meaning of words, cutting up phrases, and using alliteration for dramatic, violent effect.’21 Quoting Bellmer’s preface written for Z¨urn’s anagrammatic compilation Hexen-texte, Mahon refers to Z¨urn’s writing in passing, and suggests that these ideas were explored in Bellmer’s The Anatomy: ‘Bellmer admired Z¨urn’s work for its corporeal-textual instability – again, an instability similar to his own pictorial work.’22 Mahon explains this ‘corporeal-textual instability’ in light of Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard’s connection of representation and production in Libidinal Economy,23 as part of a general process of libido where both bodily and economic systems are built on desire. She argues that Bellmer’s use of the anagram is ‘a tool of provocation to deconstruct the totalitarian body politic of Nazi Germany’. This reading is significant in emphasising the relationship between body and text in Bellmer’s work, which was undoubtedly, but not solely, influential on Z¨urn’s practice of anagrammatic poetry. Mahon’s reading is motivated by her objective of underlining the political implications of Bellmer’s work. In her account, Bellmer’s consistent use (‘consumption’) of libidinal excess and libidinal politics

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is seen as the intertextual nature of his art. Thus, The Doll series, The Anatomy, his anagrammatic collaboration with Nora Mitrani (discussed in Chapter 4), and the Litog´ee series are all read under the premise of a violence against the body politic of Nazi Germany, placing the anagrammatic relationship between text and the corporeal as the crux of her argument. Considering the act of inscribing the body and deconstructing the text as an interdependent process, Mahon merges the connotations of Bellmer’s work with Z¨urn’s, drawing cursory associations: Bellmer took a series of photographs of Z¨urn which mimicked this image of cruelty and which seem to enact the anagrammatic example written of in Hexentexte . . . In a series of black and white photographs, Bellmer binds Z¨urn in a manner similar to the ‘victim’ in La Petit Anatomie . . . The topography of these photographs is similar to those he made of his dolls: bleak close-ups of the objectified female, macabre in their intimacy and shocking in their domesticity.24

As stated, the presence of an actual body in the Litog´ee series complicates the relationship of these photographs to previous images of The Doll as well as to drawings in The Anatomy. While Bellmer’s fantasy of fragmenting the female body is realised in the series, and is a major advancement in his sadistic representation of the body, what is important to point out in this account is the active collaborator in the photographs. In her detailed discussion of the EROS exhibition, Mahon refers to Unica Litog´ee as ‘portraits of Z¨urn’ and The Doll, representing a testament to Sadean love.25 Though Mahon rightfully identifies Z¨urn in the images, there is a recognisable dissimilarity between these photographs and Bellmer’s ‘portraits’ of Z¨urn. In the first few years, before Z¨urn took part in the Litog´ee series, Bellmer made a number of portrait drawings of her and their relationship. Portraiture makes up a large part of Bellmer’s early career in the 1930s, when he would often draw and sometimes paint the children of his friends and family. After moving to Paris in 1938 he began creating portraits of his respected peers. Bellmer was a very talented draughtsman, producing many intimately realistic portraits of his close acquaintances. These works, which could be regarded as homages to each person depicted, pose the question of whether to regard the portraits of Z¨urn in the same way. 70

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A number of drawings made in the 1950s were shown at an exhibition at the Galerie Diderot, including a portrait of Z¨urn alongside portraits of Victor Brauner, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray and many others. After moving to Paris with Bellmer, Z¨urn often accompanied him to various gallery openings and many of the drawing sessions for the portraits, where she became acquainted with all of the represented artists. Portraiture in Surrealism, especially in the group’s photographs, bears traces of the history of the movement whilst identifying those whom were involved and therefore rendering such images social contracts. These contractual portraits represented a collective, and ‘posed portraits [that] appeared in [the Surrealist] reviews, len[t] official status to their members’.26 Some of the most memorable portraits of Surrealist members were taken by Man Ray.27 Portraiture in Surrealism documents prominent figures of the time as well as depicting the performance and activity of members. Looking over a catalogue of Man Ray’s photographic portraiture, there is an undeniable sense of recognition; from Robert Desnos to Virginia Wolf, Henry Miller to Antonin Artaud, Ray is known to have photographed the most notable personalities of the twentieth century, including Unica Z¨urn. Z¨urn met Ray again in 1956 at her first solo exhibition in Paris, where he proposed making a photographic portrait of her. This photograph marks Z¨urn’s first initiation into the Surrealist circle, and subsequently she would be invited to exhibit her work in the International Surrealist exhibition, two years later (Fig. 11). The photograph attributed to Ray, and often dated 1956, is considered the only portrait taken of Z¨urn by Ray, yet there is one more photograph signed and dedicated ‘to Unica’ which might have been taken on one of many possible occasions. One of Bellmer’s first portraits of Z¨urn dates to 1954. This drawing is a very detailed representation of Z¨urn, similar to his depiction of other artists and writers in a serious and sullen pose (Fig. 12). As in many of his other portrait drawings, Z¨urn looks downwards and away from the viewer as she allows Bellmer to capture her most prominent characteristics. Looking at Man Ray’s photographic portrait, it is clear that Bellmer does not add any particular qualities to Z¨urn’s natural appearance, so it would be right to say that it is a fairly straightforward, naturalistic portrait. In a double portrait by Bellmer in the same year, we see a large representation of Z¨urn’s face, modelled on the previous pencil drawing,

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Figure 11 Man Ray, ‘Unica Z¨urn’, 1956. Photograph, unknown dimensions. Private collection

Figure 12 Hans Bellmer, ‘Portrait of Unica Z¨urn’, 1954. Pencil on paper, 42 × 32 cm. Private collection

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alongside a standing representation of her that may have been modelled after this sketch, which is also dated 1954. This is a double-sided white ink drawing on black paper that exaggerates Z¨urn’s features, making her resemble The Doll, enlarging her eye and making her hair bow more prominent. Here, Bellmer is deliberately manipulating Z¨urn’s face, surrounding her left eye with a web of lines that appear to control her like an inanimate puppet. On the reverse of the paper, Bellmer subsumes Z¨urn’s facial features onto a drawing of two little girls, one with striped stockings playing with a marble-like object (presumably an eye) and the other looking over her in a dominating pose, with one leg bent and her hand on her hip. Bellmer’s incorporation of Z¨urn’s portrait into his ongoing studies of the doll has led critics to read the more traditional portraits as drawings that represent an ‘expressionless, doll-like face’, suggesting all portraits of Z¨urn to be equivalent to Bellmer’s doll. Rather, it would seem that Bellmer clearly uses two different representations of Z¨urn, one being the portraits of her where she is represented as his companion, writer and artist, and the other where she lends her face and body to participate in Bellmer’s continued studies on and representation of The Doll, as collaborator. Recognising such a distinction becomes pertinent to both understanding the different roles Z¨urn plays with Bellmer as well as to reading Unica Litog´ee. In another portrait of Z¨urn, dated 1956, Bellmer paints in oil on parchment paper. With this technique, which he began developing in 1954 with the portrait of his mother, Maria Bellmer, the paper folds and crumples with the paint, becoming the lines and wrinkles of an ageing face. Z¨urn, who often expressed her distaste for aging, is represented in her most feared form. A photograph of Z¨urn holding her portrait reveals the exaggerated effect of the painting, where she looks away, as if in avoidance of an inevitable truth (Fig. 13). Z¨urn describes the development of this portrait in her text on Bellmer: one day he decides that he will make a portrait for her – but he is tired of the decalcomania technique which he had already mastered and is looking for a new method. He has the idea to paste wrinkled parchment paper on canvas, applying dark and warm colours as if the surface was skin. She continues: ‘In this portrait, she revisits the face of her youth, yes, all the legends of her life.’28 While the image of her face represents herself, the parchment becomes everything she has lived through, each

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¨ UNICA ZURN Figure 13 Hans Bellmer, ‘Untitled’ [Z¨urn with Portrait by Bellmer], c.1956. Photograph, 8 × 12.7 cm. Ubu Gallery, New York and Galerie Berinson, Berlin

fold depicting an event, becoming an exhibition of her life in one face. There is one particular painting that presents a very distinctive representation of Z¨urn, one that cannot be read as a portrait but rather as a collaborative involvement prior to her participation in the Litog´ee photograph series. The painting, titled Double Cephalopod, was completed in 1955 after a number of preparatory sketches. Bellmer’s exploration of the cephalopod figure dates back to 1939 and is continued throughout the following decade, taking its most polished form in a disturbing large mixed-media portrait of himself with Z¨urn as Double Cephalopod. This meticulous painting in oil, reproduced in the catalogue for the couple’s 1967 Hannover exhibition, is combined with a collage of a lace tablecloth taking up a large part of the surface of the mutilated body. The body is viewed from behind, in a posterior pose, stretching the buttocks across the middle of the left side of the tableau, while the leg of the creature is elongated into the right bottom corner. Bellmer’s portrait, which eerily looks at the viewer from the surface of the right cheek, is represented in the same technique as his earlier 74

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portraits of his mother and Z¨urn – the cloth folds as Bellmer’s stern face wrinkles. The folds of the cloth are painted to accentuate the orifices of the body, revealing the slit of the genitalia as a simultaneous slitting of the throat. This seemingly deliberate double effect is supported by the sadistic nature of Bellmer’s approach to the female body, where desire is equivalent to a violent cruelty. Bellmer is often read within the context of a modern philosophy of eroticism along with George Bataille and key figures like Marquis de Sade, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch and Charles Baudelaire, all of whom, one way or the other, inextricably linked sexual gratification with cruelty. While Bellmer’s sketches and depiction of the female form could be read as a misogynistic attack on the female form, they can also be read as a negation of the ‘image of man’ becoming an ideological tool for political resistance. This second suggestion connects to Bataille’s statement on de Sade, whom he claimed as ‘the first person to give reasoned expression to those uncontrollable impulses on the negation of which conscience has found the social edifice and the image of man’.29 The link between Bataille’s views on eroticism, especially in 1955 when Bellmer was making a series of sketches for the short novel Madame Edwarda, can be viewed as influential on his production of the Double Cephalopod, produced in the same year. A caricature of Z¨urn’s face occupies the upper centre of the painting, supporting a disoriented blank stare and hollow cheeks. The smooth surface of her face appears lifeless beside the fleshy portrait of Bellmer. The painting is branded with a monogram that Bellmer often used as a letterhead of his initials ‘H.B.’, which can be seen on the upper right quarter next to Z¨urn’s image. The expression on Z¨urn’s depicted face resembles Bellmer’s description of her when she is having a fit. In a letter to Dr Gaston Ferdi`ere, Bellmer describes the look as a ‘frozen stare’, which is depicted in this image of her.30 It can be said that Bellmer’s use of Z¨urn as model here represents an inanimate object (the doll); a representation where Z¨urn is not present as a person but instead personifies the ‘hysterical’ woman. The lace that covers the body of the cephalopod is stitched with pearls, one painted red as a nipple; Z¨urn’s representation is eroticised to a point where the body transforms into an object that represents desire. Z¨urn’s participation in Bellmer’s work coincides with her experimentation with fragmentation and multiplicity, which is discussed in Chapter 6 of this book. The

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¨ UNICA ZURN Figure 14 Hans Bellmer, Unica Litog´ee [Unica Bound], 1957/8. Photograph. Sheet: 23.5 × 17.6 cm. Image: 16.2 × 16.2 cm. Printed by Roger Vuillez. 1983. Private collection. Ubu Gallery, New York and Galerie Berinson, Berlin

construction of the subject alludes to but is at times distinct from Z¨urn the artist, and can be related to Z¨urn’s multiple, inconsistent and fragmented representations of the ‘self ’. While in her 2003 essay Mahon references Z¨urn as a supplement to appreciating the intertextual nature of Bellmer’s art, her discussion of Z¨urn’s role in these photographs is more inclusive in an earlier account, ‘Twist the body red: the art and lifewriting of Unica Z¨urn’.31 Here, Z¨urn’s performance in Unica Litog´ee is regarded as an aggressive division of the ‘self ’, though again in relation to rejecting the Aryan ideal. The photographs are described as allegorical portraits of a female muse by a male Surrealist. Building on this, Mahon identifies some aspects of looking at Z¨urn’s collaboration and paves the way for contemplating what her practice provokes. She questions: ‘What was Z¨urn’s role in these constructions of the female (her own) body?’,32 pointing to two particular photographs in the series where Z¨urn is ‘pulling on her own binds’ and ‘squeezing her own stomach’ (Fig. 14). While these observations lead Mahon to clearly state Z¨urn’s role as collaborator, the response she offers is through Bellmer: ‘Bellmer’s writings also give us 76

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an insight into his photographs of Z¨urn.’33 These two photographs, one of which does not involve binding or string at all, are in fact the most interesting of the series and prompt a closer consideration in relation to Z¨urn’s artistic production. This particular image, which Mahon describes as Z¨urn ‘squeezing her own stomach’, clearly portrays a different effect from the bound body – that the assault against the body is self-inflicted. The juxtaposition of the photographs where Z¨urn is tying her body up with string and firmly pressing her stomach with those where the torso of body is solely portrayed indicates a division within the series; a division perhaps reflected in the two different titles, Unica Litog´ee and La V´enus d’Ermenonville. One of the strongest and most important arguments the article puts forward is Mahon’s reading of Z¨urn’s work as an ‘assault on the notion of a unified self and the body’. However, this is again related to Bellmer, similarly to her later 2003 article, where Z¨urn’s work is read through the political implications of Bellmer’s work. Here, the assault against the unified self is considered ‘as an assault on a very definite body politic . . . the body politic of Nazi Germany’.34 It is important to distinguish Bellmer’s attitude towards the female body from Z¨urn’s fragmentary representation of it. As mentioned, this early reading is informed by Foster’s analyses, which builds on the political implications of Bellmer’s practice.35 Mahon explicitly aligns her argument with Foster and Therese Lichtenstein and distances herself from the more psychoanalytically oriented reading of Sue Taylor. Bellmer’s attitude towards the female body, as stated by Foster in ‘Armour fou’, indicates a hint of ‘proto-fascist subjectivity [that is used] as an armor [sic], for self-definition, for self-defence’.36 Foster’s reading points to the photographic medium of Die Puppe and the mechanical quality of the dolls that represent a connection to the ‘(proto)fascist metallization of the human body’, which is brought to a sadistic realm by the fragmentation of that body. While this refers specifically to Bellmer’s first doll series, where a mechanical body made of papier-mˆach´e and other inanimate materials was disarticulated, the use of an actual female body in the Litog´ee series complicates its reading. The act of sadism is realised in the visual effect of cutting into the flesh, and in turn received masochistically by an active participant. Contradicting her critical assessment on earlier art-historical approaches to Z¨urn’s work through Bellmer’s, Mahon conforms to the same path of interpretation. She gives Bellmer’s The Anatomy as

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reference to bring insight to the Litog´ee photographs. The photographs are interpreted by means of Bellmer’s description of the anagram and its nature, regarded as ‘a violent, paradoxical conflict that presupposes the need for the greatest strain of the imaginative will and at the same time insist on the exclusion of all preconceived intention’.37 This interpretation reads Z¨urn’s participation merely as a passive object that remains under the possession of the male subject in service of his own desires. Returning to Jessica Benjamin’s revision of Freud’s question, we find that Mahon’s account, though at times questioning the system of domination in these photographs, fails to escape Freud’s ‘gloomy view’. This restricts the argument Mahon constructs of Z¨urn’s individual engagement with her body as subject rejecting the independent connection it has with the photographic series. By transferring the implications of The Doll on to these photographs, we not only forget that the images are of an actual body but also that the act of sadism is received by a participating subject. Thus, revealing the confusion of Bellmer’s desire with that of Z¨urn leads us to see that their relationship and their artistic collaborations are informed by a sadistic and masochistic binary that invites us to reconsider the photographs from the perspective of subject as the one who desires.

Towards a New Understanding Academic interest in Germany emerged after Z¨urn’s publication of The Man of Jasmine in 1977. However, none of this research has been translated into French or English, and all of it is outdated. It was not until 1999, over 20 years later, that a major retrospective exhibition of Z¨urn’s visual work was held, in Berlin. There was a boom in North American research during the 1990s (especially in 1994 when Z¨urn’s books were first translated into English) and later in France after a large retrospective in 2006 in Paris. Whilst Z¨urn’s legacy was reawakened, the research consisted of short accounts that focused on a narrow selection of works and/or relied heavily on limited biographical information. A typical portrayal of Z¨urn can be read in the anthology Surrealist Women: Born in 1916 into a prosperous family in Berlin, Unica Z¨urn grew up oblivious to the horrors of Nazism and remained so until around 1943–1944, when by chance she heard an underground radio report of the concentration camps. After this shattering experience she never returned to any kind of

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with Bellmer in 1953 was a determining one, and they became one of the most extraordinary couples in the history of Surrealism . . . unwilling to adapt to the deteriorating vicissitudes of life, she jumped from a window to her death in 1970.38

This simplistic summary excludes important facts and features of Z¨urn’s artistic life and work. Among the invaluable sources on Z¨urn’s life are the writings of Ruth Henry, close friend and the first to translate the manuscript The Man of Jasmine. Henry has written extensively on Z¨urn, often short biographical notes that provide deeply personal accounts. in Obliques: La Femme Surr´ealiste39 and descriptions of their shared living conditions in various articles from 1991 to 2006.40 In her preface to a collection of letters published in 2006, she wrote that Bellmer was the centre of their worlds and described Z¨urn as being dwarfed by his success.41 The description of the first time Henry received the manuscript The Man of Jasmine is most compelling; Z¨urn’s name, written on the title page, was accompanied by the inscription ‘femme de Bellmer’ [literally translated as ‘Bellmer’s woman’]. In fact, a close inspection of letters, invitations and photographs reveal this same inscription. Almost all Z¨urn’s external presentations were accompanied by this ‘stamp’ of identification. A strong advocate of Z¨urn’s work as artist, Henry proclaimed in an essay entitled ‘My encounter with Unica’: ‘Those who have considered her art a marginal product resulting from her intimate relationship with Bellmer would soon learn how mistaken they were and realise that they were dealing with uniquely personal creations arising from quite different origins.’42 Henry’s moving statement points to a significant historical fact; that during her lifetime Z¨urn was largely known through Bellmer. Equally, Henry redirects the viewer’s attention to considering Z¨urn as an individual. As if to put an unknowing audience to shame, with a selfassured tone Henry proclaims that anyone who comes across Z¨urn’s work will not be left untouched. Similarly, Sigrid Weigel predicted in 1987 that ‘the interest in [Z¨urn’s] literary work would increase in the years to come’.43 This has been contested by some commentators, however, such as Rita Morrien who stated that: ‘The name of Z¨urn remain[s] known only to a comparatively small number of readers.’44

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‘normal’ life. Later diagnosed as schizophrenic, she was at various times hospitalised in institutions in Paris and Berlin and La Rochelle. Her meeting

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The perception of Z¨urn as ‘femme de Bellmer’ has survived into current accounts on her work, where it is often read as an extension of Bellmer’s artistic objectives. In an earlier essay ‘Unica Z¨urn, la femme qui n’´etait pas la poup´ee’ [‘Unica Z¨urn, the woman who is not the doll’], Henry writes of Michel Leiris’ impression of The Man of Jasmine: ‘I know of Bellmer’s woman [la femme de Bellmer] as an artist . . . but this amazing book has given me one of the most important readings of these last years.’45 In an account by Katherine Gerstenberger, Z¨urn’s work is considered to be restricted to a syntax created by Bellmer: With its effects on the psyche and the body, mental illness causes distortions of the body that remind Z¨urn of Hans Bellmer’s artistic fragmentations and re-compositions of female-bodies. Z¨urn lives with constructions of femininity that Bellmer can manipulate at will as objects of art.46

Likewise, the writings of Alyce Mahon and Caroline Rupprecht share this approach, where the socio-political aspects of Bellmer’s work are read into Z¨urn’s use of the anagrammatic form and fragmentation. More recent interpretations have searched for new routes into reading Z¨urn’s work whilst coming across the same obstacles. Commenting on the section of the journal Sulfur that was dedicated to her anagrammatic poems and drawings, Z¨urn’s anagrams are considered within a broader dimension: Z¨urn’s anagrams would present a response to Cixous’ demands for the liberation of female aesthetic forms . . . however, this argument is undercut by the fact that the form was invented and introduced to her by her partner, Hans Bellmer . . . it originates not only in the creative practice of a male artist, but one which subjects the female body to the anagrammatic ‘game of permutation and displacement’.47

In a later, longer account of Z¨urn in Magnifying Mirrors (1994) this point is emphasised further: ‘Z¨urn’s relationship with Bellmer can hardly account for her achievement as a writer and graphic artist, even though their encounter may have given a strong impetus to her creativity.’48 In another account Riese Hubert consistently states: ‘The painter [Bellmer] has undoubtedly initiated the game, but the poet [Z¨urn] by no means remained a junior member of the partnership let alone a mere follower.’49 Such statements have in time transformed 80

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what was thought to be the fate of many women Surrealists, whose works until then had been defined by, compared to and parenthesised by their male counterparts. What was then the canonical approach to these women artists has long been replaced by studies on individual timelines and subjectivities. Another issue raised by Z¨urn’s work is the dangers of ‘psychobiography’. The complex entanglement between Z¨urn’s artistic production and her mental illness may lead to constricted views on her creative ability as a side effect rather than artistic ability. However, a complete disregard of Z¨urn’s actual experiences of mental illness may be equally detrimental. Whilst some scholars like Katharina Gerstenberger have chosen to focus on the lexicology of ‘madness’ merely as a tool for literary gain, Jennifer Cizik Marshall criticises Gerstenberger, amongst other scholars like Margret Eifler, for ignoring or overlooking the realities of Z¨urn’s illness.50 While stating the dangers of ‘psychobiography’, she writes that ‘it is critical that this gap . . . be recognized and examined through an investigation of her works in the specific context of her disease as she herself describes it’.51 The central claim of the text suggests that Z¨urn was not actually schizophrenic and proposes that retrospectively she could clinically be diagnosed as suffering from what is now known as bipolar disorder.52 The medical files that accumulated from Z¨urn’s numerous internments have not been disclosed and for that reason any interpretation based on psychology remains conjectural. Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain, a psychiatrist who was a young student at SaintAnne Hospital in Paris during the 1960s, became closely associated with Z¨urn and Bellmer, often frequenting their house and spending time with the couple, together with his then wife Catherine Binet. Though Rabain never treated Z¨urn as her doctor, he received a photograph from her medical file shortly after her death. Recalling the mysterious event, Rabain claimed that the medical file had disappeared. However, he recalls Z¨urn as someone who was often heavily medicated and at times experienced paranoid delusions.53

¨ in France: Irigaray’s ‘A natal lacuna’ Critical Reception of Zurn Though Z¨urn comes from a German background, a large part of her artistic career took place in France. Z¨urn’s artistic presence in Paris and her subsequent representation in retrospective exhibitions have attracted French feminist perspectives. In her incisive account of 81

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feminism in France during the 1960s Claire Duchen points out that at this time the boundaries between psychoanalysis, radical political thought, the critique of power and philosophy were abolished, creating an interdisciplinary dialogue on issues of women’s repression and the feminisation of illness.54 Between the two world wars, the patriarchal French mentality towards women’s role in society was similar to the ‘woman question’ in the Third Reich in that the problem of family and population politics informed the definition of women’s role as mothers. Robert J. Belton points to this issue in his discussion of Andr´e Masson’s headless women in Naissance de la femme (1943): ‘In 1939, for example, new legislation made it illegal for women to use contraceptives or to obtain an abortion, because women’s role was to repopulate a decimated country.’55 Within this context, Belton reads Masson’s headless women as icons of a historically specific antifeminism: ‘headlessness also connotes the loss of intelligence, which is particularly interesting in this context since French pro-natalist policy was one of the principal reasons that women did not get the right to vote for another half-decade’.56 Over several decades feminist theorists have considered the concept of ‘subjectivity’ from a woman’s perspective. For H´el`ene Cixous, writing is a forceful cultural expression of women’s alterity: [feminine text] is recognizable by the way it has no end: doesn’t finish . . . the quest for origins, illustrated by Oedipus, isn’t something that haunts the feminine unconscious. On the other hand, the beginning, or rather, beginnings, the way to begin, not punctually with the phallus and closing with the phallus, but starting on all sides at once, that is the inscription of the feminine. . . . 57

Like Juliet Mitchell and Deleuze and Guttari, Cixous eliminates the Oedipal element of the equation.58 She continues: ‘you can’t foretell a feminine text, it can’t be predicted, it doesn’t know itself (isn’t conscious of itself ), it is therefore very troubling. You can’t think of it in advance, and I believe that femininity is written without anticipation.’59 Here, Cixous is describing the feminine text as something that is inherently spontaneous and multiple, ‘starting on all sides at once’. Such qualities carry a resounding similarity to a form of automatism. Though Cixous does not directly refer to this strategy, the relationship between automatism and the woman [‘feminine’] is 82

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revised. Rather than woman becoming a representation or symbol for the ‘unconscious’ as the Surrealist vessel, her ‘inscription’ written from her own subjectivity takes on this form of production that is resistant to analysis and coherent understanding, one that is spontaneous and multiple, which also reflects aspects of critical inquiry into logocentric institutions. In linear readings, priority is given to certain meanings through structure, as explored and critiqued by Michel Foucault in his seminal book Les Mots et les choses. Une arch´eologie des sciences humaines [The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences]60 and also by Jacques Derrida in essays like ‘Structure, sign and play in the discourse of the human sciences’ in Writing and Difference.61 Written within the same period, Z¨urn’s fragmentary texts that play on, question and disrupt such expectations also point to the problem of language and representation as well as the construction of history and institutions. However, while Z¨urn does not escape this system fully, she investigates such issues from within. Certainly, such investigatory expressions are read within a wider frame of feminist inquiry and current understandings of women’s writing, which at times remain restrictive. Z¨urn’s mode of expression as discussed in Chapter 6, works off binaries of difference where simple oppositions such as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ or ‘love’ and ‘hate’ and more complex differences like ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are used and transposed, posing forms of inconsistency. ‘Difference’ in French feminism was regarded a sign of weakness, a submission to the phallocentric system of language and signs. This perception of women’s subjectivity created a specific frame that was not open to interpretation. Penser autrement [thinking differently] (‘otherness’), extended to encompass that which is outside a dominant conceptual system (such as madness, poetry, cannibalism) that could be seen as a psychological, linguistic and social otherness.62 These two viewpoints, which are assimilated into feminist theory, result in two opposite poles. The ‘other’, as posed by Simone de Beauvoir, confronted the question of women’s experience contrasted with the demands of society, which imposes on her a different image from that she has of herself.63 This limited view associated the ‘other’ with the inferior, the inessential, while on the other hand, the appropriation of ‘otherness’ and assimilating it to the ‘feminine’ hoped to open new possibilities to the perception of woman and woman’s subjective experience. Both Cixous, whose emphasis on women’s writing points to the significance of difference, and Luce

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Irigaray, whose discourse is preoccupied by questions of subjectivity and identity, rationality and the unconscious, rethink these questions in light of sexual difference. As a prominent writer of the period who partook in the early discussions on Z¨urn’s work on a theoretical level, and as someone who has dedicated her entire career to discussing such issues, it is of interest to consider Irigaray’s views on Z¨urn as woman and artist. Though now considered by some to be slightly outdated, Irigaray’s writing from the 1970s provides a strong theoretical model that resonates closely with these issues and the prominent tool of multiplicity in Z¨urn’s work. Irigaray’s work continues to inspire recent scholarship on visceral philosophy, feminism and critical theory.64 Irigaray’s account of Z¨urn, while still an intriguing essay, more significantly reflects a history of Z¨urn’s reception as writer and artist. Z¨urn, though known to some extent in small artistic circles of Paris, was not fully embraced by the German literary scene; she was not accepted as a writer or artist until the late 1970s and early 1980s, when many changes in social forms were officially voiced and formally implemented. In the 1980s revival of interest in Z¨urn’s work it was adopted by extreme left feminist circles in Berlin, which led to the appropriation of her work to build a case against the detrimental effects of a repressive patriarchal system by showing Bellmer as a prime negative figure in Z¨urn’s life.65 While incorporating Z¨urn’s German background into a discussion of an artistic subjectivity, it is important to keep in mind that the early reception of the works, as discussed in Chapter 2, was primarily by a French public. In Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, Margaret Whitford writes that Irigaray’s writing should be read as discursive interventions or interpretations that seek to recode the imaginary symbolic structures of Western thought.66 Distinct from the Lacanian ‘symbolic’, which carries a mediative function that separates the ‘Imaginary’ from the ‘Real’, for Irigaray the symbolic order is dually structured through difference which is productive and can accommodate a ‘double syntax’.67 Irigaray’s restructuring of language and model of a ‘female subjectivity’ closely corresponds to Z¨urn’s artistic methodology, where both place emphasis on multiplicity and the plural as significant qualities of expression. Irigaray has become a well recognised French thinker, primarily in the discourse of feminism, who brought attention to what she called the ‘monosexuality’ of Western thought with the publications Speculum

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of the Other Woman and This Sex which is not One.68 Irigaray’s essay ‘This sex which is not one’ builds an insightful theory of the multiplicity of woman’s identity. Irigaray claims that the plurality of woman resists all adequate definitions and therefore cannot be categorised in singular characterisations. In Irigaray’s ongoing discourse, the origin of her early writings examine woman as ‘the scene on which representations are staged . . . the mirror in which Western man saw himself reflected’.69 There are a number of concepts in Irigaray’s theoretical model that appear common to Z¨urn’s methodology, which call for attention. First is the notion of ‘multiplicity’ that coincides with Irigaray’s definitions of ‘plurality’. For Irigaray, plurality is a tool of resistance against what she regards as the ‘monolithic’ phallocentricism of symbolic structure. Therefore, plurality (specifically referred to as ‘being two’ in her metaphoric reference to female genitalia and lips as an organ of speech) has been discussed in terms of a multiplicity. The second notion, which can be seen as an extension of the first, is evading a unified self. Finally, the third can be seen as the escape from the representation of the female body. In their introduction to the issue of Diacritics dedicated to discussing the political aspects of Irigaray’s writing, Pheng Cheah and Elizabeth Grosz highlight a common misconception of readers of ‘When our lips speak together’;70 that while Irigaray is characterised as a ‘champion of multiplicity, which is enacted in/as e´criture feminine or parler-femme’, ‘multiplicity’ is ‘the one in its self-willed dispersal into unrelated atomistic singularities, many others of the same’.71 In this sense, ‘multiplicity’ comes to imply not a counter to phallocentric discourses on femininity such as the monosexual discourse of psychoanalysis, but a fragment of the logic of the one: ‘the Platonic monologic that reduces the other to a pale copy of deficient version of the same’.72 Therefore, plurality in Irigaray’s terms refers to difference that is based on a double syntax. In line with this, the fragmentation operative in Z¨urn’s work, which can be referred to as a ‘multiplicity’, is based on a repetition of difference, and therefore is based in a multiplicity of pluralities. This can be discussed in terms of a plurality of twos specifically in reference to Z¨urn’s use of binaries and difference, but also a plurality in more general terms, as a multiplicity that generates new meanings out of fragmentary transformations.73 In her reading of Irigaray’s feminist texts, Hilary Robinson observes a set of terms that are used to refer to forms of repetition.74 These different forms,

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such as mime, masquerade, mimicry, mimesis and reproduction, refer to the different notions that can be productive or counterproductive for female subjectivity. Mimesis, and particularly a ‘hysterical mimicry’, are regarded by Irigaray as possible strategies of resistance, where the process of imitation, specularisation and reproduction are transformed into a ‘productive-mimesis’. This is identified specifically with women’s writing as an investigatory, interpretative strategy where different interpretations offer new meanings of ‘the same’.75 For her clinical experience Irigaray trained as a psychoanalyst in France, and worked for several years with patients at the Sainte-Anne Hospital, where Z¨urn was incarcerated prior to Irigaray’s training. Her training took place under Jacques Lacan after she had participated in his well-known seminars, also delivered at the Sainte-Anne Hospital. Like Lacan, Irigaray is critical of the institution; however her criticism is based on the way psychoanalysis is transmitted from patriarchal lineage, historically determined, exclusive and devoid of recognition of the perpetuation of cultural phantasies within a discipline that purports to analyse the phantasies of others.76 In her introduction to Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine Margaret Whitford comments that a large number of Irigaray’s terms derive from Lacan and Derrida, albeit often reworked or redefined.77 Whitford begins with a short anecdote of how Irigaray, as a woman thinker, ‘hated being asked personal questions’. This is explained by Irigaray as follows: ‘I don’t think that my work can be better understood because I’ve done this or that. The risk is that such information will disrupt people when they read.’78 Whitford goes on to explain further: ‘one way of neutralising a woman thinker whose work is radically challenging is to reduce her to her biography’.79 Whitford discusses the example of Simone de Beauvoir, whose work was often reduced to her appearance, emotional problems and her relationship with Jean Paul Sartre. It is ironic that a feminist thinker who is said to have maintained an ‘uncompromising anti-autobiographical position’ in her own writing would go onto evaluate and analyse a woman artist by exactly such a reading, which was carefully avoided in her own reception. In her short essay ‘Une lacune natale’ [‘A natal lacuna’], Irigaray cites Z¨urn as a negative example within women’s exploration of their psychic pain in the 1970s as a liberating iconoclasm, and regards Z¨urn as a ‘failure to become both artist and woman’.80 With no intention of claiming to revise Irigaray’s theories on fragmentation,

Rereading ‘A natal lacuna’ Following the 1981 exhibition of Z¨urn’s work in Paris, Irigaray was invited to take part in a panel discussion focused on her life and work. Shortly after, Irigaray incorporated her impressions from this event into a short essay titled ‘Une lacune natale’. This essay is a condensed piece of writing of only three pages that puts forward a hostile reading of Z¨urn as a negative example of women artists. Irigaray accuses Z¨urn of having failed as an artist as well as a person, claiming that the fragmentation of herself and work has led her to succumb to a void without having developed an artistic identity. It must be noted that in 1985 there was very little or no scholarship on Z¨urn and very limited access to her complete works. Therefore Z¨urn was largely known solely through exhibition reviews which were dominated by Bellmer’s overshadowing fame and her battle with mental illness that ended in suicide. Her longer narratives available in that year were most likely the only source of insight for Irigaray to contemplate Z¨urn’s artistic persona. Although this piece of writing is yet to be outdone in its theoretical richness, its interpretation is limited by the availability of material and it therefore fails to look beyond the association of autobiographical elements to its products. A more complete compilation of Z¨urn’s visual œuvre, which has recently only been made available, therefore prompts a revaluation of Irigaray’s account. Firstly, it is important to note Irigaray’s political stance at the time the essay was written. In The Irigaray Reader Whitford writes:

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femininity or of resolving the contradictions in her work, rereading Irigaray’s essay touches on ways of rethinking her previous judgement by pointing to related aspects of her thought that coincide with Z¨urn’s practice as an artist.81 Therefore, considering common ideas explored in their work will allow a theorisation of the fragmentation operative within Z¨urn’s practice, while simultaneously defending her from Irigaray’s own criticisms.

Since about 1985, Irigaray has become more and more concerned with having an effect on society and changing existing social forms . . . which involves a more direct focus on women’s civil status, their position as a sex before the law, the need for womankind to be recognised as a genre distinct from mankind, and the importance of translating sexual difference into specific social forms.82

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The essay’s tone corresponds to such concerns, where, according to Irigaray, Z¨urn’s fragmentation and lack of an ideal self display a failure to discover a female ideal. She reads Z¨urn’s art as an expression of her will to escape the self, to mutate into many selves and as a refusal to fashion an ideal self that would subsequently replace patriarchy’s ideal female self: ‘She escapes from her anatomy, from the sites of her body. She mutates. But in doing so, she does not transform herself.’ This particular criticism may conform to Irigaray’s search for ‘specific social forms’, and considering Z¨urn’s play on multiplicity and fragmentation, especially in her literary prose this observation is in fact, partially correct. However, while Irigaray’s essay considers this ‘escape’ from the representation of the female body as a failure to transform in to a singular ‘ideal self ’, it would seem, on the contrary, that evading a unified representation is a strength, rather than a failure, that is one of the most productive characteristics of Z¨urn’s creativity. The strength of Z¨urn’s work is evident in her use of particular tools that correspond to concepts supported by Irigaray in her earlier writing, such as using multiplicity as a tool to evade the phallocentric conception of the ‘feminine’ and the representation of the female body as object of desire, mother figure or passive conduit. As Whitford suggests, Irigaray’s texts require a dynamic reading, keeping in mind that each text is a product of one moment, posing issues in subjectivity and therefore not necessarily a closed, finished opinion. By taking into account Z¨urn’s wider artistic production, the short essay can be taken further by revisiting Irigaray’s discourse, in which she sought to explore the female imagination, reinvent the female subject and establish a new language in order to reclaim a female subjectivity. Much like Z¨urn’s practice, Irigaray’s writings are not static but are rather ever-changing, with new perspectives that encapsulate the postmodernist exploration of plurality and the dissolution of the self, paving the way for new conceptions of identity, subjectivity and artistic production. Thus when Irigaray claims that Z¨urn as an artist is defeated by her dominant, male counterpart (Hans Bellmer), and accuses her of not being able to replace the patriarchal ideal female image, we should be reminded of the significance in Z¨urn’s active collaboration in Bellmer’s production of her own image, which she in turn individually represents from her own position as subject. Z¨urn elaborates her own set of images, drastically different from Bellmer’s images of the female body in both technique and theory. While

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Bellmer’s mutilated bodies often unite to form a singular phallic form that represents a male eroticism, Z¨urn, on the other hand, remains fragmented and plural. Thus, by ‘escaping from her anatomy’, Z¨urn transforms her self into a multiplicity of female identity, which cannot be defined in singular characterisations but remains fragmented and plural – as Irigaray once stated all women should be in her 1977 essay ‘This sex which is not one’.83

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4 Anagrams ‘Rosen mit violettem Herz’ In 1953, Z¨urn’s artistic career took a turn when she formed what she described as a ‘deep friendship’ with Hans Bellmer: ‘It began in Berlin, a chance meeting at a gallery opening. Mutual recognition from the first moment . . . and suddenly meeting again on a platform at the Jungfernheide subway station.’1 In ‘Meeting with Hans Bellmer’, Z¨urn writes about the influence Bellmer had on her, more specifically about her first experience of composing anagrams together. Bellmer, a much older and more experienced artist, introduced Z¨urn to anagrammatic poetry; a form of constrained writing that would become a formative tool in both her literary and graphic work for the remainder of her creative output. They take writing materials and go to the top of the hill overlooking an enormous park and a rose garden, next to the Gesundbrunnen station. They sit in the sun on a green bench and together they try to turn the phrase ‘Rosen mit Violettem Herz’ into an anagram. When there are two of you, your concentration is twice as intense!2 This detailed recollection marks an important moment for Z¨urn. She had been known as a published author since the late 1940s, writing short stories as well experimenting with painting. Composing anagrammatic poetry was an experimental form of writing that was new to Z¨urn and had been discovered by Bellmer only a few short years before their meeting. Bellmer was introduced to the anagram by Nora Mitrani, a Bulgarian writer who was initiated into Surrealism in 1946. 90

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Mitrani was a sought-after writer who contributed to several Surrealist journals, including M´edium and Le Surrealisme, mˆeme. She became a familiar name amid postwar Surrealists, and an inspiration for Z¨urn long after her death in 1959, both as a prominent writer as well as Bellmer’s former lover. Mitrani became involved with Bellmer in 1946 and made a lasting impression on his work, modelling for his photographs and writing about his life and work. The most significant contribution Mitrani made was the anagram, which later became a definitive philosophical model for Bellmer’s disarticulation of the female form. In 1950, Mitrani and Bellmer wrote a single anagrammatic poem together, with the collaboration of artist and friend, Jo¨e Bousquet. ‘Rose au cœur violet’ [‘Rose with a violet heart’] is the prototype anagram for Bellmer and shaped the theoretical backbone of his book Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious or The Anatomy of the Image (1957/8). The Anatomy of the Image is a self-theorisation of Bellmer’s doll series, where the anagram becomes the epitome of a linguistic representation of the body. The Doll had a lasting impression on the Surrealists, who were fascinated by it as ‘the ultimate embodiment of the muse as an inanimate object of desire in Surrealism . . . [soon] female dummies were to be seen everywhere in Surrealist exhibitions’.3 The association of the body with a sentence that can be taken apart and put back together came to be recognised as slogan from the book for the Dolls: ‘the body is comparable to a sentence that invites you to disarticulate it, for the purpose of recombining its actual contents through a series of endless anagrams’.4 In his preface for The Games of the Doll, Bellmer wrote: ‘The imagination draws exclusively on the bodily experience . . . the fact is that language has very few means with which to illustrate the interceptive images of the body.’5 Bellmer’s interest in anagrammatic composition, insofar as its potential to act as catalyst for the disarticulated body relied on a physical and visual product; the inclusion of the single anagrammatic poem ‘Rose au coeur violet’ in The Anatomy, demonstrates the importance of the anagram for Bellmer as a theoretical concept, rather than a literary tool that unleashes the potential of language. ‘Rose au coeur violet’ Se vouer a` toi oˆ cruel A toi, couleuvre rose

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O, vouloir eˆtre cause Couvre-toi, la rue ose Ouvre-toi, oˆ la sucr´ee Va, o`u surr´eel cˆottoie O, l’oiseau cr`eve-tour Vil os e´coeura route Coeur viol´e osa tuer Soeur a` voile courte – e´colier vous a outr´e Cur´e, o`u Eros t’a viol´e – o`u l’´ecu osera te voir O`u verte colori´ee sua – cou ouvert sera loi O rire sous le couteau Roses au coeur violet6 [‘Rose with a violet heart’ Devoted to you O cruel one To you, pink garter snake O, desirious to be the cause Cover yourself, the street dares Open yourself, O sugared one Go to where the surreal lies near O, the kill tower bird Vile bone disgusted the road Violated heart that dared to kill Sister of the short veil – schoolboy who offended you Priest where Eros has violated you – where the shield dares spy upon you Where coloured green sweated – open throat will be the law O laughter under the knife Roses with violet hearts]

The title ‘Rose au coeur de violet’ is borrowed from the first line of G´erard de Nerval’s sonnet Chim`eres [Chimeras] (1854). The anagram, which loses its aggressive and sadistic tone in translation, is full of double phonetic meanings. As Marcelle Fonfreide rightly suggests, anagrams are ‘virtually untranslatable, except to show direction, to indicate the “meaning”’.7 The title itself implies a play on the exchange of roles between domination and submission, where the heart can either be 92

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perceived as violent itself or ‘bruised’ by another. The colour ‘violet’ denotes death, where the heart would take the colour purple upon its tissues, clotting and dying. This early poem is playfully compliant to the tone of the title, building on and expanding the already existent implications into a sadistic erotic encounter. Much like the traditional process of anagrammatic composition, where a word or a sentence is rearranged to produce a new word or phrase by using the original letters exactly once, the overall meaning of the title and the subject is maintained. Mitrani’s creative influence on Bellmer was cut short when she left him for French writer Julien Gracq in 1953. Bellmer met Z¨urn later that year, and was keen to share his current interest in anagrammatic composition. Z¨urn quickly became accustomed to the strategy, constructing the anagram ‘Rosen mit violettem Herz’ together with Bellmer.8 ‘Rosen mit violettem Herz’ Hortensie reitet zum Olm Sie loht im Zorne, meutert Hoer’ Untier, Mimose lenzt Entroete sie im Holzturm Lunte her, zittere im Moos Turmotter ziehe mein Los Immer zeitlose Totenuhr Romhure zotet mit Eselin – Listviehmormone zetert Nimm Lottes Eiterzeh’ vor – Lusttote’ nimm rohe Reize Heize Monstrumteile rot – los, hetze mir vier Motten Vorzeiten-Himmel rostet Ins leere Ruhm-Motto Zeit Zieht Reim vom ersten Lot Im letzten Ei Rest vom Ohr Violetter Zenith-Sommer [‘Rose with a violet heart’ Hydrangea rides to the Olm She blazes in anger, mutinies Listen monster, mimosa pumps out Unredden her in the wood tower

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Slowmatch here, tremble in the moss Tower otter, draw my lot Ever timeless deathwatch Rome-whore makes filth with the she-ass – cunning cattle mormon nags Get to work on Lotte’s pus toe – Lust-murder victim, take raw charms Heat monster parts red – Go hunt four moths for me Prehistory-heaven roasts I not the empty glory-motto time Stretches rhyme from the first plummet In the last egg the rest of the ear Violet zenith-summer]

The rigid tone of Z¨urn’s first anagram ‘Rosen mit violettem Herz’ lacks the wit and poetic metaphor of its French counterpart. With its clinical references to the body, the words that emerge carry an almost critical perception of women as objects, and it does not have the same fluidity of exchange as the first anagram written with Mitrani and Bousquet. One could say that Bellmer was not particularly equipped with Mitrani’s poetic skills, and may have been overpowered by the influence of Z¨urn’s ‘stiff and deadly serious’ style that ousts the fluid demise of the female body in the original.9 Z¨urn continued to practise anagrammatic poetry and expanded its parameters by playing against constraints; whilst these two poems were Bellmer’s last. He included ‘Rosen mit violettem Herz’ in The Anatomy, as his German reconstruction of the original French anagram, with no reference to Z¨urn’s collaboration.

Finding a Unique Syntax A small fraction of Z¨urn’s poems, most often written in German, and sometimes in French, were translated into English by Pierre Joris in 1991. In his translator’s note for the anagrammatic poems reproduced in Sulfur magazine, Joris writes: In the final analysis . . . what makes [Z¨urn’s] poems gripping work for the reader is not so much the method itself – though it is essential to know that she did use a specific procedure to generate her texts, but the meaningful

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images the poet is able to generate due to/despite of/with and against her chosen procedures.10

Joris indeed refers to a quality of Z¨urn’s work which no non-German speaker can truly appreciate. However, by placing the value of the poems solely on their poetic imagery he effectively discredits the significance of the method by which they are produced. Despite the careful and considerate approach of his translation, Joris’ assertion regarding Z¨urn’s anagrams is disputable. The poems are produced in a somewhat generic manner, where titles or phrases from existing literature or road signs are reconfigured and reproduced. Therefore the anagrams are not only unique works but can be seen as part of a wider serial method that uses the restrictive bounds of the anagrammatic form as a source of inspiration. Z¨urn’s process of composing anagrammatic poems and her use of them as multiple and reproducible objects demonstrate that the method of their production can be held at equal significance to their content. The translation and analysis of the poems have been discussed in a number of individual studies.11 However, the quality that is equally as important as their content, that is, the method by which the poems are produced, has not been previously explored. By reusing old texts and titles, Z¨urn explores the relationship between language and meaning; as a result, the procedure and outcome of the anagrams remain intentionally incongruous to point to a gap between the signifier and the signified that in turn does not allow a definitive reading. This incongruity is significant as it underlines the methodical system of poetic composition that is applied to Z¨urn’s literary writing style to suggest a gap or void between object and subject, self and other. This divide demonstrates anagrammatic poems’ correspondence to Z¨urn’s larger body of work. Games, from her childhood to her later role-playing as the ‘Native Indian mother’, form a significant part of Z¨urn’s artistic output in this period, where Bellmer’s practice introduces a new dimension of ‘desire’ into her already playful representations of ‘selfhood’ and ‘identity’. Indeed, the ‘cruel syntax’ of Bellmer’s dolls would later be read in most of Z¨urn’s writings, where her anagrammatic poetry and prose are either considered in light of The Doll, or solely as a documentation of her later struggles with mental illness.12 In ‘Remarks of an Observer,’ a text written in the late-stages of Z¨urn’s life, she gave a very short reflection on Bellmer’s work.13 In response to her question 95

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posed to Bellmer, ‘[w]hat would you say if the Doll entered, provided with four legs, into this room?!’, he gives the following answer: ‘I would be obligated to shout . . . like a child who is frightened by his own game.’14 From Z¨urn’s first-hand account, we find a contradistinction between her fearless approach to serious subject matter and Bellmer’s theoretical distance from his material. Initially a means of earning a living, Z¨urn’s creative use of anagrams is incorporated into expanding on her broader interest in games by utilising the rules of constraint as a tool for understanding the potential of language as well as providing a new theoretical dimension for understanding the unconscious. Themes of cruelty and desire, as well as illness, which are taken up as subject matter, are intimate materials for Z¨urn. The blurred lines between reality and the imagined inadvertently provide a set of rules that shape Z¨urn’s work into games with an openended progression; similarly, experimental themes shape narratives and the variation of characters and identities formed in the plot. Writing for Z¨urn evolves into a tool that shapes her artistic methodology. Thus anagrammatic composition becomes a formative method in the production of longer narratives, namely The Man of Jasmine, among other shorter texts. The Man of Jasmine was published by Gallimard Press in 1971, which was at the time known for representing and supporting French resistance writers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus and Andre Malraux. Founded by Gaston Gallimard in 1911 with the journal Les Editions de La Nouvelle Revue Francaise (NRF), the publishing house had become so popular that by the 1950s and 1960s it had a backlist of manuscripts from writers waiting to be published. Raymond Queneau, who would later become one of the founding members of the Oulipo group, joined Gallimard in 1933 as an author and became a permanent member in 1938 as translator and member of the editorial board. Georges Perec, who was a regular contributor to La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, met Queneau in 1967 and became a member of the Oulipo group. Oulipo, founded by Franc¸ois Le Lionnais and Queneau in 1960, was a research group in experimental literature that relied on the basis of restricted writing methods such as anagrams and lipograms: ‘Every literary work begins with an inspiration which must accommodate itself as well as possible to a series of constraints and procedures.’15 The objective of the group was to ‘propose new structures to writers, mathematical in nature, or to invent new artificial or mechanical procedures that will contribute to literary activity’.16 Among their long list

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of precursors, Unica Z¨urn’s anagrammatic work had had a considerable impact on the Oulipians as a contemporary writer. Between 1961 and 1978 Perec was working at the Neuropsychological Research Laboratory attached to Sainte-Antoine Hospital as an archivist, only a few miles across the Seine from Saint-Anne Hospital where Z¨urn was incarcerated in the early 1960s. Both Queneau and Perec may have come across Z¨urn’s work in this period. As an admirer of Z¨urn’s work, Queneau may have recommended The Man of Jasmine to the Gallimard editorial board that led to its acceptance for publication, pushing ahead of the backlist. In 1974, Perec married Catherine Binet, who was the former wife of Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain. Binet, who had met Z¨urn personally, directed the films Film Sur Bellmer (1972) as a memorandum of Bellmer’s life after Z¨urn’s death and Les Jeux de la Comtesse Dolingen de Gratz (1980), which was based on Z¨urn’s novel Dark Spring. Z¨urn’s wider influence on Oulipian writers and the legacies of her anagrammatic work, which explored the ‘tradition of transforming the constraints of literary rules into sources of inspiration’ that Alexander Dumas once called for, calls for a closer inspection by scholars of postwar literary studies.

Hexen-texte Z¨urn produced over 100 known anagrammatic poems, some of which are dispersed among graphic notebooks, her longer prose narratives and scraps of loose paper. The year after she moved to Paris, friend and gallery owner Rudolf Springer, who also supported her early paintings, released her first publication of ten anagrammatic poems with ten drawings in the form of a booklet.17 Z¨urn had an organic transition from writing short stories and fairy tales to writing anagrams due to the inherent qualities the two literary styles share. The process of anagrammatic poetry can be compared to the known plots of the nineteenth-century Kunstm¨archen, where limits, errors and chance govern the results. Kunstm¨archen, a literary genre that is often translated as ‘fairy tales’, was practised by writers Z¨urn admired, such as the Grimm Brothers, Hans Christian Andersen, Goethe, Franz Kafka and Nikolai Gogol. Known to follow classic folk-tale structure, Kunstm¨archen addresses not only children but adults too, and adopts disorder that does not always promise happy endings.18 The tale Fichter’s Bird, collected by the Grimm Brothers and written by Friederike Mannel and Dortchen Wild, for example, provides a metaphorical space where 97

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three sisters are confined into a particular loop by a Hexenmeister [sorcerer].19 The tale’s plot creates a confined space or situation from which the characters must escape, adhering to the principle of the anagram which the Oulipians later used to describe themselves as ‘rats who must build the labyrinth from which they propose to escape’.20 Z¨urn’s collection of anagrams implies a similar relation to the magic and witchcraft of the story. Though Hexen-texte is translated into English as The Witches’ Texts, the verb hexen actually means to actively work magic. This meaning will be revisited in questioning the function of the text for Z¨urn and how this reflects her thoughts on the potential of language. Working through the ‘analogical principle of the anagram which brings forth a renewal out of old texts’ continuously returns Z¨urn to the children’s games and stories implied by the portrait of the Native American chief in Hexen-texte as illustration.21 This drawing was printed alongside the anagram ‘Wenn die Wildgaense Schreien’ [‘If wild geese shriek’], recalling the Native American hunter’s drawing on the tepee from Z¨urn’s game of the ‘Indian Mother’.

The Dissociation of the ‘self ’: Anagrams and Psychoanalysis For his short preface for Hexen-texte, Bellmer summarised the implications of the anagrammatic process, beginning with the basic definition of an anagram: ‘Anagrams are words and sentences resulting from the rearrangement of the letters in a given word or sentence.’22 In the short text, Bellmer refers to a reawakened interest in the development of language: It is surprising that despite the re-awakened interest in the development of language in psychotics, psychics and children, little thought has been given to the anagrammatic interpretation of the coffee grounds of letters . . . The result acknowledges – in a slightly uncanny manner – that it owes more to the help of some ‘other’ than to one’s own consciousness. This sense of an alien responsibility and of one’s own technical limitations – only the given letters may be used and no others can be called upon for help – leads toward a heightened flair, an unrestrained and feverish readiness for discoveries, resulting in a kind of automatism. Chance seems to play a major role in the result, as if without it no language reality were true, for only at the end, after the fact, does it – surprisingly – become clear that this result was necessary, that no other was possible . . . oracularly, sometimes

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chance a proof of eternity.23

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spectacularly . . . A pleasantly disrespectful spirit . . . who is serious only about singing the praises . . . of error and of chance . . . as if error was a way and

His reference to words such as ‘psychotics’, ‘psychics’ and ‘children’ alludes to the contemporaneous studies of psychoanalysts and linguistics, particularly referring to the work of Jacques Lacan, a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist known for his advancement of Freudian psychoanalysis by means of a radical critique of ego psychology. Bellmer makes specific allusions to Lacan’s writing, borrowing phrases such as ‘the coffee grounds of letters’, taken from his 1957 essay ‘The instance of the letter in the unconscious or reason since Freud’24 or the acknowledgement of the presence of another subject behind the subject of the statement, from the same text: ‘However strongly somebody may identify with the subject of the statement, we have good reason to believe that the utterance is coming from somewhere else than the place which the message has defined as the locus of emission.’25 The influence of Lacan’s interest in Structuralist studies on Bellmer’s discussion of Z¨urn’s anagrams is highly significant in contextualising the theoretical dimension of the process of anagrammatic composition for Z¨urn, as well as relating her practice to wider trends of the postwar period. From the mid-1950s, Lacan began to integrate the principle tenets of Saussurean linguistics into his own theory of psychoanalytic practice. Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated an innovative approach to language that was ‘against the realist perspective according to which all words are but names corresponding to prefabricated things in the outside world’.26 Saussure argued that within any language system the linguistic signs connect sound-images to concepts rather than names to things. This implied that the signifier is merely the phonological element of the sign and could never be the actual sound itself, therefore revealing the relationship between signifier and signified to be more complex and inherently divided. Lacan, a self-proclaimed Structuralist, took the Saussurean algorithm that already posed a division between signifier (sound-image) and signified (concept) further by applying an impenetrable boundary (S/s); as a symbol for ‘resisting signification’ the line constitutes a genuine barrier that questions the unity of the linguistic sign. Influenced by Claude Levi-Strauss’s statement that the unconscious was ‘synonymous’ with symbolic function, Lacan would later make his famous statement, in The Instance of the Letter in the 99

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Unconscious or Reason Since Freud that the unconscious is structured like a language.27 ‘The instance of the letter’ was originally delivered as a lecture on 9 May 1957 and was later published in 1966 in Ecrits. With the objective of formalising psychoanalysis as a discourse based on the structure of language, Lacan’s text would become a key source in studies of the ‘subject of the unconscious’: ‘Lacan’s use of structural linguistics to advance the practice of Freudian psychoanalysis is rooted in the establishment of a science of the subject – the self contained subject of consciousness but the ephemeral subject of the unconscious.’28 Bellmer, who had delved into studies of a corporeal unconscious in The Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, received praise from Lacan, who had seen and admired the publication of the Doll series in the Surrealist journal Minotaur in 1934. Bellmer, in turn, followed Lacan’s work closely, often attending his seminars delivered at Saint-Anne Hospital between 1953 and 1964 and sending him catalogues and information on artists in whom he believed Lacan might be interested. Jean-Michel Rabat´e recalls Lacan’s popularity in the 1960s: ‘Lacan was known to draw crowds from the city’s select quarters, a medley of colourful intellectuals, writers, artists, feminists, radicals and psychoanalysts.’29 It is important to note that in the same period as Lacan’s weekly seminars Z¨urn was incarcerated in the JeanDelay ward of Sainte-Anne Hospital. Though it is not known whether Z¨urn would have been able to attend these seminars, she was certainly aware of Lacan’s work and theories (perhaps by means of Bellmer), and subsequently dedicated several of her drawing notebooks, as well as the manuscript ‘MistAKE’ (c.1964) to ‘Professor Lacan’. In accounting for Z¨urn’s writings, it is necessary to consider such influences, especially in her references to certain mental illnesses, which are recognisably present in her use of language as well as in her subject matter. In his psychoanalytic interpretation of the companionship of Bellmer and Z¨urn, Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain rightly accounts for Z¨urn’s concerns with language: Like Schreber [the subject of one of Freud’s case histories] or Artaud, Unica Z¨urn questions such a mode of signification that is the organization of a language, which is heterogeneous to meaning and asymbolic, in which the sign no longer supports a message but becomes an indicator of drives that are relative to the primary organization of the body’s image, of its representations, and of its lived experience.30

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Likewise, Katherine Conley points to the command of Z¨urn’s texts: ‘For Z¨urn, words themselves have power, even more than the signs enacted by her performing, metamorphosing body. Like Hans Arp, she believed that words do more than mediate meaning.’31 Thus the text itself, described by Z¨urn was what ‘actively works magic’, is a tool that internally disrupts meaning and representation, where even the title of an anagrammatic poem can contradict its content. One may go as far as to imagine the initial title of the anagrams as the signifier and the constructed poems as the signified. It is through a (post-)Structuralist re-examination of the anagram that a comprehensive reading of Z¨urn’s poems can begin; to explore the potentially automatic qualities of the anagram as a (re)generative tool. There is a direct link between Z¨urn’s approach to anagrams and her interest in psychoanalysis that coincides with concepts taken up by Freud and Lacan. This relationship is an intriguing area that requires careful examination.32 In 1967 another 14 anagrams, along with eight etchings, were published under the title Oracles et Spectacles (which shares the title of many of her graphic notebooks). Beyond Bellmer’s references to his own interpretation of the anagram as a representation of the body, he continues to outline the automatic qualities of the anagrammatic process: The anagram is seen to arise from a violent and paradoxical dilemma. It demands the highest possible tension of the form-giving will and, simultaneously, the exclusion of premediated purposeful shaping . . . For this kind of imagining and composing to happen . . . oracularly, sometimes spectacularly – adds much of its own behind the back of the I.33

The preface was reprinted for the second series of Z¨urn’s poems under the same title, presenting 29 poems. The second expanded ‘Hexentexte’ series was reproduced in the German literary journal Der Monat in July 1961. Though comprising new poems, it was presented with the original preface written by Hans Bellmer. The two prefaces are identical except for the exclusion from the 1961 publication of the sentence ‘[i]t is clear that we know very little of the birth and anatomy of the “image”’.34 Bellmer probably regarded the excluded sentence as unnecessary, following the 1958 publication of The Anatomy, which dealt with the subject of uniting the anatomical body with its image in depth. Bellmer’s preface may be a problematic source because it 101

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carries possible subjective implications, mainly his interpretation of all anagrammatic compositions in relation to corporeal disfigurement. Though Bellmer is reading Z¨urn’s poems through his own discourse, it is nevertheless an essential text for understanding Z¨urn’s poetry. It is through Bellmer, who at the time was in the process of composing his theoretical work The Anatomy, that Z¨urn began writing anagrammatic poetry, which must be read as the central framework for her narrative account of madness in The Man of Jasmine. Hence the process of anagrammatic poetry is implicated in accounting for madness, tying the two in an inextricable knot.

Anagrams and Automatism In anagrammatic composition, Z¨urn discovered the potential of letters and language to subvert linguistic conventions. Whilst Bellmer stopped composing anagrammatic poems, Z¨urn produced an extensive body of anagrams. There are certain patterns that govern her method that can be recognised as distinct from general anagrammatic practice. The anagram, mainly a composition with strict rules, is utilised in its traditional form (similar to Robert Desnos’s use of the Alexandrian verse in his later poems), where Z¨urn adheres to the definition given in The Man of Jasmine: ‘Anagrams are words and sentences which are created by rearranging the letters in a word or sentence. One may only use the letters which are available, and not draw on others. Inventing anagrams is one of her most intense preoccupations.’35 Z¨urn’s unique application of this method consisted of selecting an initial sentence or phrase. The process of selection is noteworthy, as an overview of Z¨urn’s poems show a range of various social commands, names of places, proverbs, deliberately banal statements and occasionally certain lines from the poetry of Henri Michaux, Hans Arp and the Comte de Lautr´eamont. In Victoria Appelbe’s close examination of Z¨urn’s anagrams, ‘“You will reveal your secret”. Anagrams in the work of Unica Z¨urn’,36 she observes Z¨urn’s clever adjustments to the process such as allowing herself to insert punctuation and to replace the German scharfes s (ß) with a double s (ss), as well as writing letters with umlauts in full: ae, ue, etc. Another significant observation that Appelbe makes is Z¨urn’s departure from traditional anagrammatic form. In traditional compositions the writer seeks to restore the original meaning of its 102

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initial phrase by composing words that invite the reader to reconfigure this meaning. Z¨urn’s anagrams adhere to the procedure of anagrammatic composition; the poems, on the other hand, ‘engage in a critical dialogue with the initial phrase . . . [t]hey subvert, fragment and reverse the title, and thereby attempt to undermine the foundations of rational thought and to scramble moral codes.’37 This particular characteristic becomes significant when we compare Z¨urn’s anagrams to Bellmer’s and Mitrani’s prototype, where Z¨urn’s development of the anagrammatic process as an automatic technique becomes apparent. In many of Z¨urn’s texts, it is reiterated that the ‘act of writing’ makes her intensely preoccupied with the subject of her narratives, and distances her from reality and from the people around her. In a letter to Dr Gaston Ferdi`ere dated September 1964, Z¨urn wrote: ‘You gave me some advice: it is better not to write anagrammatic poems or to draw . . . Fine! No anagrams or drawings. But it is not good to lay around reading detective novels all the time, either, don’t you think, dear Doctor?’38 Z¨urn’s reluctance to heed the advice of doctors and friends in their attempts to keep her from losing touch with reality is evident in her response. In another account, Z¨urn describes the pleasures of writing: ‘There comes a burning urge to pull back from reality. The daydreaming needed for inventing her tales, the excitation and the temporary respite, the flights of imagination – these become her daily bread.’39 The break from reality, and the consequent escape to daydreams/the imagination, correlate with a description of what was then thought to represent tapping into unconscious states. Z¨urn’s deliberate engagement with this state of mind indicates a chosen means of creative production. Appelbe also reveals Z¨urn’s anagrammatic work as both automatic and intentional by pointing to the process of Z¨urn’s practice as an ‘attack on the notion of the self as singular by compounding pronouns’.40 The clear association of mental illness with anagrammatic production becomes a means of dissociating the self from reality. In ‘Toward a new definition of automatism: l’immacul´ee conception’, Jacqueline Chenieux-Gendron points out that from 1930 onwards, automatic practice dissolves the ‘pure text’ medium of early Surrealist practice, opening the way for ‘free rein to everything that play can imply in a mentality whose coloration is poetical/magical’.41 In response to the enquiries into what establishes a work as ‘automatic’, she formulates a close study of The Immaculate Conception42 and outlines

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how it could be considered an automatic text. Chenieux-Gendron directs our attention to the protocol which governed this writing; in the three large parts of The Immaculate Conception, the titles in ‘Man’, ‘The Possessions’ and ‘Mediations’ were pre-assigned to the text before it was executed, which reveals a process of what is referred to as ‘invention and composition; a game of oppositions, mirrors or echoes’.43 She argues that the text, in which the themes were chosen a priori, is governed ‘by the rules of writing whose boundaries are established in advance and whole number is limited’.44 Like Z¨urn’s anagrams, the syntax of The Immaculate Conception is preserved and legible, though the text remains ambiguous in meaning. The dislocation of objects, events and sensations eventually results in the breakdown of syntax in the last section of ‘The Possessions’, a quality that can also be observed in some of Z¨urn’s anagrammatic poems. The anagrammatic poem ‘Orakel und Spektakel’ (1956) for example, plays on the phonetic qualities of made-up, nonsensical words that conjure an auditory game.45 Chenieux-Gendron states that logical sequences of thought produce prose while true poetry, on the other hand, is based not on logical but on analogical sequences of thought. Thus the artistic strategy of automatism is said to bring a clearer comprehension of the flexibility and scope of the human condition.46 Breton’s analogical prose, said to be free of time and place, moves in accordance with word and image association, yet Breton’s thought process, permeating the writing, can be distinguished from Z¨urn’s. Katherine Conley rightly observes that Z¨urn’s ‘descriptions of depression are vivid enough to distance [her] testimonial from Breton and Eluard’s “simulations” of mental illness in The Immaculate Conception’.47 However, Z¨urn’s divergence from the Surrealist simulation of mental illness is not only present in longer texts, such as The Man of Jasmine, which Conley points to, but first and foremost in her approach to anagrammatic composition. While Breton’s text ‘moves in accordance with word and image association’, Z¨urn, in an almost experimental manner, places words and images in combat, observing the disassociation of one from another. Z¨urn carefully selects the titles of her anagrams, and creates within them a critical dialogue where the anagram engages with the title in a subversive attempt to dislodge its meaning. Similar to the Surrealist automatic method, the author is obsolete, as if the text itself were actively working its way through a self-contained structure. The

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automatic quality of the anagrammatic poems, therefore becomes in the most part a subtraction of the ‘I’ and consequently a dissociation with the conscious self. Furthermore, the poems demonstrate the barrier in Lacan’s S/s algorithm, eternally divided by the title and the poem. The dangerous effect of the anagrammatic process on Z¨urn’s mental health reasserts this dissociation, where the act of composing the text is perceived as a direct break from reality. Reading Z¨urn’s development of the anagrammatic composition through her longer narrative The Man of Jasmine, the automatic trait of her text can be seen as a scrambling of codes. This quality, misread by early critics as a failure to form a unified self, is a deliberate fragmentation that encompasses and further builds on the automatic strategy of disengaging the conscious self from the unconscious self. Z¨urn’s anagrams ‘engage in a critical dialogue with the initial phrase . . . [t]hey subvert, fragment and reverse the title, and thereby attempt to undermine the foundations of rational thought and to scramble moral codes’.48 Within a postwar context, Z¨urn’s adoption of automatism, which in its early definitions sought to unify unconscious and conscious perceptions and processes, is transformed into a malleable technique that is developed in a fragmentary manner to divide rather than unite such implications further by means of binary associations – language/meaning, body/image, physical/mental illness – in a violent, deformative process of limitless recreations of subjects and subjectivity. When composing anagrams, Z¨urn often used manufactured notebooks or calendar diaries already filled with pages of incessantly crossed out words and sentences. Each word of a sentence, fragmented by means of marking, is taken apart into letters in abidance with the rule of restriction; these are crossed out and then reused in forming new words and sentences. The words that are taken apart, letter by letter, are slowly annihilated, transformed into a new set of structure, in turn recreating its meaning. There is an element of violence in taking words apart, systematically destructuring by slicing sentences, words and even letter into fragments (Fig. 15). In Z¨urn’s stories and radio tales from the late 1940s, we observed her discovery of merging dream and reality with her fascination with childhood and naivety. Following her introduction into the French Surrealist group, her interest in anagrammatic compositions developed a more sinister outlook that took on a violent, fragmentary graphic expression. Z¨urn’s use of graphic automatism and anagrammatic composition transformed visual

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Figure 15 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Eisenbahnheft Paris-Berlin-Paris’ [‘Railway exercise book’], 1960–70. Mix-media notebook, 22 × 16.8 cm. 174 pages

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and textual representations by means of deformation and fragmentation that continually recreated its subjects.

The Pantomime of Words: The Man of Jasmine For Z¨urn the anagram provided a stage where words interacted in a performance. She continued composing anagrams throughout her practice, making the poem as well as the method a recognisable trait of her artistic œuvre. Previous scholars on Surrealist women, such as Susan Rubin Suleiman, have noted that Z¨urn’s work is read as a silent discourse and a ‘muted story’, one that is bracketed within the context of Surrealism, and more so within her partnership with Bellmer.49 In Z¨urn’s longer narratives, ‘silence’ can be read as a tool in the text that performs a pantomimic role. Simultaneously with her textual practice, Z¨urn also began to draw. In 1956 she had her first exhibition of drawings in Paris, the same year that she returned to painting for a very short period and decided to give up writing for the press. Z¨urn would, of course, continue to write and would produce the most recognised prose pieces of her career. However, this decision in 1956 marks a move from her early short stories, where she submerged herself in longer narratives, towards texts that would develop the method of the anagram further, disengaging the signifier from the signified and disengaging the self through and from the fragmented body of her work. The attractive quality of the anagram lay in its inherent and inevitable logic of division, remaining decomposed and unfinished. Between 1965 and 1967, Z¨urn committed herself to writing The Man of Jasmine. The Man of Jasmine, which is the longest and the most comprehensive account of her artistic process in conjunction with experiences with mental illness, was originally written in German and translated by Ruth Henry into French.50 The composition of the plot at times adheres to Z¨urn’s real-life experiences and surroundings, which has led the book to be regarded as an autobiographical piece. The autobiographical elements of the book become signifiers of mental illness which are subverted, like the titles of her anagrams, in constant combat with their reconfigured signs. These factual and at times contradictory references are, like the titles of her anagrams, shuffled and decomposed, producing a new narrative which engages in a critical dialogue with the realities of its subject-matter. Z¨urn’s narrative records the experience 107

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of three breakdowns, each of which begins with ‘an abrupt decision on the narrator’s part to isolate herself from others’.51 The desire for independence and freedom is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf ’s seminal essay A Room of One’s Own,52 which discussed, in a fictional setting, the place of the woman in literature and the necessity for female writers to have financial and emotional independence. This is a dominant theme in Z¨urn’s book, where the protagonist struggles with mental and physical constraints, reflected in her ability and/or disability to write. Each time she is alone, she encounters a new episodic breakdown, which fuels her narration. The book consists of these events, and likewise the text is a product of a ‘lived experience’. Thus, she achieves independence herself, while commenting on broader issues such as the image of the autonomous woman, and mental maladies especially associated with women such as hysteria, delusions and particularly erotomania. Z¨urn’s narrative engages with the Surrealist image of the creative woman as muse, and provides a new perspective on a female unconscious, recalling the more commonly known examples Down Below and The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below by Leonora Carrington.53 There are certain tools Z¨urn uses in her engagement with these themes, namely the anagrammatic divide and the subsequent identification with the other. This technique is developed further in The Man of Jasmine, in which the narrative is written in the third person pronoun ‘she’. In certain accounts, Z¨urn’s use of the third person pronoun is considered a reflection of the division of the self as an effect of her illness. However, there are concrete examples that have particularly shaped her mode of expression as well as the subject of her narratives. The Man of Jasmine becomes the central piece of text that encompasses Z¨urn’s internal and external references. On 26 September 1961, Z¨urn was admitted to the Jean Delay ward at Sainte-Anne Hospital in Paris, where she spent nearly two years. It was during this internment that she decided to work on a narrative which she subsequently titled ‘The Man of Jasmine’ in reference to one of the leading characters: the White Man. In line with the analogical principle of the anagram, which brings forth a renewal and subversion of old texts, Z¨urn’s use of fragmentation appears to have a mitosis effect, where retelling events subverts and decomposes reality as well as the plot. The division of the self into a host of collective others as signifiers of the self makes reference to

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external sources that can be found in the narrative; Vincenzo Bellini’s opera Norma, the White Man and Jacques Lacan’s case-study on ‘Aim´ee’.54

‘Norma’: ‘The Games for Two’ ‘The Games for Two’, completed on 22 February 1967, is a short text written on coloured paper that is glued inside the musical album of Bellini’s opera Norma (1831) (Fig. 16). The handwritten text in this musical album is accompanied by several drawings of imaginary figures and a separate series of imaginary letters written by the characters in the opera.55 Praised by Rossini and Wagner, Bellini’s opera Norma offers the perfect plot for Z¨urn’s game. The opera takes place in Gaul during the Roman occupation (50 BC).56 Norma is the high priestess of the Druidical temple of Esus. The Roman pro-consul Pollione, who engages in a secret affair with the priestess, confides to his centurion Flavius that he no longer loves Norma and that he has, instead, fallen in love with Adalgisa, the virgin of the Druidical temple. Norma, overcome with wrath and despair, confesses her intimacy with her Roman enemy to the warriors of Gaul and to her father. Upon her confession, she declares war against the Romans, and Norma and Pollione share a pyre for atonement.57 The opera epitomises unrequited love, desire and deception, in which the priestess is unable to escape the love of her deceitful enemy. Z¨urn uses the overall themes of the opera to form her own plot, where the conflict between the Romans and Druids is converted into a forbidden game between Norma and Flavius. The enemy Pollione thus turns into the husband, and his confidante Flavius becomes the secret receptor of her desires. The causes of Norma’s wrath and despair in the opera become the rules of Z¨urn’s game. The game begins with a list of nine rules, stating that there can be only two players, of the opposite sex (labelled A and B), who cannot share any physical contact or close proximity and who will ultimately join each other in death. The rules are then followed by a prelude after the plot of Bellini’s opera, describing three meetings between Norma and Flavius, who become the players of the deadly game. The image of Flavius comes to Norma as an apparition, from the left side of her line of vision. Initially three metres tall, Flavius then shrinks to a man of his 109

Figure 16 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Norma’, 1957–9. Ink and gouache on musical notes, 27 × 17.5 cm. Private collection

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‘customary size’. Norma avoids contact in a passive manner, as she engages herself in ‘Druidic thoughts’. The Druids, as in the opera, were sorcerers of the Ancient Celtic religion, corresponding in this context to the magical and equally passive yet intense quality of the words in anagrammatic composition. The musical context of the booklet is translated in the text into a forbidden song of the departed Druids that awakens the desire for death in the lovers. The romance plays with traditional ideals in a subversive way, where the intensity of the lovers’ bond, formed solely at a distance, turns into an obsessive mania. The region Celtica is renamed by Z¨urn as ‘Romantica’, an ironic word play on the concept of the romantic opera and its relation to the game. The game is indeed not about romance, but cruelty. In the now outdated discussion of female writers and their poetry, observers have often come to the conclusion that ‘the art of a woman poet must in some sense arise from “romantic” feelings (in the popular, sentimental sense), arise either in response to a real romance or as compensation for a missing lack’.58 Conventional examples as such tie creativity to emotional suffering and misery: ‘Would art have sprung from fulfilment, gratification, and completeness as abundantly as it did from longing, frustration, and deprivation?’59 Z¨urn plays with ideas surrounding conventional sources of creativity, intricately designed to fulfil and present more than anything the suffering of a ‘longing, frustration’ and ‘deprivation’. Whilst Z¨urn’s narrative/game is based on such feelings, it has a subversive approach to the subject of romance, love and desire. The traditional motif of suffering is translated into a psychic dreamscape where the ‘maladies of the female unconscious’ take over. In turn, the self becomes fragmented like the text, taking over the pantomimic role of the words. Among these qualities of expected suffering and mental unbalance in writers, Z¨urn attributes her text to the depths of the twentieth-century female malady ‘erotomania’. At the end of the text, the identities of the characters are revealed; Flavius is the White Man and Norma is herself. An autobiographical reference is hinted at by the correlation of the name ‘Norma’ to one of Z¨urn’s given birth names, ‘Nora’. The character Norma takes different forms in the games, on one occasion becoming a liquid that Flavius drinks, leaving her ‘abandoned by her own self ’, on another radiating into a ‘white nothingness’.60 The changeability of the self also applies to the subject of her desire, Flavius, who changes physical form and

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abilities. In a letter to Henry written in 1968, Z¨urn reveals further attributes of the two characters: Another thing on [The Man of Jasmine]: The Games for Two holds a special place with me and with the white man. As for the case of Norma, it is SHE [sic] who is mad, and Flavius is the white man or Michaux. This is not noted in the manuscript but I remember this well . . . it is much more beautiful to see it on musical paper.61

Z¨urn makes an interesting association here, where the female character is labelled as ‘mad’ while Flavius is given two potential personalities: the White Man or Henri Michaux. Z¨urn often referenced to Michaux as her ‘childhood love’, the white man; although the two were never romantically involved this provides an important link as to his possible role in the game. Even though Michaux is again referenced here, he is but one of the specified signifiers, leaving the identity of the White Man open to interpretation. Like the fragmented ‘self ’, the ‘other’ in Z¨urn’s narrative does not have a unitary or fixed form of identity. In another letter to Henry, dated May 1970, Z¨urn writes about several of her love subjects: an old man she describes as a bald poet who is a mescaline addict, clearly labelled as Michaux, and a man once an architect, who repairs the doors and sinks, named as JeanG´erald (Roger Blin).62 Indeed, Z¨urn’s interest in actors and theatre is relevant here, providing the title of her most important work and the character that would fill the role of the ever-changeable desired object.

The White Man The mysterious figure of the White Man haunts Z¨urn’s narrative like a ghost, becoming a recurring figure in all aspects of her work. Conley suggests that the jasmine man, or ‘the white man’ could possibly be ‘mythical mix of Bellmer and Michaux’, without any indication of where the title originates. By tracing Z¨urn’s meeting with Bellmer, there are clues that reveal the identity of this mystery man. In 1953, Z¨urn attended the exhibition opening of Anneliese Kuhk, where she met Hans Bellmer. Z¨urn noted in several of her writings that days before meeting Bellmer she had become obsessed by a face she had seen in a film. The film was Les Enfants du Paradis [Children of Paradise] 112

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(1945), written by Jacques Pr´evert, a tragic tale that centres around the ill-fated lovers Baptiste Debureau and Garance. Les Enfants du Paradis provides, like Bellini’s opera, yet another plot that deals with unattainable love, desire and deception. In The Man of Jasmine, Z¨urn writes of seeing this film three times ‘in order to get drunk on the sight of a particular face’. Strangely, she claims to ‘identify so strongly with this masculine face that suddenly she is told “you resemble him”’. She comes to recognise Bellmer, whom she met a few days later, as also resembling the man in the film and whom she identifies with herself. Similarly, she identifies the White Man with the protagonist in The Man of Jasmine, where he is clearly stated as a projection from her imagination: ‘it is she who has hypnotised herself by allowing her thoughts constantly to revolve around the same person . . . ’, continuing: ‘This situation has become manifest to her . . . She begins to get confused. The first crisis starts in a cinema.’63 What remains undiscovered and overlooked about this passage is its relation to the previously cited event that occurred in the cinema; one that determined and confirmed Z¨urn’s move to Paris and, more so, the foundation of the character, the White Man. In response to the question ‘why did she move to France?’, the text responds with this event as a confirmation of Bellmer’s request that she should move to Paris. Immediately after this line she wrote: ‘In Paris she meets the “Man in Jasmine”.’64 Les Enfants du Paradis is a two-part film that centres around the characters Baptiste Debureau and Garance. French actor and playwright Jean-Louis Barrault, in the role of Baptiste Debureau, plays a theatre mime who suffers the consequences of unattainable love. The first part, ‘Boulevard of Crime’, reveals a series of encounters beginning with a carnival on the streets of Paris. Garance and Baptiste gaze at each other from afar, and become great lovers who can never truly unite. Baptiste is a mime, described as someone who does nothing, who is a sleepwalker, a stupid observer, always silently witnessing the world. In the film, the desired object is watched from a distance, where people can only attain what they need rather than what or who they desire. Garance’s nickname ‘Desdemona’ epitomises her role as victim and the object of desire.65 The second part of the movie is titled ‘L’Homme Blanc’ [the White Man], an obvious reference to the mime Baptiste. Z¨urn subverts this plot and writes it from the woman’s perspective, dubbing the White Man as the female protagonist’s object of desire,

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and the face she comes to identify with both herself and Bellmer. The ‘White Man’ can also be translated as the ‘man in white’, forming the title ‘The Man in Jasmine’. On closer inspection, numerous other references to the film emerge in the narrative, also indicating Z¨urn’s identification with the character Baptiste: One can become convinced that one is the greatest mime of all time when one has before one’s eyes the spectacle of one’s own body, of the power it has to ‘metamorphose’ into all kinds of animals fleeing in all directions at different speeds in front of the tiger pursuing them – and this is what she sees at this moment.66

What Z¨urn is describing here is a scene from the film, where Baptiste is pursued by a tiger on stage, performing in the viewer’s eye the ability of the White Man to metamorphose into different forms. The mime likewise becomes an image of the White Man; similar to the character of the ‘clown-prince’ with a painted face in her radio tale The Wondrous Animal, and Alexander Camaro in The Little Clown, forming a range of association from the idealised male figures in her fairy tales to her lovers, connecting the character of the White Man to her childhood love. Thus, the White Man is initially Barrault’s character, the mime, who, like Z¨urn’s anagrammatic poems, silently yet actively works magic.67 In terms of her identification of both men in Les Enfants du Paradis, Z¨urn herself does not have a reflection but can only see the White Man, who is on several occasions reduced (to the size of a man, in ‘The Games for Two’), paralysed or mutilated in his physical or mental capabilities, enhancing his role as signifier. The White Man could therefore be regarded as a fragment of herself as ‘other’, projected onto multiple figures. Z¨urn dissociates the ‘self ’ from her ‘subject’; by refusing the ‘self ’ a reflection, she escapes a rigidly defined identity, and instead plays on the malleability of the ‘subject’ and ‘other’ exchanging roles between the one who desires and the object of desire.68 The obsessive fixation of the mad woman on various male others has strong parallels with Lacan’s model patient Aim´ee, whose recorded name in the case-study is a self-appointed pseudonym of Marguerite Pentaine, originating from her fictional narratives, carries resonance to Z¨urn’s pseudonym AM (Angela Mortens). In her later narratives, Z¨urn places 114

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phonetic significance on the letter M, as the harbinger of both desire and doom.

´ AM, M. Aimee, Jacques Lacan, who gained his psychiatric training at Sainte-Anne Hospital, was at one point a student of Ga¨etan Gatian de Cl´erambault, who ‘showed an early interest in the way language functioned amongst the patients at Sainte-Anne’.69 Lacan, who would in the 1960s become one of the most celebrated intellectuals in France, declared that the unconscious was structured like a language.70 The potential of language in its inherent ambiguities and overflows became the primary interest of the young trainee, brought forward in one of his first case presentations, in 1931, on the ‘inspired writings’ of Marcelle, a woman classified the year before as an erotomaniac by Cl´erambault. Cl´erambault was the medical head of the Sainte-Anne Hospital’s Special Infirmary for the Insane, attached to the Paris Pr´efecture de Police. As with Jean-Martin Charcot’s discovery and exploration of hysteria with the famous patient-subject Augustine, Cl´erambault was responsible for reinventing the condition of erotomania. Erotomania, also known as the ‘stalking syndrome’, was defined as a false but persistent belief that one is loved by a famous or prominent person, causing the subject to obsessively pursue a disinterested object of love. This condition, ‘compounded with persecutory delusions . . . the contradictory liberties, demands and prohibitions which tugged at women’s minds and emotions’, was defined by Cl´erambault as ‘madness, a “mental automatism” of the ambitious, often sexually wayward and most usually female, imagination’.71 The condition came with unusual symptoms, such as ‘glossolalia, a fervid verbal outpouring and flagrant mixing of metaphors, syntax and literary registers’.72 Such symptoms were of great interest for the Surrealists, inspiring their automatic texts, to which Z¨urn had been exposed as prototypes in the late 1940s. Lacan noted that in Marcelle’s prose he saw something that resembled attempts at automatic writing, akin to the Surrealists, ‘allowing the unconscious free reign on the page, exploding grammar and syntax’.73 Lacan would classify Marcelle’s writing as a ‘schizographie’; an ‘untranslatable, surreal mode of writing’. Lacan’s second case study was brought to Sainte-Anne on account of an attempted murder. 115

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Marguerite Pantaine became the focal subject of Lacan’s dissertation ‘Of paranoid psychosis in its relation with personality’, in which he included lengthy sections of his patient’s own delusional interpretations of the world. Marguerite Pantaine, who called herself ‘Aim´ee’, the name of the heroine from one of her fictions, possessed the ‘typical’ characteristics of an ‘erotomaniac’: an obsessive preoccupation with an unattainable love object; paranoid conspiracies that the people around her wanted to kill her son; and a solipsistic interpretation of her surroundings as signs, which Lacan called ‘interpretative madness’.74 According to Lacan’s ‘Freudian analysis’, Aim´ee resolved her delirium after recognising her delusions and violent acts as a way of punishing the ‘self ’ via an ‘externalized ideal’.75 Though the case of Aim´ee may not build direct links to Lacan’s later seminars, which he would present at Sainte-Anne during Z¨urn’s incarceration, his analysis of Aim´ee and her fictions has strong parallels with Z¨urn’s narratives. There are several close associations between Z¨urn’s female characters and the case of Aim´ee, who could be regarded as the model for the protagonist of The Man of Jasmine, as well as the self-identified other ‘M’, described as her mortal enemy and/or her lover.76 Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain, a psychiatrist who was closely associated with Z¨urn and Bellmer during his training at Sainte-Anne Hospital in the 1960s, commented that Z¨urn carried the characteristics of a ‘typical erotomaniac’, often becoming obsessed with various unattainable love objects such as the White Man or Michaux and at times experiencing paranoid delusions.77 Rabain was particularly astonished to find mentions of his brief encounters with Z¨urn in The Man of Jasmine and other short journal entries published after her death. Unaware of the ways in which she perceived him as both friend and foe, Rabain’s testimony reveals the extent to which Z¨urn took creative liberties to exaggerate and build on real life events. Likewise, the female figures in Z¨urn’s writings are deliberately associated with madness, as seen in ‘Norma’ (‘it is SHE who is mad’), in the protagonist of The Man of Jasmine who remains under the possession of the White Man, and various references in the narrative to M´elusine and Medusa. The protagonist in The Man of Jasmine in particular narrates paranoid fits that are very similar to Lacan’s subject patient Aim´ee, who believed her son to be in mortal danger. As noted by Henry, the accounts in the narrative can be considered neither purely factual nor fictive; however, the resemblance of such inclusions to this particular ‘female malady’ is undeniable. The narrative

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goes further, to describe various events that are regarded in a solipsistic interpretation as a series of signs (including the actions of people around her or numerical signs throughout the book) that shape and induce her imagination. These events, which fuel and simultaneously form the narrative, must be read in terms of their careful composition that seeks to ‘undermine the foundations of rational thought’ through both subject-matter and execution. In The Man of Jasmine Z¨urn expands the anagrammatic process of composing poems into a larger critical dialogue with multiple levels; the function of the anagrammatic title is transposed into various characteristics of ‘madness’ generating a host of ‘others’, as her titles generated the anagrammatic poem. The book is therefore not the product of an ‘erotomaniac’ but rather of an artist who deliberately uses her knowledge about such illnesses to destabilise her text. These characteristics, foregrounded in the above-mentioned citations, occupy some of the other, more specifically ‘erotic’ (and hence perceived as ‘female’) characteristics of mental conditions. These characteristics, such as obsessive ideas of unrequited love, fuelled by stages of emotions, doubt, paranoia and delusion, are central to Z¨urn’s development of the anagrammatic process as an automatic technique, where such motifs provide dissociation from the conscious self and mark the text as a deliberate break with reality. Z¨urn’s approach also engages with the clinical gaze of the institution. Cl´erambault’s studies, whose subjects were often . . . stalkers [who] suffer[ed] from a disturbance of love which parallels and parodies true ‘forbidden’ romance at every juncture . . . [were regarded as] the heirs of Madame Bovary, taking her sentimental aspirations into a world of delusional excess . . . bovarysm, which signified illusions about the self, dissatisfactions, the desire to be another . . . a sign of madness which would place a woman in an asylum rather than in a prison.78

Cl´erambault was known for his acute clinical gaze, which neatly classified female criminal behaviour by the use of a process of physiognomy. Indeed, his detective-like attention to such details as the looks, dress and movement of patients depended on sight, which he had lost in a cataract operation. Unable to see depth, Cl´erambault planned an elaborate suicide, ‘pistol in mouth, watching himself in the mirror before falling back on to the divan he had carefully placed behind his chair’.79 Cl´erambault’s case-studies, which read like detective novels, 117

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recall Z¨urn’s response to Dr Ferdi`ere’s warning against her writing anagrammatic poems and drawing: ‘Fine! No anagrams or drawings. But it is not good to lie around reading detective novels all the time, either, don’t you think, dear Doctor?’80 It is as if Z¨urn is mocking the activities of the doctors, with an implication that there is a thin line between escaping reality through fact and through fiction. Unlike Aim´ee’s ultimate ‘resolution’ of her erotomania by adapting Lacan’s mirror stage – recognition of the self through an externalised ideal – Z¨urn denies the subject of her novel a reflection or a self-ideal and instead confronts her with a wall, as in the introductory paragraph of The Man of Jasmine. She disperses the subject into various external others. This corresponds with Z¨urn’s rejection of a cure, and follows the immersion of her protagonists and herself into the dislocating experience of illness.

5 Automatism after 1945 ‘Automatism as a weapon to kill art, and a tool to regenerate it’1 In one of the larger drawings made in 1965 Z¨urn repeatedly portrays human heads that float in the centre of the page (Fig. 17). The page is filled from corner to corner with superimposed circular lines that form multiple portraits with facial features that merge and transform into other faces. Each image is drawn repeatedly in various sizes, creating a monstrous head with layers depicted from different angles. The effect of repetition manipulates and distorts the face, while the multiple layers open the image up for interpretation. The faces are seen in movement, as if to amalgamate layers of time and memory. It is not possible to count the number of people or faces in the drawing because at each glance new faces, eyes, lips, noses and eyebrows emerge and merge with one another. The sequence in which the lines were inscribed is visible, though no single image stands out as first or last, losing a sense of temporal depth and leaving only layers. In a series of drawings made the same year Z¨urn reworked the multifaceted portrait archetype in different variables. The layering of such portraits requires an act of intervening in previously made drawings, crossing over them in the process of making new ones. The superimposition of lines in drawing constitutes not only products with multiple layers but indicates a process that is akin to writing in anagrammatic composition where words and letters are disposed of to create new words and meaning. In the 1950s Z¨urn’s fragmentation of language took on an aggressive and obsessive characteristic in which the subversion of existing phrases in her anagrammatic poems 119

¨ UNICA ZURN Figure 17 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Untitled’, 1965. Chinese ink and white gouache on paper, 65 × 50 cm. Succession of Z¨urn, Berlin

and the interaction between the characters of her narratives become violent. The reconfiguration of text, where phrases are taken apart and rearranged, is a destructive task in itself. Similar to Z¨urn’s use of anagrammatic composition, where words were literally broken and decomposed, her graphic drawings adopt a more violent character in the deformation of images. Violence and deformation stand as two distinctive qualities strongly present in both the process of making and in the final visual products of Z¨urn’s graphic work. The act of drawing 120

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as a process of creation thus depends on a destruction or deconstruction that consequently recreates the image. A reliance on destruction is resonant with Z¨urn’s recreation of meaning and words in anagrammatic compositions, which are transposed and integrated into her graphic images. This association has previously been made by Ren´ee Riese Hubert, where she notes that the drawings ‘can be related to anagrams, since these drawings seem to stem from writing rather than from the lines and strokes suitable to a spatialised world’.2 Such an association recalls earlier debates on the affinity between automatic writing and drawing, which in turn questions how defining the process of drawing as an act of writing predetermines the way in which graphic images are read and, more importantly, whether this terminates the drawings’ automatic potential. Z¨urn’s visual production has been defined as early Surrealist automatism due to the undisputed influence of the movement on her artistic career. However, the placement of her work in relation to this artistic strategy raises issues as to what particular qualities of Z¨urn’s visual work have been identified as ‘automatic’, and the reception of automatism in a postwar context.

A Brief History of Automatism The term automatos [acting of itself ] originates from the Greek term autos [self ] from the seventeenth century and was adopted into Latin and French in the nineteenth century as the term automatisme [automatism], meaning action that does not involve conscious thought or intention. The meaning of ‘automatism’ as we know it today has developed through its associations with spiritualism and experimental psychology, as a result of being linked to the nineteenth-century ‘unconscious’. In the early twentieth century the conception of the unconscious – defined by its leading advocate Sigmund Freud as all that is hidden below the surface – carries a passive overtone which is heightened by its appropriation into artistic practice. Soon after, automatism became a popular Surrealist strategy used in exploring an interest in psychoanalysis and the Freudian unconscious and dream interpretation. Freud’s technique of free association, of exploring alternative states of consciousness, was adopted to artistic ends that resulted in the development of a new creative method, pure psychic-automatism. The term used by the Surrealists; ‘pure psychic automatism’, coined 121

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by Pierre Janet in his book L’Automatisme psychologique,3 encapsulates Andr´e Breton’s definition of early Surrealism in the First Manifesto of Surrealism.4 According to David Lomas, Janet’s term automatisme psychologique [psychic automatism] was defined as a way ‘to gain access to a split-off, traumatic kernel of ideas disassociated from the individual’s conscious mind which [ Janet] believed to be the causative factor in hysteria’.5 Janet’s work followed that of Th´eodore Ribot, who is known as the founder of French psychology for his clinical observations in psychiatric wards that led to many of his works. Hence, the origins of ‘psychic automatism’ predate Janet’s studies. In fact, the term ‘automatic’ is first used by the English philosopher and physician David Hartley in 1748 in his studies of the phenomena of memory, emotion, reasoning and voluntary and involuntary action. Hartley’s book, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations,6 outlined his theories on the association of ideas, drawing on the ‘automatic’ qualities of the human mind.7 A decade before Janet had published his book on automatism, English scientist Francis Galton, after writing on word association as access to the unconscious in ‘Psychometric experiments’,8 discussed . . . the automatic construction of fantastic figures through . . . allowing [his] hand to scribble at its own will, while [he was] giving [his] best attention to what is being said by others . . . [he found] that a very trifling accident, such as a chance dot on the paper, may have great influence on the general character of any one of these automatic sketches.9

Interestingly, Galton’s early account not only explores automatism in the science of measuring mental capacities and processes, he also records his experiments with automatic drawing, a form of artistic production that is thought to have developed out of automatic writing much later in the twentieth century. The term automatic writing originated in the nineteenth century within a spiritual, occult context. These texts were often produced by so-called mediums and/or people who were supposedly under the control of a ‘subconscious agency’. With the turn of the century, the exploration of these cases in experimental psychology led to a variety of methods that attempted to diagnose, treat and define these cases as ‘maladies’. In the first half of the nineteenth century, automatism was a term coined as a reaction to sensory stimuli. This encompasses 122

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studies within the practice of hypnosis, particularly by Jean-Martin Charcot.10 From 1880 onwards, there was a move in psychiatry towards more literary, narrative case-studies due to the growth of interest in the representation of individual emotional experience. The causes of mental maladies were beginning to be studied in psychogenic terms, marking the move from electro-shock therapy and hypnosis towards parole-pleine [the talking cure].11 Both occult phenomena and psychological investigations raised the interest of French Surrealists, which in due course led to the practice of automatic writing as an artistic strategy.12

Automatism and Surrealism Breton insisted that automatism was a limit to, not the frontier of, Surrealism: ‘to plunge much deeper is to become lost in, tyrannised by the unconscious, to risk not returning, psychosis. No gateway to be left behind, automatism is a threshold to be attained so that the conscious and unconscious can “communicate”’.13 Indeed, the Surrealists were fascinated by the ‘mad’, by primitive cultures and children, all of whom provided models of thought and experience for their early practices of automatism. ‘The possibility that civilized man was still driven by the same primitive instincts as his savage ancestors, and that beneath the conscious mind lay a rich subconscious world of dream and fantasy’,14 influenced Surrealism to the point of shaping their newly forming techniques. Yet, the ‘mad’ posed a particular threat to some members, especially to leading member Breton, who often refrained from crossing such bounds, and advised other members against it. The psychopathological aspects of Surrealist automatism derive from an interest in the literary portrayal of early case-studies as narratives and the documentation of such experiences as examples of the Freudian ‘talking cure’. Within this long-standing history, the Surrealists paid attention to many case-studies, with a specified interest in two figures. The studies of Frederic William Henry Myers and Th´eodore Flournoy were cited in The Automatic Message15 with praise and admiration. Noted as a prolific English writer on psychology and psychical phenomena, Myers’ studies into ‘psychological automatisms’ are opposed to Pierre Janet’s direct relation of automatism to hysteria. In his book Human Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death,16 Myers defines what he calls sensory and motor automatisms, through which he traces the 123

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history of the practice of automatism. His study is executed with what would be considered a non-traditional formality, avoiding the superstitious spiritualism of his time and, rather, focuses on the art of human expression and ‘thought-transference’. The notion of sensory automatism is presented as the basis of hallucination. He writes: The art, which was attributed in early times to divine power, came to be regarded in the Middle Ages by the Christian church as the work of evil spirits, and the Secularii were looked upon as heretics and treated accordingly.17

Myers claims that . . . there is a possibility of inducing a spiritual hearing and a spiritual pictureseeing or reading and also a spiritually-guided writing and speech . . . We find that a tendency to automatic writing is by no means uncommon among sane and healthy persons.18

Rather than insisting on psychic automatism as the causative factor in hysteria as claimed by Janet, Myers opened the practice of ‘automatism’ to all. The other principle example of automatism for the Surrealists was the account of H´el`ene Smith’s mediumistic experience recorded by Th´eodore Flournoy in From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia.19 For the Surrealists, Smith was the muse of automatic writing. Based on their readings of the Freudian unconscious and their fascination with pre-Freudian ‘primitivism’, the Surrealists prescribed instructions on how to practise ‘pure psychic automatism’ in their earlier manifestos. The acclaimed psychic Smith became an interesting figure for the Surrealists, representing for them the possibility of releasing creative abilities by means of paranormal states. In 1932, an exhibition of paintings that represented her visions as well as several other drawings took place in Geneva under the title Art and the Subconscious, and was regarded by commentators as a study in ‘art and the subconscious’.20 Smith’s use of painting and religious mysticism led to a series of images and scribble drawings, some of which may invite comparison to Henri Michaux’s mescaline drawings and Max Ernst’s cryptic symbols used in his preface for Z¨urn’s 1962 exhibition in Paris. Flournoy’s case-study on Smith claimed that 124

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‘under hypnosis to be the reincarnation of a Hindu princess from fifteenth-century India, of the French Queen Marie Antoinette, and of an inhabitant of the planet Mars, whose language she claimed to speak and whose landscapes she painted’.21 During a radio interview in 1952, Andr´e Breton, who was particularly interested in the systematic studies of trance-like states and unconscious revelations, stated that he was directly influenced by Flournoy’s study on Smith while writing Nadja.22 The Surrealist fascination with paranormal states was based on the access to the ‘spectre of a fertile subterranean mental life to be tapped as an imaginative resource and [as a representation of ] a profound dimension of human experience by the artist’.23 The first appearance of ‘Martian handwriting’, written by Smith on 22 August 1897, is reproduced as autotype in Flournoy’s account. Three lines of 18 symbols are inscribed on the surface, some of which were retraced multiple times. The text, which was claimed to have appeared to Smith in visual hallucinations, is in fact revealed as names of the many guises she entered during her ‘possessions’. A similar graphic inscription with identical symbols was transcribed into a different verse, which was printed in The Automatic Message. On the first page of the text, the original title from its first publication in Minotaure is presented between two crystal balls, with an additional illustration by Victor Hugo placed in the centre.24 The second line introduces the reception of the messages to follow as ‘crystal clear’: ‘I encounter one of these word sequences addressed to the world in general, but crystal clear and structured, to what is commonly called the inner ear, as a remarkable autonomous word-group.’25 The earlier somewhat mediumistic text of The Soluble Fish26 has been noted by Anna Balakian as ‘the most authentically automatic writing, apparently free of any contrivance or artifice’.27 In her comments on the original scripts, she notes that this text was written in a ‘feverish frenzy as if possessed’ which is put forward by her graphological study of the script. She compares Breton’s composed handwriting in his other scripts to the hand writing that ‘covered the page as if propelled by some magic and infallible force’.28 In the First Manifesto, auditory, textual and visual qualities are imprinted with magical, fantastic forces and experiences: . . . removed from the sound of any voice, a rather strange phrase which came to me without any apparent relationship to the events in which,

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my consciousness agrees, I was then involved, a phrase which seemed to me insistent, a phrase, if I may be so bold, which was knocking at the window . . . I cannot remember it exactly, but it was something like: ‘There is a man cut in two by the window’ . . . accompanied as it was by the faint visual image . . . 29

One of the most recognised passages of the First Manifesto is the apparition Breton encounters when he sees a man leaning out of a window. It occurs immediately before Breton goes to bed, when he is suddenly drawn to a ‘strange phrase’. While, at the time, Breton seems to be more interested in its visual aspects, commenting on creating a visual depiction of a man who is perceived to be split in two, the phrase is actually described as ‘as clear as auditory phenomena’. Breton continues to discuss his thought revelations in a footnote, noting that they might derive from hunger.30 His comparison of thoughts to ‘auditory phenomena’ is suggestive of the earlier article ‘The mediums enter’, where Breton speaks of automatism as an act of listening.31 Thus, this abundant flow of thoughts is by implication coming from his unconscious. His assertion is completed by providing Robert Desnos’ experiences during ‘the periods of sleep’ as ‘proof ’. In the Manifesto there is a passage explaining that his collaboration with Soupault ‘came about in the wake of his medico-psychiatric training during the war, when he was wholly under the influence of Freudian theory’.32 Referencing Freudian methodology, (‘which I had some slight occasion to use on some patients during the war . . . ’33 ) he wrote: I resolved to obtain from myself what we were trying to obtain from them, namely, a monologue spoken as rapidly as possible without any intervention on the part of the critical faculties . . . which was as closely as possible, akin to spoken thought.

The man cut in two is given as an indication of this and, sharing his experience with Soupault, they began to work on The Magnetic Fields. The Magnetic Fields is said by Balakian to be ‘the first example of sustained automatic writing as conceived in the context of the psychiatric studies of Dr Janet, which had so greatly impressed Breton in medical school’.34 Balakian’s semi-biographical study is based on information received from Breton’s closest relatives. She further notes that what was of greater significance to Breton was that The Magnetic Fields 126

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was ‘the first of a series of writings that creat[ed] a new structure for communication, based on a new orientation of the creative mind’.35 Written by Breton and Soupault in collaboration, the text was offered as an experiment, in the scientific sense of the term, and was claimed not to have been intended as a new piece of avant-garde literature. Yet since Breton and Soupault mistrusted the habitual procedures of scientific method and more specifically the logical apparatus overall, they resorted to the means traditionally utilised by poets: intuition and inspiration, chiefly concretised in images.36 The magnitude of visuality in automatism for Surrealists is clear in Breton’s ‘The mediums enter’, where he spoke of a ‘psychic automatism’ which he compared to the dream state, whilst other texts such as Francis G´erard’s article ‘L’etat d’un surr´ealiste’ [‘The state of surrealism’] in the first issue of La R´evolution Surr´ealiste (December 1924),37 treats automatism in writing without even mentioning visual art.38 Even though The Magnetic Fields is said to have been directly inspired by Janet, by 1930 the Surrealists were moving away from the initial definition of automatism under his studies. In The Immaculate Conception,39 we can observe the influence of Myers, especially in ‘The possessions’. ‘The possessions’ comprises a series of texts written as attempted simulations of certain mental deficiencies. Even though the concept of ‘simulation as a phenomena in mental illness’ is read into the text as a part of Breton’s experiences in 1916 at St-Dizier,40 the influence of Myers’ study is undeniable. Andr´e Breton and Paul Eluard’s texts in ‘The possessions’ are not actual claims for the mental states they were describing, but are claims for a ‘spiritual possession’ of the inner depths of the psyche. As Jacqueline Ch´enieux-Gendron suggests, ‘the possessions are possessions of the tongue by madness’,41 undertaken by the ‘normal’ man. Thus, mental illness becomes a metaphor for a mode of expression of the ‘self ’. The first uses of the term indicate writing to be the initial representational tool of automatism. Nevertheless, as Myers has stated: ‘Side by side with the automatism of arm and hand, we must place the automatism of throat and tongue.’42 Breton also asserted the role of speech as a significant element to consider while looking at the production of visual objects. In ‘Toward a new definition of automatism: L’immacul´ee conception’, Ch´enieux-Gendron points out that from 1930 onwards automatic practice dissolves the ‘pure text’ medium of early Surrealist practice, when the end of such experiments opens the way for ‘free

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rein to everything that play can imply in a mentality whose coloration is poetical/magical’.43 Ch´enieux-Gendron references Ren´e Char, for example, who speaks of the three-voiced automatic poems in Ralentir travaux [Slow under Construction]44 as ‘bundles of kindling, hastily tied up’; Breton and Eluard testify in 1935 to the rapidity with which The Immaculate Conception was written: ‘The book was written in fifteen days, and in that time we consecrated on it [sic] only our hours of real leisure.’45 These early Surrealist texts are executed in perfect syntax while demonstrating ambiguity in meaning, dislocation of objects and a disorientation of events and sensations. The use of the artistic strategy of automatism within the movement was designed to bring a clearer comprehension of the flexibility and scope of the human condition.46 The seemingly narrative structures of the texts differ from prose produced from logical sequences of thought. Therefore the early automatic writings can be seen as analogical sequences of thought akin to poetry. Breton’s analogical prose is free of both time and place and moves in accordance with word and image association. A distinction can be made here between the occult notion of automatism, where the medium is regarded as an empty vessel through which a message is communicated by means of automatic experience, and the artistic exploration of automatism as a form of self-conscious engagement. Thus we observe several types of automatic expression: the recordings of an observed external experience, the supposed products of the mind of the individual and recordings of induced experimentations. Varying expressions stem from the multiple definitions of the word, branching into active and passive connotations at the turn of the century with the consolidation of the unconscious in psychology and psychoanalysis. Returning to the word itself, automatism appears to have a malleable characterisation under different circumstances. Here, the original definition of the term becomes relevant. The Greek term suggests that there is an active will that plays as counterpart to automatism. Automatos is compounded of auto-, meaning the ‘self ’, and ment´os, meaning ‘thinking’ from the base men-, ‘to think’, which also means ‘to advise’. A closer look reveals that automatos is an ‘act of one’s own will’ by means of thought or advice.47 Although the term is often found in the visual arts in reference to the unconscious, in practice, the ‘active’ essence of its original meaning remains. The nineteenthcentury developments in psychology and the birth of psychoanalysis in

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particular play an important role in the strategy’s current understanding. However, it could be said that the reification of late nineteenthand early twentieth-century investigations of automatism and its later adoption into artistic practice has brought the term closer to its Greek roots, the act of imitation becoming the willed participation of a selfacting strategy. There were, of course, artists who were indifferent to methods of automatic expression, such as Bellmer, who stated: ‘I think that the various modes of expression, pose, gesture, act, sound, word, handwriting, creation of an object, all result from the same assemblage of psychophysiological mechanisms, that they all obey the same generative law.’48 Whether automatic writing and drawing might be produced under the same ‘generative law’ is questionable; however, the basic foundations of writing and drawing overlap in that they both require a surface and that they are both composed of lines. ‘Automatism’ suggests the expectation of producing an illogical word sequence or an illegible object as a prerequisite. This pretence is based on the expectation of a text/object that is a representation of the unconscious. The difference between automatism in writing and drawing in Surrealist practice can be seen as being closely connected to the birth of its criticism. The attempt to create a ‘Surrealist image’ appeared to conflict with automatic writing, which had become a part of the repertoire of games that greatly influenced the movement.49 Automatic writing formed the base of many of these games, for example ‘simulation’, in which artists would produce texts as if they were people suffering from certain mental illnesses or possessed by spiritual agents. The process of transforming such ‘instructive’ games into visual images raised questions as to what might change in this process and whether it could still be considered ‘automatic’ in the context of Surrealism. In the first issue of La R´evolution Surr´ealiste in 1924, Max Morise stated that a ‘stream of thought cannot be viewed statically . . . secondary attention necessarily distorts an image’. In these terms, automatism was extrinsic to visual art. Thus Morise concluded that ‘the images are Surrealist, but not their expression’.50 The main concern of Morise’s argument, as expressed in ‘Les Yeux enchant´es’ [‘Enchanted eyes’], dealt with the difficulties painters had to face when trying to accomplish the equivalent of automatic writing in visual art. He doubted whether they could ever keep up with the flow of ideas and the succession of images with the same intensity that poets could keep up with the flood

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of words. Another important commentator on automatism within the circle of Surrealism was Pierre Naville, the co-editor of La R´evolution Surr´ealiste. Naville claimed: No one remains unaware of the fact that there is no Surrealist painting. It is clear that pencil marks resulting from chance gestures, a picture which sets down dream images, and imaginative fantasies can none of them be described as Surrealist painting.51

Naville’s statement suggests that automatism, though recognised as a strategy, cannot be identified as a certain style of painting, which interestingly refutes Breton’s anxious criticism of Andr´e Masson gaining recognition as an automatic painter. As a ‘prime exponent’ of automatic drawing, Spector notes that . . . [Georges] Bataille appreciated, supported and collaborated with Masson, who found more sustenance in Nietzsche and Heraclitus (neither of them important to Breton’s group) than in Freud. Breton’s rejection of Masson may have come from his fear that Masson’s successful abundant production of automatic drawings might lead to an academic formula.52

Between 1924 and 1927 many issues were raised in Surrealist practice, one of which was automatism; Naville and others insisted that Surrealist painting would have to model itself on automatic writing.53 Later on, Naville made another statement, approved by Breton: ‘The entire activity of the Surrealists does not reduce to automatism alone. They employ writing in a manner that is quite voluntary and in contradiction to automatism.’54 The criticism of Surrealist ‘automatism’ and its connotations in psychology caused a rift, complicating its acknowledgement as a credible strategy and deeming it somewhat ambiguous. The controversies surrounding automatism in Surrealism share similar concerns with earlier scepticism. The critique of automatism as an artistic practice is as much rooted in philosophical and scientific scepticism as it is in criticisms within and outside of the art movements in which it was practised. James Randi, who was a challenger of paranormal claims and pseudoscience, noted that there is little evidence distinguishing automatic writing, thought to be of supernatural origins, from a parlour game (referring to the Surrealist games), and that there is no solid evidence that any messages came from anywhere 130

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other than the mind of the person holding the pencil. Books such as Randi’s An Encyclopaedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural,55 question the likelihood that automatic writings are any more profound than a ‘regular’ writer’s conscious thoughts expressed in writing. Sceptics argue that there is no evidence that the ‘true self ’ lies in the unconscious any more than there is for it to lie in the normal consciousness. Simone Colinet’s views on automatism reflect a different perspective: she questions not the authenticity of the product but rather the intention of the producer. She claims: ‘The best results are frequently the work of non-professionals. Artists’ styles are too intrusive to create a real amalgamation.’56 In relation to this, automatic drawing developed by the Surrealists claimed to be distinguished from the drawn expression of mediums.57 However, sources of automatic drawing in Surrealist practice did actually refer to mediums and psychics, such as Madame Smead, whose automatic drawing ‘Le message automatique’ was included in Minotaur.58 In 1926 Robert Desnos made a similar assertion to Colinet; ‘In effect, only the drawings of mediums, drawings produced in a trance, the drawings of madmen can, and to some extent only can correspond to this [automatist] definition.’59 Early critics of automatism, most notably Morise, have commented on the consciousness of transcription, arguing that experience is subject to secondary revision in the course of notation, leading him to observe (of artists such as Max Ernst) that ‘the subject matter may be Surrealist, but the method of its execution is not’.60 Morise here points to the main problem of automatism. In The Haunted Self,61 a more recent examination of automatism, David Lomas questions the status of the unconscious in Surrealist images and objects and considers whether psychoanalysis, as a discourse about the unconscious, provides evidence of its existence or a betrayal in its attempted representation. These remain central questions in unravelling the position of desire and its relation to the subject in automatic processes. According to Robert Short, ‘the Surrealist revolution meant breaking down the barriers which led to fragmented consciousness and to the endless frustration of desire’.62 This early study excludes the practice of artists who later in the century utilised the ‘fragmented consciousness’ and the ‘frustration of desire’ by means of Surrealist techniques that apparently sought to eliminate them. While automatism was once about unifying and communicating between conscious and unconscious states, later

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practices, as well as its criticism, reveal division and fragmentation as key components. Indeed, Dawn Ades’s definition of automatism as a ‘weapon to kill art, and a tool to regenerate it’,63 becomes an interesting and useful phrase when looking at Z¨urn’s more violent and contradictory uses of automatism as strategy.

Automatic Drawing after 1929 Whilst automatic drawing continued to be central to the creative activities of some artists such as Masson and Miro, others experimented briefly with automatism during its heyday in the 1920s. In ‘The second manifesto’,64 Breton apologised for the inferior quality of some or many automatic works, claiming that Surrealism was ‘in a period of preparation’. In 1933 there was a reversal or reconsideration of automatism vis-`a-vis visual art. In May 1933 Max Ernst published the article ‘How to coerce inspiration’65 that, in a seemingly rebuttal of Dali’s paranoiac critical method, reinforced the importance of automatic techniques for representing unconscious thought as well as for reducing the artist’s conscious will. Shortly after, Breton published The Automatic Message, which encouraged a complete return to the first principles. This time, rather than to emulate mechanical, passive trancelike states, the artist/writer was encouraged to exert ‘critical liberty’ characteristic of mediums who trace their visions. The 1930s marked the period of Surrealism’s growing internationalisation. During the interwar years, Surrealist activity developed in Czechoslavakia, Japan, Yugoslavia, North and South America and Great Britain: ‘While Paris remained the centre of Surrealist activities, Surrealist ideas were successfully communicated through journals, conferences and exhibitions, and personal contacts and collaborations helped make Surrealism an international discourse.’66 On the other hand, there was an influx of a new generation of foreign artists seeking affiliation and community in Paris. Different variants of automatic practice such as decalcomania became credible techniques and remained popular throughout the 1930s. Decalcomania was originally a decorative technique used in the nineteenth century in which an image was painted on paper and then pressed onto glass, metal or wood to transfer the image. It was later employed by Georges Hugnet and Remedios Varo in the 1940s by way of the Rorschach test. In some cases, the artist would draw out images that he or she found in the resulting blotches or stains or use 132

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pre-cut forms to transfer the gouache. During the war years, artists like Alice Rahon, Robert Matta and Wolfgang Paalen redirected notions of automatism to address issues of space imbued with mathematical and cosmic concepts as well as mysticism. The technique expanded across international circles: ‘what began as a closed discourse centred on technique, Surrealist drawing developed and expanded, through dissent as well as collaboration, into a dynamic international discourse that embraced numerous methods in countless mediums’.67

Material and Multiplicity: The Significance of Variation in the Notebooks Over a period of 20 years, Z¨urn produced a large body of visual work in various media. These are discussed with reference to and are often overshadowed by her biography, and her narrative prose such as The Man of Jasmine or Dark Spring. Unlike her writings, Z¨urn’s visual works have seldom seen the light of day outside of private collections, auctions, gallery storage rooms and national archives. It is only very recently that these works have been made public by means of exhibitions and catalogues, as discussed in Chapter 2. The corpus of Z¨urn’s visual work consists of watercolour paintings, a small number of oil paintings made between the years 1955 to 1957, illustrations in booklets, collages, Indian ink, gouache and watercolour drawings on musical score books, postcards, stamps made for individual postcards, loose-leaf paper in various sizes and material and finally a large number of drawings in notebooks. Notebooks, which make up the majority of the oeuvre, are pertinent to artistic production and are telling of her methods of expression. The notebook form is manifestly a chief characteristic of Z¨urn’s graphic work, and the significance of their multiple forms cannot be overstated; the manufactured sketchbooks, drawing books, spiral gridded notebooks, musical score books and handmade books are products of a fragmentary creativity that echo a similar subjectivity. Erich Brinkmann, editor and publisher of Z¨urn’s oeuvre, notes that a large part of her work remains unknown: ‘Not all of the notebooks could be located and verified. Nor could all the verified notebooks be published and the publication of individual notebooks is not complete.’68 The incomplete and fragmented nature of Z¨urn’s notebooks reflects her nomadic life. These recently rediscovered works introduce a number of works that had not been seen or exhibited in 133

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the early twenty-first century, and prompt a re-evaluation of Z¨urn’s use of automatic processes. A small amount of postgraduate research has taken up the topic of Z¨urn’s visual production. These studies take a perspective that relates Z¨urn closely to Outsider art and postmodernist production; however, there is a substantial gap in the discussion of Z¨urn’s visual work as automatic drawing as defined by French Surrealism.69 If only, just one more time, I could write as I please. If I could write the way I dream or the way I think, I would willingly devote myself to writing again. But now drawing is the only mode of expression I’m really capable of.70

Drawing was a central tool for Z¨urn, taking prominence over painting because it wholly facilitated what Z¨urn enjoyed in making art – a fluid process that welcomed effects of chance and mistakes. In ‘Meeting with Hans Bellmer’, Z¨urn wrote about being inspired by Bellmer’s use of oil paint, which eventually led her to experiment with certain techniques such as decalcomania. While emphasising the meticulous attention Bellmer paid to detail and accuracy, Z¨urn said that it was the mistakes that she found most attractive in painting, and that she would not decide on a subject matter beforehand like Bellmer, but preferred to allow the painting in a way to paint itself.71 This reflects Z¨urn’s interest in automatism, which required a disengagement from the imitation of reality in a rational manner. Bellmer was not deeply interested in this form of production, once stating: ‘I am glad to be considered part of [the Surrealist] movement, although I have less concern than some Surrealists with the subconscious, because my works are always carefully thought out and controlled.’72 In contrast to Bellmer’s carefully thought-out and controlled style, Z¨urn followed a process closer to chance and intuition. Disengagement from reality is a recognisable feature of Z¨urn’s paintings and later drawings, where life forms and reality on the whole are deranged and deformed. Z¨urn’s images do not seek to capture a controlled or realistic representation, but are rather constructed from experience based on manipulations of real and imagined events. Bellmer’s work, on the other hand, follows a focused tradition of representational drawing and painting, where his skill as a draughtsman allows him to delineate figures that are then carefully and subversively deconstructed. This is an important 134

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divergence between Bellmer’s and Z¨urn’s work: their approaches to artistic production follow completely separate routes; one of chance and the other of premeditated formulas. In the act of drawing, the immediacy of the process and permanence of the mark created a platform that allowed Z¨urn to develop a strategy in graphic expression: . . . every single pen stroke, brush stroke or colour application counts and remains in a notebook – incomparable with writing where correction is possible. More than with writing – drawing demands the highest concentration, and it is this presence of mind and closure which Z¨urn sought in the act of drawing.73

The degree of concentration, comparable to a trance-like state, was considered a dangerous condition by Z¨urn’s friends and doctors, who were afraid that she would lose touch with reality to the point of no return. A similar warning was given against her construction of anagrammatic poems, which she incorporated into her notebook drawings. Text and image are combined in amalgam, in the likeness of Antonin Artaud’s ‘written drawings’, where the act of writing on visual images is interchangeable with the act of drawing; both are performed to subvert its individual function.74 There are three identifiable forms of notebooks titled by Z¨urn ‘Albums’, ‘Books’ and ‘Manuscripts’ that reflect their processes of production. ‘Albums’ and ‘Books’ make up most of Z¨urn’s visual output, consisting of over 300 known drawings.75 These notebooks, almost all of which are carefully numbered, titled, signed and dated, register their production as a continuous series. Though each notebook has its own unique characteristics, they nonetheless construct a sequence that in no way provides, or intends to provide, a narrative coherence.

Albums ‘Albums’ are preprepared shop-bought sketchbooks and geometrical school notebooks, often given to Z¨urn or prepared by her as gifts. These Albums, numbered with roman numerals and labelled in a sequence, represented a surface with endless possibilities. In 1961, Henri Michaux brought Z¨urn the first album to Saint-Anne Hospital, inscribing a dedication on the inside of the cover, ‘Cahiers de blanches: 135

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a notebook – white and blank’.76 There are three known notebooks, titled ‘Album II St Anne 1961 / 1962’, ‘V Album / de St Anne / 1961’ and ‘VI Album / de St Anne / 1961’ by Z¨urn, which are currently held in part by the Ubu Gallery collection archive in New York. The Albums in the Ubu collection were acquired at the end of the 1990s and have the spiral binding taken out. From what is known, there are six numbered Album notebooks, all of which contain a compilation of between six and 17 drawings based on the ratio of blank pages (with drawings) to grid papers (with annotations, dedicational remarks and letters). In reference to the Albums, Boxer commented: If someone had given me a complete spiral bound notebook I would not have taken it apart. But in the long run, for [Z¨urn], this may have turned out for the better. If she kept them in book-form, nobody would have bought them. Sometimes it’s nice to keep things together, but sometimes it makes better sense to take them apart in terms of serving the artist.77

From what remains of the Albums, each page is carefully recorded, numbered and signed by Z¨urn with dates. All three notebooks are spiral geometrical study books with both grids and blank pages. The drawings are made on the blank pages while the grid paper pages carry important notations, identifying to whom the notebook was dedicated and who Z¨urn intended to see it. There are also more formal declarations such as ‘Property of Unica Z¨urn’ inscribed and dated by Hans Bellmer on December 25, 1961’, in Album VI, or longer, very formal contractual letters signed by Bellmer, such as one dated 14 December 1961 in Album V, which accepts Z¨urn’s dedication of the book to Bellmer on 3 December the same year. The territorial aspects of the signature and dedications act as marginal notes to the drawings, providing historical information and a contextual frame that indicate the production and provenance of the notebooks.

Books Similarly, the ‘Books’ are also numbered and labelled as series. The Books, however, were handmade of assembled sketches that were then sewn together and bound with specially designed covers, often made from the same red material. The titles of the Books are often reused within the serial books as well as outside of them in anagrammatic 136

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compositions. Many of these anagrams can be found in the Books, intricately inscribed into or alongside several drawings. From 1956 to 1967 there are four notebooks and one publication that carry the title ‘Oracles and Spectacles’. These handmade books have the same red cover material, made by a specialist bookmaker, and are numbered in volumes.78 Unlike the Albums, the serial numbering is disrupted by the combination of Roman and Arabic numerals such as ‘IV’, ‘V’, ‘No. 5’, and in turn suggests that the wholeness is incomplete. The book in its material form and assigned number substantiates a presence that simultaneously marks an absence in the serial process of its making. The disorder of the numbered volumes also obscures a temporal chronology. While Z¨urn numbered and dated each notebook and its components, she often returned to and reworked them, allowing the production process to extend over several years. The only constant of the notebook form is that they remain perpetually unfinished. In particular, the two Books ‘Orakel und Spektakel IV’ (1960), made during Z¨urn’s stay at Palaves-les-flots from April to September, and ‘Orakel und Spektakel V’ (1960/1), made on her arrival in Berlin at the end of September that same year, have both visual and historical significance.79 Z¨urn began inscribing fragments of narratives into a pink notebook in 1960, during her stay at Palaves-les-flots. This notebook holds the manuscripts of several anagrams, as well as the full text of MistAKE. The simultaneous production of MistAKE with Book IV creates interesting parallels between text and image and the use of multiplicity and fragmentation in either form. A week after her arrival in Berlin, Z¨urn was admitted to the Karl-Bonhoeffer-Nerveklinik in Witteneau, staying there until early February the following year. Book V is particularly interesting for its prominent depiction of a series of grotesque, empress-like images of women made during Z¨urn’s stay at a mental institution. A multiheaded female figure in a grand dress holds an erect snake in one hand, while her other arm rests on the shoulder of a younger girl standing beside her (Fig. 18). The head of the central figure, as if undergoing metamorphosis on the page, shifts and fragments into four faces. Two of the three faces, merged at the lips and nose, form the fourth larger face, making the head of the figure monstrous. A closer look at the faces reveals certain expressions emphasised by the corners of the mouth and the darkened circles around the eyes, making each a depiction of woman under different conditions. The woman is represented as a

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¨ UNICA ZURN Figure 18 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Untitled’, Orakel und Spektakel, Book IV, 1960. Ink and gouache on paper notebook, 32.9 × 25.2 cm. Ubu Gallery, New York and Galerie Berinson, Berlin

multifaceted figure represented by the multiple faces. While juggling a phallic snake in one hand – perhaps a symbol in reference to patriarchal authority – and a child in the other, the figure can be read as the image of the ‘schizophrenic’ woman. In other images, multiple faces appear and merge with one another while being physically entered and taken 138

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over by various creatures. These chimerical figures appear powerful, standing elevated outside large buildings while the arabesque of their dresses transforms into the scales and thorns of their surroundings. The two notebooks of the same title display the use of inscription at its height, where the text is literal and incorporated into the drawings, exchanging the act of looking with the act of reading; letters and words becoming an ornamental part of the image. These drawings provide a glimpse into Z¨urn’s interchangeable use of literary and visual tools, where visuality is used as a strong literary tool and word games are used as underdrawings. The arabesque lines of Z¨urn’s Books become a leitmotiv for automatic production. In his annotations for the collection of correspondence between Bellmer, Z¨urn and Ferdi`ere, Alain Chevrier notes that Art Nouveau in general and Aubrey Beardsley in particular, were a source of inspiration for the couple.80 Beardsley, who drew exclusively in black and white using Indian ink, produced elaborate and neat drawings that often included calligraphic lettering. The Surrealists were familiar with Beardsley’s work; Salvador Dali once commented that the overly decorative and ornamental style of Art Nouveau brought out ‘our unconscious mechanisms, our megalomania, our exhibitionistic capricious feeling’.81 The general attitude of Victorian men and women underwent a change in the late nineteenth century, initiated by the women’s movement. Beardsley, widely known to capture the image of the ‘New Woman’ in his drawings, challenged the restrictive social conventions of the time in a witty and mocking manner, using the Victorian decorative motif as a disguise for censoring erotic content. Criticised for illustrating themes such as erotomania, Beardsley often used traditional sexual symbols such as the snake and the nude female body with allusions to motherhood as a subject related to such erotic themes.82 The combination of woman as object of sexual desire and the pious mother figure is recalled in the split that would reappear in 1940s Europe, when it was taken up as subject matter in both literary and visual genres. The symbol of the snake is a prominent motif in Z¨urn’s drawings. While in some drawings the snake is attacked and eaten by an eagle or some other vicious creature, in others it becomes an extension of women’s bodies. In Book V we find a female saurian figure with several smaller reptiles emerging from her body. In another image in the same Book we find a double-headed figure with long tentaclelike horns extending on either side of the Janus face. Here, the body is

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divided by the density of motif and pigment of the pen; the darker lines that form the right side of the body that holds a child-like creature on its bent knee, while lighter inscriptions form the left side. The figure holding the child has a stern gaze with a dark brow, while the less ornate left figure depicts a blank glare with a single breast. It is as if Z¨urn is merging the image of the ‘new woman’ with an old one into a single body that represents woman as both a strong mother figure and an erotic subject. The double-headed serpent at the foot of the woman claws at her body as if looking for a good place to sink its teeth into the breast. Similar to ‘the knowing faces’ of Beardsley’s snakes, Z¨urn depicts the metamorphosis of a sexually responsive woman into a triumphantly responsible mother.83 Z¨urn’s images of women’s heads and faces are always at least duplicated, if not multiplied several times. The monstrous image declares women as empresses, as a regeneration of intelligence, of capability. Z¨urn’s multi-voiced narratives as well as her multifaceted representations of women present new perspectives on definitions of hysteria and femininity that resist definitions and single characterisations. The images of Z¨urn’s ‘new woman’ also escape the representations of the single female body, merging multiple roles and characteristics into monstrous figures.

Manuscripts Lastly, there are notebooks referred to as Manuscripts. Unlike Z¨urn’s other artist books, Manuscripts are short illustrated narratives, dedicated to a particular person or multiple people and carry a specific theme. The House of Illnesses,84 now known as a book, was actually part of Z¨urn’s handmade notebook series labelled as Manuscripts, dedicated to Herman Melville. This manuscript, numbered 2, consists of a narrative with drawings. The drawings in The House of Illnesses also incorporate text and illustrate components of the narrated story. The drawings are most powerful when they depict a corporeal translation of the topography of the institution.85 ‘The whiteness with the red spot’86 is an extract from Z¨urn’s notebook labelled Manuscript No. 3, dedicated to her son Christian and H.M. (Herman Melville), written at Ermenonville during the same period as The House of Illnesses. ‘Serment, Conjuration, Evocation Manuscript No. 6’ (1960), comprises sheets of paper in a folder. Two drawings and three anagrams dated September 1960 were compiled by Z¨urn in Paris and numbered 140

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as Manuscript No. 6 as part of this series. The drawings of tall creatures with a small human figure are given numbers that allocate each illustration to a particular anagram; therefore the anagram and drawing work together in literary and visual forms. All three forms of notebook have their sequence, creating multiple series that were made simultaneously or very close to one another in time. Both Brinkmann and Rike Felka note in their short entries for the 2009 catalogue that these notebooks were created in very short periods of time, and ‘show an inner continuity that corresponds to their being serially produced’, supporting the idea of a serial production.87 In her entry ‘The dreaming hand. Unica Z¨urn’s drawings’, Rike Felka states that for Z¨urn each notebook was a new beginning with a new focus, reflecting the different phases, places, techniques and materials of her career. The open form of the notebooks captures the malleability of Z¨urn’s subjectivity, in which her feelings towards people, stories and anecdotes invariably changed with any desired additions or subtractions. For Felka, even though the notebook ‘promotes the idea of a continuous production’, it also limits the tendency of a series to become an endless extension. She also notes that: ‘Just as the edge of the page can become a boundary, the notebook format limits.’88 The notebooks are explicitly a serial concept; however, they are not necessarily limited by the size or number of their pages as Felka suggests. Z¨urn not only incorporated the process of anagrammatic composition into her graphic work, she also inscribed finished poems into her notebook drawings. Carefully transcribed into and around the drawings, Z¨urn considered the anagrams an aesthetic addition to the image: ‘I write anagram poetry into the drawings. That looks very beautiful.’89 The notebooks can be read not as a limiting medium but a discontinuous seriality that fragments and multiplies into different forms of expression. Notebooks for Z¨urn are a source of ‘endless multiplications,’ which she openly expresses in her narrative The House of Illnesses: ‘Since yesterday I know why I am writing this book: in order to stay sick longer than I ought to. Each day I can insert more white pages into it . . . As long as I can continue to add new blank pages to be filled out, I can stay sick.’90 The fresh blank page for her is beautiful; however, the lines from the page may overflow, and even when the pages of a notebook are finished she can insert new pages, so the act of drawing or writing can go on forever. Z¨urn builds a direct relation between her illness and the material pages of her notebooks, which

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adds a particular significance to the unrestricted form of the notebook. Production is aligned with the duration of her illness, where she is intentionally prolonging ‘sickness’ by the use of writing and drawing. It is also interesting to note the fragmentary form of the notebook, where each page (that provides time to remain ‘sick’) can be added or taken out. The ability either to insert or take out pages suggests an ability to select when or when not to be sick. There is a certain amount of control present in the production of these notebooks that implies that Z¨urn consciously and methodically used materials and certain techniques. Thus it can be deduced that these notebooks were a tool with which Z¨urn sought to exert control over (mental) illness in the form of a strategy or a habitual practice that she, at times, willingly engaged with for creative gain. Notebooks are not static objects that limit, especially in Z¨urn’s Books and Manuscripts where pages were literally assembled and sewn together or her spiral Albums which could be, and eventually were, taken apart, fragmented and sold off as individual drawings. Z¨urn was aware of the potential of her notebooks, which is evident in the fact that she personally signed and dated each drawing in her bound notebooks. This can only suggest that she and/or others around her anticipated the eventual dissemination of the notebooks and carefully identified each drawing with a certain value. Looking back to the early exposure of the drawings, as early as 1957 Z¨urn sold individual drawings from her notebooks in Paris. While the notebook carries significance as part of a series and in itself, each page can be declared equally important.

Automatism and the ‘arche-trace’ The material notebook, like the contents inscribed on and around its surface, transforms, fragments and multiplies. Thus the materiality of the notebook reflects the material quality of Z¨urn’s drawings, where the continuous line performs a calligraphic fusion of words and images. These graphic inscriptions are animated, motile and metamorphic. As they fragment, multiply and transform, the surface witnesses and records this process; continuous and open (with every fresh white page), yet accumulating permanent traces. The inscriptions in Z¨urn’s notebooks are reminiscent of what was once described by Sigmund Freud as the ‘mystic writing pad’. Freud’s visual analogy ‘A note upon the “mystic writing pad”’91 is appropriated from a childhood 142

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writing device, which consists of a celluloid surface that is attached on one end to an underlying wax slab. The receptive celluloid surface is incapable of storing inscriptions, any marks being erased by simply lifting the sheet, while the wax slab on which it directly rests is capable of permanently accumulating all inscriptions. Freud’s likening of the celluloid sheet to temporary perception and the wax slab to the mnemonic apparatus is introduced with the actual use of a notepad as a retainer of memory. Here, a perhaps too literal but nonetheless relevant example is Z¨urn’s use of actual notepads as art objects. The drawings dated 1957 are made on the small pink leaves of a notepad, which were then torn and attached to various letters sent by Z¨urn to friends in Berlin (Fig. 19). The factory prints on the right top corner of each leaf give the notepad a numerical seriality and allow us to envision a pad that was once bound at the top, providing fresh pages upon lifting, and possibly tearing off inscribed surfaces, while retaining marks or blots of ink from the previous drawing. The image on No. 47 is an ink drawing of what resembles a figure in an Native American headdress with bow and arrow, perhaps bearing a mnemonic trace of the ‘Native Indian Mother’, with a metamorphosed body covered in scales and multiple feet.92 Another leaf, No. 36, is a gouache painting with fine colours superimposed over hints of faded lines from an ink drawing. While for Freud writing is a mnemonic record that is extracted and materialised from the apparatus, Z¨urn’s graphic materials can be read as an intricate collage of intertextual references that are deliberately woven together like her narratives and poetry. Z¨urn’s use of intertextuality can be read in terms of Derrida, who in his theoretical works such as Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference searched for a different writing space; one that is not an ‘external projection of the memory as aid’ but that is formed by a combination of different layers and drives.93 The resulting concept leads to an organised multiplicity of origins, rather than a process that indicates any form of a unitary original presence. The analogy of the mystic writing pad, where the conscious retains no permanent trace and reacts like a clean sheet to every new perception, combines Freud’s idea of the perceptual apparatus with the psychic scripture: ‘We must be several in order to write, and even to “perceive”.’94 On a handmade postcard dated 1956 we find Z¨urn experimenting with the concept of the trace. The embossed surface reveals a form

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¨ UNICA ZURN Figure 19 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Untitled’ [No. 47 notepad], 1957. Ink drawing on rose paper, 13 × 8.4 cm. Deutsches Literaturearchiv Marbach

that resembles a mutated organism. Breast-like marks are decorated with sharp flexuous lines. The underlying inscription, carved into the card, creates multiple layers with superimposed marks, and this relief surface is made apparent by the blackened smear applied over it. The 144

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technique of its production is close to the method of ‘frottage’, where a sheet of paper is incised with a pattern, creating a relief, which is then rubbed with pencil, charcoal or crayon.95 On its verso, we find an intricately designed postal stamp fixed on the top right corner, made and signed by Z¨urn in black and red ink. Z¨urn includes an ‘official’ heading, declaring it a product of the ‘Universal Mail Union’ with the word ‘postcard’ written in six different languages. As an object whose function is to be transported as a communication method, the postcard and the trace become a symbol for an absence, similar to Lacan’s reading of The Purloined Letter.96 The postcard is a fictional device designed by Z¨urn, therefore it is not part of a real system; it will never be sent or received. While the trace indicates an absent image, the postcard points to a lost communication.

¨ ‘Cadeaux Surrealiste?’: Zurn’s Use of a ‘Surrealist automatism’ After dinner, at my mother’s house, Unica was absent-mindedly scribbling (like one scribbles while on the telephone). Of course, with my very experienced eye, I immediately saw a remarkable donation to automatic drawing supporting a graphic melody without rupture.97

In a letter to Gaston Ferdi`ere, dated 2 November 1964, Hans Bellmer told the tale of how he first discovered Z¨urn’s ability to draw automatically. With a direct reference to Breton’s definition of automatism as a unification of the unconscious mind with artistic production by means of a distracted state, Z¨urn is said to engage in automatic drawing ‘absent-mindedly’ almost naturally. The letter continues with the claim that after Bellmer pointed this out to Z¨urn, she continued to produce drawings for the next few days ‘with an intense pleasure’. Bellmer concluded by commenting on the drawings, stating that ‘almost all [of which] were of quality’.98 Though previous commentators have all pointed to this passage as the beginning of Z¨urn’s artistic career, few have focused on what happened before or afterwards. Following this encouraging ‘introduction’ into Surrealism and the practice of automatic drawing, Z¨urn significantly developed the technique that she continued to use as a method of visual production until the very end of her life. Whilst the above anecdote suggests that Bellmer in a sense ‘discovered’ Z¨urn, it is important to remember Z¨urn’s previous affinity 145

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with Berlin Surrealism and her familiarity with techniques that were definitive of the movement, such as automatism. It is now known that Z¨urn was very familiar with early Surrealist definitions of automatism from 1949 and had direct access to automatic texts and drawings during her time at Die Badewanne. Whilst the earliest known graphic drawings date to 1954, it is possible that Z¨urn experimented with automatic drawing prior to this recorded dinner date in Paris. Nonetheless, the anecdote has become a ‘go-to’ reference in discussions of Z¨urn’s graphic work. In Automatic Woman Conley notes that ‘[i]t was Bellmer who encouraged Z¨urn to compose anagrams and to draw automatically’,99 and she considers this to be the main motive behind Z¨urn’s move to and ensuing success in Paris. Conley’s discussion of ‘automatism’ is centred on the narrative The Man of Jasmine, and makes very few, obscure references to actual drawings made by Z¨urn. From the early 1990s, following a decade of a handful of exhibitions and minor publications, the scholarship on Z¨urn’s work, especially within English-speaking countries, has relied on the newly translated narratives The House of illnesses, The Man of Jasmine and Dark Spring.100 All three narratives, which have strong visual innuendos, were considered central primary materials to be read as semi-autobiographical sources. This approach was pooled with the canonical reading of women artists as ‘female counterparts’ to betterknown male companions – indexing Z¨urn and her work under the auspices of Hans Bellmer. These literary texts, although at times providing specific information on drawings, which can be useful, are autonomous works that should not restrict the reading of Z¨urn’s visual production. The main danger of using these literary narratives to interpret the visual work is the loss of the graphic element, insofar as the assumed autobiographical aspects of the literature are read over the visual components. Observing Z¨urn’s volume of graphic production requires a concentrated focus on the image itself. While Bellmer encouraged Z¨urn to practice automatic drawing, he did not think himself to be the first to introduce Z¨urn to Surrealist techniques or to making art. In the same letter, Bellmer wrote: ‘[Z¨urn] always had a taste for art and painting’, in reference to her previous partner Alexander Camaro who, in Berlin, supplied her with art materials. With a slightly critical tone, Bellmer considered her previous works in relation to Marc Chagall: ‘flavourless, and softened . . . not

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completely without charm, but mediocre’.101 Though Z¨urn’s early paintings did not particularly impress Bellmer, her collages certainly did. Bellmer briefly discussed a number of collages Z¨urn made after visiting Max Ernst’s exhibition in Germany.102 Album III was begun in 1962 during her internment at the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Anne in Paris. An earlier annotation in the patient file from her first internment at the Karl-Banhoeffer Klinik from 1960 noted: ‘She began to paint in a Surrealistic way. She often preferred paper printed with [musical] notes to effectively obtain an under layer of tone.’103 The 1962 notebook, which was given to Z¨urn to draw on by Bellmer, was comprised of a reproduction of German composer Robert Schumann’s musical scales. Robert Schumann was notoriously incarcerated in a mental institution for the last two years of his life. Bellmer may have chosen this particular German composer for this reason. This semi-leather bound book represents a transformation of the object and medium that can be seen in the juxtaposition of collages and drawings made by hand. In Album III, we find a series of animals and other, enchanted, creatures transforming over and within the musical scores that now exchange the earlier auditory element of her radio tales and her later narratives with a visual presentation that awakens an imagined auditory counterpart. Though using musical scores with German titles, the album was made particularly for a French audience, where Z¨urn carefully translated everything into French. The notebook is transformed into a picture book for adults and children, resonating to her earlier radio stories which also concentrated on animals and creatures of the forest. On the first page of Z¨urn’s music album, the collage is superimposed over Schumann’s piano composition Bilder aus Osten [Pictures from the East]. In French, Z¨urn inscribes the subtitle La Vie des Bˆetes [The Life of Beasts] for her collage of a large toad in the top centre, a parrot in flight on the right centre, the head of an ostrich on the left corner and what resembles a cow’s head with a feathered headdress. The impressions of the found object conduct the pen in a ‘magic dictation’, while the blobs of red ink stain the pages like blood. In these pages, the flat sheets of the cut out animals present a violence undergoing a deformation by the manipulation of images conjoined with the act of drawing. Automatism has been a process used for creative expression and production by various artists for over a century. This technique, which

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precedes and surpasses Surrealism, is more complex than the often associated single and therefore simplistic definition. The identification of Z¨urn’s graphic work as ‘automatic’ raises a number of questions in relation to the definition of automatism and the surrounding debate on what constitutes automatic production and whether there can be a truly automatic text or drawing. Over the last 15 years, there has been a returning interest in Z¨urn’s visual work that is beginning to address such issues.104 In 2010, the exhibition Surrealism and Madness at the Prinzhorn Collection Museum in Heidelberg presented a wide selection of works, including the early automatic drawings of Andr´e Masson and Salvador Dal´ı’s ‘paranoiac-critical method’. A small room, separated from the two-storey exhibition space, held eight works by Z¨urn. The exhibition sought to present the close affinities between seminal members of the Surrealist circle and Hans Prinzhorn’s collection of works made by patients. The individual display of Z¨urn’s work, which had no affinity with this particular institution or Prinzhorn, was appropriated as an indirect allusion to madness, Surrealism and the technique of automatism. In her short article ‘On several drawings by Unica Z¨urn’, Bettina Brand-Claussen introduces Z¨urn by means of an outdated identification with the doll that Bellmer had himself constructed; similar remarks can be found in The New York Times review of Dark Spring105 as well as earlier accounts of friends describing the couple.106 She continues: ‘Literary texts such as The Man of Jasmine and Dark Spring, which despite their distanced narrative perspective (“she”) should be read as autobiographies, invite us to see the visual works in the same way.’107 Though Brand-Claussen does not suggest we read these drawings simply as ‘psychograms of serious traumatic events’, her interpretation of Z¨urn’s narratives as autobiographical simultaneously risks undermining the drawings as mere illustrations. As Ren´ee Riese Hubert pointed out in Surrealism and the Book,108 drawing remained primarily defined as secondary to the written word despite the revolution of book illustration early in the twentieth century. Consideration of Z¨urn’s graphic drawings together with her narratives reiterates an earlier hierarchy between disciplines and medium where its chief function was the depiction of narrative.109 In the postwar period, however, drawing took a new role, as it became the primary mode of expression for many leading artists. As Lesley Jones observes in her outline of the use of drawing from 1918 to 1950 in Surrealism, ‘the artists absorbed

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the hallucinatory, nonlinear, and subversive qualities of the text and adapted them to their own expressive ends’.110 Brand-Claussen’s interpretation in which she considers Z¨urn’s graphic work as illustrative lead to the question of whether these drawings can be considered automatic: ‘But how close did she come to dessin automatique, to leaving marks of the soul untouched by reason, as the Surrealists were looking for?’111 While on the one hand Z¨urn’s drawings are put under scrutiny by asking whether they can be aligned with a ‘Surrealist automatism’, on the other hand a list of particularly automatic qualities of Z¨urn’s work is identified and outlined with ease: ‘Even if Z¨urn’s drawings seem purposeless and accidental, like the e´criture of the “masters”, they betray an aesthetic plan, attention, and not least infinite patience and detailed work.’112 Emphasis is placed on Z¨urn’s description of drawing as watching the self perform an uncontrollable act: ‘without a present intention increases the excitement of the work: you watch yourself doing it . . . Looking at your own body, it is surprising how capable it is of transforming into many different animals.’113 The act of watching an image appear before the artist’s eyes is consistent with earlier descriptions of automatic production. In 1954, Yves Tanguy wrote about the creative process in an essay of the same title: ‘The images take shape before my eyes. It reveals its surprises the further it progresses. This gives me the sense of complete freedom.’114 A year later Andr´e Masson described the act of drawing as a ‘tornado’, only later revealing what was on the surface: ‘In the beginning, I drew so feverishly that I didn’t see what I was making. In this tornado of sorts, without any precise form, emerged parts that one could relate to the world of the senses.’115 Max Ernst went as far as describing himself as a ‘spectator’ at the birth of his work. These all coincide with Breton’s definition of ‘tracing’ in the 1924 Manifesto as a ‘kind of drawing that suggests no conscious effort; it is an automatic transfer to paper of, in this case, imagery “never seen”’.116 However, the process of drawing indicates a more dynamic physical interaction where the hand is deliberately engaged in the act. One could go further to suggest that this act goes beyond physicality, (in)voluntarily engaging the mind as well. In ‘Unica Z¨urn: oracles and spectacles’,117 Jo˜ao Ribas highlights the contradistinctive characteristic of Z¨urn’s automatic drawings from automatism as defined by Breton’s 1924 Manifesto to suggest an active participation in the process of drawing. Ribas quotes from Z¨urn’s The Man of Jasmine.

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The pen ‘floats’ tentatively above the white paper, until she discovers the spot for the first eye. Only once she is ‘being looked at’ from the paper does she start to find her bearings and effortlessly add one motif to the next.118

There is a certain awareness in Z¨urn’s conscious engagement with the act of drawing; although it may or may not be controlled, the hand and the eye are receptive and therefore intentionally engage in a state of perceptive passivity. This description is contrary to Breton’s definition of the automatic process where the inscription is blindly produced by an unknowing agent: With a pencil and white sheet of paper to hand . . . I would plunge into it, convinced that I would find my way again, in a maze of lines which at first glance would seem to go nowhere. And, upon opening my eyes, I would get the very strong impression of something ‘never seen’.119

Brand-Claussen’s resistance to defining Z¨urn’s drawings as Surrealist automatism resurfaces: Z¨urn’s description of ‘looking’ and ‘watching’ the body as it draws eliminates the possibility of a unified pure unconscious state, and instead creates a splitting in its creative process. The 2009 exhibition Unica Z¨urn: Dark Spring had taken a considerably different approach to Z¨urn’s work than did the later show, standing against the simplification of her work as an ameliorative product of her illness, and instead contextualising Z¨urn’s drawings in relation to Surrealist automatism. In his previously mentioned catalogue essay ‘Unica Z¨urn: oracles and spectacles’, Ribas places the exhibited drawings within the defining aspect of Surrealism: ‘The goal of the Surrealist automatist technique, to which Z¨urn aligned herself, is a kind of “performed” or “encountered” madness. . . . ’120 This ‘controlled’ or conscious adaptation lies closer to Henri Michaux’s proposal for a ‘fusion of automatism and volition’; he had previously equated automatism with ‘incontinence’.121 Ribas describes Z¨urn’s drawings as an ‘entoptic graphomania’, where the image occurs upon the perception of existing marks.122 This Surrealist technique, though not considered by the French Surrealists as definitive of automatism, and was actually developed in Romania during the mid-1940s, and provides the concept Ribas puts forward as an intriguing development of the strategy. Ribas relates the ‘cryptographic character’ of form (as discussed by Ferdinand de Saussure)123 to Z¨urn’s belief in the 150

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ability of language to take on an oracular character: ‘In anagrams, as in drawings, Z¨urn was merely deciphering a message put there for her. . . . ’124 This association makes sense, considering that Saussure was the formative figure for Lacan in his understanding and discussion of language. Here, though not mentioned by Ribas, Z¨urn’s interest in Lacan is again present. This ‘oracular character’ of text and image takes on an interpretive process, transforming and simultaneously disfiguring reality through a method that can be taken even further in relation to Salvador Dali’s paranoiac-critical method. Automatic drawing as visual play takes a different route in Z¨urn’s Books and especially in her musical notebooks, where the trace indicates an alternate process of inscription. Similar to Mir´o’s Barcelona Series III (1944), where he used lithographic pencil on transfer paper, the act of tracing and transforming is combined with the use of musical notes and the production of distorted figures. The paranoiac-critical method is the epitome of Surrealist visual play based on the idea of the double image. It is a systematic process of undermining rational thought which in turn is said to manipulate images by means of transformations and associations. This method, named by Dal´ı, aimed to conjure a world seen in continuous flux: ‘as in his paintings of the 1930s, in which objects dissolve from one state into another, solid things become transparent, and things of no substance assume form’.125 In Orakel und Spektakel Book IV,126 the drawings merge with a calligraphic use of text to form highly decorative surfaces that carry an oracular function; the images transform according to the distance and angle of sight, resulting in multiple, open interpretations. The viewer is given a chance to discover the potential of their own perceptions, experiencing the drawings as limitless and ever-changing. ‘Notes on her last (?) crisis’,127 written during her internment in 1966, is a short text which in itself does not narrate any one event in particular but rather a series of events where one is born of the other. The narrated events are dependent on describing what the protagonist sees: From this new position she has gained several centimetres and discovers an enormous hand up above . . . the hand turns into the head and neck of a crocodile one with one single, evil eye. The crocodile transforms back into the hand, which in turn becomes the crocodile once more. She realizes the crocodile is guarding the sky.128

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¨ UNICA ZURN Figure 20 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Untitled’, 1963. Chinese ink on paper. 64 × 50 cm. Joachim Kersten collection, Hamburg

By shifting her body, the images transform with the movement of her peripheral vision; like the paranoiac-eye in Z¨urn’s drawings that brings the page to life, a figure that resembles this description can be found in an untitled drawing made in 1963 (Fig. 20). The eye, which is to be found everywhere in Z¨urn’s drawings, therefore conjures a paranoiac quality that brings the page and the marks on its surface to life: ‘Z¨urn was always haunted by the look of eyes: women’s eyes are like spiders, and the spying upon the self is somehow associated with self-splitting, with the schizophrenia of Z¨urn herself.’129 Paranoia, often defined as a synthesis of the real and the imaginary, is a temporary insanity that is incorporated into a method based on the sudden power of systematic associations. Thus a delirium of interpretive association takes on a systematic structure in Dali’s 152

[this] could point precisely to the kind of awareness, the capacity for consciousness of consciousness, usually impaired by illness. Z¨urn’s work however, seems imbued with a surplus of involution – a kind of drowning

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paranoiac-critical activity, where a spontaneous method of irrational knowledge is interpretative. Here, Ribas’s reading of the eye as ‘the presence of an observing ego’ becomes useful:

out of the external world through paranoid self-awareness – as in the clich´ed description of the schizophrenic as someone who thinks they’re being ‘watched’.130

Thus the paranoid drive of production merges with the play of word and image in a graphic expression. Roger Cardinal has expressed the difficulty of reading and defining Z¨urn’s visual work, but nevertheless has described her drawings as ‘displaying, like Surrealist automatic drawings in general, ‘the least perceptible undulations in the flow of thought’, pointing to Andr´e Masson during his automatic period of 1923–6 as a definitive resemblance.131 However, a closer look at the mechanism of automatic drawing and production proves that it may not only be a simple ‘flow of thought’. In his annotations for Letters to Doctor Ferdi`ere, Alain Chevrier refers to Leonardo da Vinci’s renowned advice to artists on interpreting nature – ‘the phantasms which come into sight from various supports: clouds, door, grass which recall da Vinci’s famous page on the faces which he saw in the stains of an old wall.’132 Chevrier suggests that Z¨urn utilised the ‘interpretation of stains’, which was also an influential concept for Surrealist automatism. Seeing faces and interpreting images from clouds is a technique Z¨urn mentions in her narratives and journal entries, described as encountering the marvellous: ‘without knowing what she is going to draw, she experienced the excitement and the enormous curiosity necessary for her own work to bring her a surprise’.133 Z¨urn’s perceptions are not, however, purely poetic but also painful: the cloud of her cigarette soon turns to the poisonous mist that killed millions of people during The Holocaust, or faces soon transform into threatening enemies, the White Man in The Man of Jasmine, the spies of the ‘fifth column’ in MistAKE and Dr Mortimier in The House of Illnesses, whom she identifies as her death.134 Similar to Z¨urn’s description of the transformation of her own body, the bodies on the pages also transform into various creatures, fused 153

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with images which resemble cats, reptiles, birds and donkey-horses. These are familiar motifs that are continuously recreated, forming new images. Coincidentally, Brand-Claussen’s doubt as to whether Z¨urn’s drawings can be aligned with a Surrealist automatism is shared by Z¨urn herself, expressed in a declarative letter found inside the Album V’s cover. Above a letter written by Bellmer, signed 14 December 1961, a small notation in Z¨urn’s writing can be found on the top right corner of the page. Z¨urn’s inscription, reading ‘`a Jean-Franc¸ois R. et Madame CR / Cadeaux Surrealiste?’, suggests that the Album was presented to Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain and his then wife Catherine Rabain (Binet) as a gift, referring to the drawings as ‘Surrealist gifts’, albeit with a question mark. Z¨urn’s hesitancy in declaring the drawings to be Surrealist, signified by the question mark, indicates a remote allegiance with the identification of her use of the technique with the movement, posing an open-ended question to the onlooker.

6 ¨ Notes on Unica Zurn’s The Man of Jasmine and Other Narratives The Man of Jasmine And time passes. More than a year has passed. ‘Isn’t there some remedy to overcome this depression?’ she asks a psychiatrist, and his cautious answer is: ‘It may take many months.’

This short passage is from Unica Z¨urn’s narrative The Man of Jasmine, an in-depth study of ‘mental illness’. Z¨urn gives a critical account of her experience and observations of psychiatric treatment in the 1960s. The narrative is considered a formative piece in beginning to understand the relationship between Z¨urn’s life and work, which has previously led to several misinterpretations due to limited consideration of a larger sociopolitical context. Z¨urn provides diverse approaches to storytelling, utilising literary tools such as the anagram, the amalgamation of fictional references with lived and imagined experiences and a critical engagement with contemporaneous socio-political issues. The Man of Jasmine, which is the longest and the most comprehensive insight into her artistic process, was originally written in German and was translated by Ruth Henry and Robert Valacay into French between 1967 and 1970. The French translation was published ´ by Editions Gallimard Press in 1971 possibly under the editorial

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recommendation of Raymond Queneau. Though a number of recent scholars have commented on Z¨urn and her relatively well-known narratives particularly The Man of Jasmine, few have observed how the book emerged in relation to the wider context of her artistic career. The collection of letters exchanged between Z¨urn and Ruth Henry about the book will shed light on the reading of the text itself.

The Making of . . . In reference to the book, originally titled Der Mann im Jasmin, Z¨urn wrote of travelling to ˆIl-de-R´e, a small island off the west coast of France, where she was inspired to write on her impressions on mental illness.1 Later this is also recalled in the narrative itself: ‘Unfortunately here she gets it into her head to write down the story of her illness.’2 However, it is not likely that this ‘idea’ was formulated on a spontaneous basis but rather was influenced by several examples of its kind. At the turn of the century, paranormal states were at the forefront of discussions, occupying the research field as well as pulp fiction. Following one of many novelistic case histories, such as Th´eodore Flournoy’s From India to the Planet Mars,3 based on the experiences of H´el`ene Smith, the prominence of the documented psychoanalytic ‘subject’ experience in psychology and literature continued in the renowned studies of Joseph Breuer with Sigmund Freud and his account of Anna O.4 and Jacques Lacan’s 1932 account of Aim´ee.5 These case-studies, which drew the interest of the Surrealists, coincided with the rapid diffusion of the psychoanalytic doctrine in France, which was seen as an instrument with which to oppose institutional psychiatry. Breton’s automatic writing, believed to be a threshold into the parapsychological conditions closely connected to the ‘mysteries of the unconscious’, was transferred to the use of automatic drawing, thus furthering the cross-fertilisation between psychoanalysis and art. The objective of automatic writing, like parole pleine, was that it would lead to the ‘land of the unconscious’. While accounts of mental illness had become popular in avant-garde literary and artistic circles in France, German literature did not follow this trend, censoring such content from canonical publications. Though similar accounts were produced, none were actually published until the 1980s. The story of how Z¨urn decided to write the book is a grey area with several contradictory claims. In a number of texts, Z¨urn claims that 156

She is expecting Dr Rabain, who wants her to record her manuscript on mental illness on the Magnetophone. She imagines that Rabain will ask her questions, which she will answer – a complete cross-questioning – and that one day the text will be broadcast to the world on the radio. Both Rabain and the white man had encouraged her to complete the manuscript.6

On the one hand, Z¨urn expresses the support she felt, whilst on the other hand, she claims to go against the advice of her friends and doctors (namely, Dr Gaston Ferdi`ere) and continue writing under the danger of losing touch with reality. There is a close association in the anecdotal evidence between the act of writing the book and the process of ‘becoming’ mentally unstable, which has been observed by others.7 After moving to Paris in the early 1950s, Z¨urn’s artistic career flourished and her work was sold and exhibited in several galleries. Her first major group exhibition was the 1959 Surrealist exhibition, where her work was showcased among other established Surrealists including Hans Bellmer and Andr´e Breton, as well as participants from around the world.8 In her account of the exhibition Z¨urn described the opening night, making reference to a particular artist who made a great impression on her and other Surrealists: Schr¨oderSonnerstern, a German artist discovered by Bellmer in 1958 who had been incarcerated in both prison and a mental hospital. In his letter to Breton dated 10 December 1958, Bellmer introduces the work of Schr¨oder-Sonnerstern with high praise, claiming he is ‘a remarkable personality and perhaps very schizophrenic’.9 In her account of the exhibition, Z¨urn wrote about Schr¨oder-Sonnerstern’s representation at the Daniel Cordier Gallery, where his work was accompanied by what is referred to as an ‘unsettling’ autobiography. Z¨urn insinuated that the unusual experiences the artist had lived through during his incarcerations brought a unique interest to his work. Subsequently Schr¨oder-Sonnerstern was included in the exhibition and was publicised widely in Surrealist journals and activities. Z¨urn was aware of the growing interest in the art of the mentally ill and incarcerated artists, and had observed the attention and fame granted to such personalities

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she was encouraged by fellow artists (Hans Bellmer, Henri Michaux) and associates such as Dr Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain to write and to draw; in ‘Notes on her last (?) crisis’, Z¨urn records an event which Rabain claims never actually took place:

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first hand. The 1967 exhibition catalogue for her joint exhibition in Hannover with Bellmer reflects this accumulated knowledge. Her biographical section outlines her numerous internments in psychiatric institutions and her treatments. Here, Z¨urn deliberately described herself as a mentally ill woman who endured ‘deliriums’ in a creative way. She described these experiences as ‘short and very lovely, not frightening’. Z¨urn also included a description of the conditions in the institutions where she had been a patient, briefly noting the treatment methods. She concluded with the announcement of her forthcoming publication ‘under the impressions of a mental malady’, which would later be titled The Man of Jasmine.

Letters to Ruth Henry Between the years of 1967, when Z¨urn completed the manuscript, and 1970, when the translation and publication were finalised, Henry and Z¨urn exchanged a series of letters discussing various details of the project. The collection, published under the title Lettres a` Ruth Henry in 2006, with an introductory note by Henry and a postscript by Victoria Combalia, was later banned in all book stores across France and other parts of Europe due to copyright disputes. The few copies that are now only available in private collections reveal the intimate relationship the two women shared, which Henry refers to as a ‘companionship’ that goes beyond friendship. In her introductory text, Henry highlights the significance of the book, The Man of Jasmine, not only in Z¨urn’s oeuvre but to German literature in general. She notes that the lack of books like this in Germany is like a ‘lacuna’ and questions whether this void will ever be filled. Similar books were censored due to themes of mental illness, hermaphroditism, violence, suicide and ‘madness’, which were considered inappropriate social conditions and behaviour. In fact, the original German text was shelved until 1977, when Verlag Ullstein picked up the manuscript for publication, when it became one of the first of its kind. The book is described by Henry as an inexplicable hybrid of fact and fiction, observation and fabrication: it is an ‘oscillation between pure fiction and simple documentation’, which in turn cannot be accountable for documenting a reality.10 This is one of the most common misinterpretations of the book, confusing as it does the reading of literary content and mannerisms as purely autobiographical. Though the narrative does not reflect a reality in 158

Critics The German reception of Z¨urn’s work was harsh, despite notable figures like Sigrid Weigel predicting in 1987 that ‘the interest in [Z¨urn’s] literary work would increase in the years to come’.13 This has been contested by commentators such as Rita Morrien, who stated that: ‘The name of Z¨urn remain[s] known only to a comparatively small number of readers.’14 This stagnation partly resulted from the reception of Z¨urn’s work by some feminist writers, such as Margaret Eifler, who considers ‘the values of distance and passivity’ which Z¨urn embraces, having ‘no relevance to the new life attitude [lebensgefuhl] of feminism’.15 Equally, Z¨urn’s work was singled out by French feminist Luce Irigaray, who argued that Z¨urn was a negative example to women artists. In her article ‘A natal lacuna’, Irigaray condemns Z¨urn as a ‘failed artist’ based on a biographical reading of dependence on male figures and a failure to launch her career and life as an independent woman.16 Over the past decade, such comments have become outmoded views on Surrealist women that call for new perspectives and methodologies in reading women’s lives and works. More recent scholarship has begun to revise such views. Jared Robert Baxter, who also argues against such criticisms, quotes one of Z¨urn’s anagrams to locate her as a precursor to the women’s movements she was once excluded from: ‘what happiness to be before the beginning’.17 One of the resulting effects on the reception of women writers, especially within a German context, has

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itself, its style carries a strict and cold overtone, which Henry refers to as a ‘metallic style’ that does not ‘sugar coat’ the realities of its subject matter.11 The book comprises five shorter manuscripts, ‘Notes on her last (?) crisis’, ‘The whiteness with the red spot’, ‘Les jeux a deux’ [‘Games for two’], ‘In ambush’ and the longer narrative ‘Impressions from a mental illness’ compiled under the title The Man of Jasmine. All fragments of the text refer to different experiences of illness, mental as well as physical, with intertextual references. The compilation of texts varies in different editions, which include some manuscripts such as The House of Illnesses, or exclude other like ‘The whiteness with the red spot’; both of which have been published individually with original illustrations. There are several editions of the book, published in several languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Japanese and Turkish.12

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been the conventional way of describing women’s literature by means of their biography, as opposed to writing by men, which has been viewed in terms of the reception of their work. As Sabine WernerBirkenbach suggests, ‘it is necessary for a history of women’s writing to focus on works and issues, rather than on biographical details’.18 In line with this, there are notable qualities and characteristics of the book that can be mentioned that surpass its correspondence and relation to Z¨urn’s biographical details. In an earlier essay ‘Unica Z¨urn, la femme qui n’´etait pas la poup´ee’ [‘Unica Z¨urn, the woman who is not the doll’], Henry writes of Michel Leiris’s impression of The Man of Jasmine: ‘I know of Bellmer’s woman [La femme de Bellmer] as an artist . . . but this amazing book has given me one of the most important readings of these last years.’19 In fact, the book and Z¨urn’s creative process involved and attracted the attention of a number of Surrealists, which remains an overlooked aspect in that the reception of her work in later scholarship is unexamined.

Preface After Der Mann im Jasmin was rejected by German publishers and was subsequently translated into French to be published in Paris, Gallimard Press picked up the manuscript for publication. Prior to this, Z¨urn collaborated with Max Ernst in 1964 on the booklet for her solo exhibition at Le Point Cardinal in Paris. Gallimard initially intended to use Ernst’s preface for the debut publication of L’Homme-Jasmin, which appears to be in line with Z¨urn’s aspirations for the book. In a letter to Ruth Henry, Z¨urn discusses the possibility of asking Ernst to participate in the project and asks Henry to pass on a copy of the manuscript for his consideration. For unknown reasons, the preface was not used for the posthumous publication; however he is said to have supported the realisation of the project. In the end, it was Surrealist writer Andr´e Pieyre de Mandiargues who wrote the preface for the first publication in 1971, praising the book and Z¨urn’s efforts against the book’s initial rejection by the German press. De Mandiargues was already familiar with Z¨urn’s work as early as the late 1950s, having written the catalogue preface for her 1957 exhibition at Le Soleil dans la Tˆete in Paris. In his short poetic text, written shortly after Z¨urn’s suicide in 1970, he wrote about how the book expressed issues and concerns on subjects such as 160

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‘madness’, taking on controversial issues that were largely marginalised by society. De Mandiargues further noted that Z¨urn embraced such issues with great passion and that her ‘sorceress style’ impressed the biggest names of her time, such as Jean Dubuffet. With mention of her successful exhibitions and a large body of work, de Mandiargues placed Z¨urn in the forefront of Surrealism, expressing his opinion that her work surpassed Bellmer’s in many aspects. Significantly, the text is not identified as autobiographical or self-referential; however, de Mandiargues does point out that Z¨urn lived in the life of her characters like ‘oxygen in blood’, breathing life into her work with increasing appetite.20 This was most likely the quality that led de Mandiargues to place Z¨urn’s work ahead of Bellmer’s and that of the rest of the Surrealists; the ability to truly experience and immerse herself in her work. The posthumous publication of the book following her suicide on 19 October 1970 has cast a heavy shadow on the reading and reception of the narrative itself, which closely intertwines episodes of severe illness with sporadically terse documentation and reflection on the latter.

Split Binaries: Dream, Reality One night in the sixth year of her life a dream takes her behind the tall mirror which hangs in a mahogany frame on the wall of her room. This mirror becomes an open door through which she steps to reach a long avenue lined with poplars . . . The impression of this dream is so strong that she gets up in order to push the mirror to one side. She finds the wall and no door.21

The Man of Jasmine begins with the dream of a little girl who enters another realm through a tall mirror. From this moment on the reader is invited into the interior world of the protagonist, who forms in her imagination the man of jasmine. The image of this man is encountered in reality quickly after the dream. This tall apparition, described as a paralysed and silent figure, is reminiscent of a reflection caught in a mirror, which becomes for the girl the image of love. She writes: ‘His silent presence teaches her two lessons which she never forgets: Distance. / Passivity.’22 Splitting in the identification of the self is a reoccurring subject matter in Z¨urn’s text, alongside split binaries, such as dream/reality. Such binaries are a formative motif throughout, shaping characters and events, as well as providing instructions or ‘lessons’ 161

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stated in the book. These lessons become mental states generated from the earlier text ‘The games for two’, which becomes a short annex for the entire book.23 It could be said that the latter motifs are based on literary tools that adopt restrictions, mainly anagrammatic composition, which force the writer to adhere to certain rules. In The Man of Jasmine the following definition is given early on in the narrative: Anagrams are words and sentences which are created by rearranging the letters in a word or sentence. One may only use the letters which are available, and not draw on any others. Inventing anagrams is one of her most intense preoccupations.24

Z¨urn produced over 100 known anagrammatic poems, some of which are dispersed among graphic notebooks, her longer prose narratives and scraps of loose paper. The clear association of mental illness with anagrammatic production becomes a means of dissociating the self from reality. In many of Z¨urn’s texts, it is reiterated that the ‘act of writing’ makes her intensely preoccupied with the subject of her narratives, and distances her from reality and from the people around her. This rule follows Z¨urn’s anagrammatic procedure, where the composed poem insistently subverts its title.25 In Subject to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism and Gender,26 Caroline Rupprecht carries out an in-depth reading of The Man of Jasmine, proposing a stern analysis of Z¨urn’s artistic identity. Her account outlines three major characteristics of Z¨urn’s work that touches upon the objectification of the self, a responsive representation of psychiatric treatment and, lastly, a redefinition of subjectivity. Rupprecht focuses on the narrative and its literary format – written in the third person, ‘she’ – which she reads as forming an impersonal perspective as an attempt to ‘objectify’ her own self (Z¨urn). Though the composition of the plot at times adheres to Z¨urn’s real-life experiences and surroundings, it cannot be read as a purely autobiographical piece. Rupprecht aligns Z¨urn’s text with the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, highlighting that her project draws attention to the problems of psychiatric treatment and conditions. With reference to her influence by Artaud, Rupprecht rightly notes that Z¨urn’s project was to draw attention to the problem of treatment. Without exploring this inviting context further, she concludes that ‘madness is not the frightening 162

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abject condition which has been described by psychoanalysts working in a clinical context. Rather importance is placed on what the subject sees.’27 Rupprecht points to the experimental quality of the text that investigates the very nature of representation itself, as it illustrates the subject’s dependence on the self-observing gaze, which leads Rupprecht to suggest Z¨urn’s writing as a redefinition of subjectivity. Z¨urn’s narrative is considered an autobiographical source, tying the text to Z¨urn as author. Rupprecht makes the interesting observation that the story is not only a narrative of the protagonist’s endeavours but also a record of how the book itself came into being. Consequently, for Rupprecht this suggests that since the protagonist’s identity relies on the text, Z¨urn as the author is equally in such a predicament. This leads Rupprecht to define Z¨urn’s exploration of the relationship between self and representation in terms of the Freudian ‘ego ideal’. This splitting, as well as the fragmentation of the body, is read as a negative sign, where the body is said to be mutilated under the direction of a male counterpart. An interesting quality of Z¨urn’s writing is introduced in Rupprecht’s account, which poses on the one hand, a deconstruction of madness as a matter of institutional discourse, where people are ‘labelled’ by diagnoses and, on the other hand, a language that illustrates a polemic between ‘subjects’ and their representation by questioning the diagnoses placed on them. Z¨urn’s text seems to illustrate that art cannot replace ‘reality’, and that the knowledge that the ‘image’ is not oneself can never fully disappear. This is an intriguing point, however, the emphasis is placed on the sight of the subject and ‘visions’ (hallucinations) as an attempt to recreate a destroyed bodily unity and this seemingly irretrievable divide between representation and reality as a denial of this restoration. Rupprecht’s critical points clearly echo one of the earliest critical accounts of Z¨urn by Irigaray in ‘A natal lacuna’, which is discussed in Chapter 2. The recording of delusions is considered a substitute for a missing component, a lack or as an attempt to restore the body as a unified object, which overlooks splitting as a method in Z¨urn’s ideological resistance to unification. This could be considered as part of a generalised reading of Z¨urn’s practice, which substitutes Bellmer’s unified phallic representation of the reassembled fragmented female body in place of Z¨urn’s actual rejection of the image (representation) of the body. While madness is presented as a creative and simultaneously self-destructive force, Z¨urn’s

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text does not attempt to resolve this splitting and, rather, resists any form of unification or resolution. This resistance, which reconstitutes the split within binaries such as madness and sanity, also refers back to the problem in reading the narrative as an autobiographical source. The psychoanalytic implications of trying to restore a constituting lack overshadows more interesting contemplations, such as considering the relationship between language and sign and sign and meaning that is implied by the use of splitting and fragmentation. Z¨urn’s artistic outlook stretches beyond traditional modes of representation by raising such questions.

Schizophrenia: Towards a Fragmentary Approach Z¨urn’s style of writing has been discussed in relation to a diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia’. This schizophrenic characteristic is based mainly on the division between the observer and the subject, as discussed by scholars such as Caroline Rupprecht and more extensively by Jennifer Marshall. In ‘The semiotics of schizophrenia: Unica Z¨urn’s artistry and illness’,28 Jennifer Marshall points out that the manuscript The Man of Jasmine demonstrates that it is ‘not the random inscription of thought likely to be created by a person with severely, permanently, and chronically disturbed brain chemistry’.29 This is indicated by Z¨urn’s use of the impersonal pronoun ‘she’ to describe conjectural facts. Marshall regards this as a ‘method of distancing her writing self from her younger self ’, which is shown as a common strategy found in life writing, ‘where the hindsight of the “sane” author contradicts the subjectivity of the “insane” literary subject’.30 The split between the ‘self ’ and ‘expression’ is read by Marshall as Z¨urn’s recognition of herself as (or wish to be) ‘crazy’ alongside her desire to remain ‘crazy’. It is pointed out that the narrative considers the protagonist’s fits, hallucinations and hysteria a blessing of creative imagination. These are then represented as pleasurable, unique and fantastic experiences. Thus Z¨urn the writer’s ‘privileging of or perhaps reliance upon her illness for creative inspiration is one of the first indicators of her inability, or rather her lack of desire, to transcend her illness’.31 While the narrative is certainly not the product of an actual ‘schizophrenic’ patient, it would be misguided to consider the narrative solely as an investigation of Z¨urn’s ‘true’ self. Rather, the narrative’s resistance to a cure adheres to the anti-authoritarian tone of the book, and complies 164

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with the plurality of subjects that do not necessarily refer to the self. It is important to differentiate the fragmentary association of schizophrenia as an illness (where there are multiple personalities) from the historical identification of schizophrenia with German women. The latter was a reference to the identity crisis of women divided between domestic and public roles. This in particular is used as a symbolic tool that reflects Z¨urn’s interest in multiple meanings, contradictory styles and punctuation that upsets syntax and confuses assumptions about meaning by means of a difference. Z¨urn does not celebrate these ideas like the early Surrealists but rather presents both the pleasurable and painful aspects of such roles in her writing and drawings. Z¨urn’s social background and the changes in gender roles during the period of her artistic practice are key to outlining both the historical and ideological roots of her artistic production. The Man of Jasmine, though written in France, bases part of its narrative on German institutions as well as French asylums, integrating an international representation of the condition of women in both countries. The text expresses a concern for the women characters portrayed in the narrative, presenting various case-studies from within the psychiatric institution. While Z¨urn is writing an account of a psychoanalytic subject, the subject ‘she’ observes other women in the asylum – those who were driven mad by the war; women who attempted suicide as a result of failed relationships and the pressures of domestic life. In one case an overeating woman tells her story of jumping out of the window with her newborn baby because the father abandoned her; another describes a failed suicide. The protagonist points to and is astonished by the oversimplification of such issues in the women’s discussion. In Germany, the women’s liberation movement of the 1960s redirected women’s voices towards the dictates of womanhood. The increasing infamy of the anti-abortion law grew, together with what was referred to as the ‘schizophrenia’ of women’s new role.32 The new ‘schizophrenic’ role characterised the expectations of society from women to be workers, perfect housewives, good mothers and also to be sexual women to satisfy their husbands. In narratives such as Dark Spring and The Man of Jasmine, Z¨urn contemplates the division of women into these expected characteristics and introduces subject matter such as rape and domestic violence. It was not until 1971, the same year The Man of Jasmine was published in Paris, that French women declared openly

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their experiences of abortions and demanded their right to free medical care. The multivocal narrative that brings different women’s stories together does not only reflect a young generation but also touches on an older generation who not only endured such social anxieties but also worse treatment methods within the asylum: this old, white-haired woman, already approaching death, does not have a moment’s peace with herself . . . One sentence keeps ringing out in which the words ‘the squashed fruit’ are repeated. As if this were the memory of an abortion or a sterilisation . . . she appears to be conjuring up age-old days, past events which have occurred here behind the walls of Witteneau mental hospital.33

Here, not only is the narrative offering an account of the foul treatment of mental patients, but also of a woman who has undergone a violent and invasive procedure possibly as a consequence of sexual aggression. The voice of the protagonist, though she is still a subject herself, carries an observational tone that outlines and questions different cases of women who are locked away in the asylum. Z¨urn’s narrative can be read as an internal gaze pointing to larger social issues that cannot be reduced to a mere autobiographical ‘self-study’. Though the narrative was not published until the late 1960s, a series of women writers published books on the social condition of women in the GDR, including the moralistic novels of Anna Seghers and Christa Wolf, focusing on interviewing women and making women’s voices heard without any authorial intervention. Indeed, Z¨urn’s literary works memorably capture the experimental expression of personal and social anxieties of the 1960s, writing narratives that present subject matter and characters that engage in anti-authoritarian behaviour, excessive involvement with reading, illness and homoerotic friendships that intertextually create multi-voiced narratives: ‘The idea of duality, of division of the whole into two parts, recurs again and again in German women’s writing.’34 Division and fragmentation as well as multiplicity therefore came to distinguish women’s experience from that of men in literature. In The Man of Jasmine this is most apparent when the protagonist challenges the authority of capital exchange, religion and a government police officer. The protagonist refuses to pay a hairdresser. In response 166

The House of Illnesses In Z¨urn’s œuvre there is an apparent multiplicity of media, form and representation that is produced by means of deconstruction and fragmentation. Over the course of 20 years, Z¨urn built up a truly rich œuvre in which fragmentation plays a consistent role in textual and visual representation. The three key texts – The House of Illnesses, The Man of Jasmine and Dark Spring, all written sporadically between 1958 and 1969 – demonstrate Z¨urn’s fusion of text and image, where visual components are incorporated into the body of the text, and the symbolic language of images goes beyond corporeal fragmentation. These three texts are almost always interpreted as semiautobiographical.37 There are, however, specific literary tools that Z¨urn used that go beyond simple autobiographical references. Z¨urn’s published texts carry the complex processes of thought and reflection that are developed in conjunction with writing and drawing. Subject matter such as mental illness and erotic fantasy are examples of how Z¨urn utilised fragmentation. The conjunction of text and image appear to be complementary counterparts, where expression often moves between the two mediums and at times intersects in manuscripts such as The House of Illnesses. The House of Illnesses is Z¨urn’s first narrative text to experiment with symbolic expression, referencing influential writers such as Goethe

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to the owner’s anger and complaint to the police, the protagonist places ‘a large piece of cotton wool on the head of the angry proprietress blesses it and declares that it is the “Holy Ghost”’.35 Following this act, she is arrested. During her incarceration in jail she assaults a police officer by pouring a beaker of water over his head. The narrative mockingly reads: ‘standing on tip-toe, she pours the contents over the giant policeman’s lovely hat’.36 These acts are accompanied by the arrival of ‘a merry band of Dadaists’ in order to liberate her. In addition to anti-authoritarian behaviour, a lack of respect for official figures who are often male and homage to Dadaist attitude towards convention, there is a deeper concern present in the narrative. for the condition of women. These events, which fuel and simultaneously form the narrative, must be read in terms of their careful composition that seeks to ‘undermine the foundations of rational thought’ through both subject-matter and execution.

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and August Strindberg. This illustrated manuscript was written in the spring of 1958, possibly around the same time that she was staying with Bellmer in a cottage in Ermenonville, where Unica Litog´ee was photographed. In addition to Z¨urn’s literary background, one cannot ignore the extensive influence of the two writers, where Z¨urn’s style appears immersed not only in the thoughts of these writers, but also in the appropriation of experience into fragments of text and images. ‘Feverish and lying in bed, she produces the manuscript: In the House of Illnesses.’38 The House of Illnesses, described as a product of physical ‘illness’, is an illustrated manuscript that narrates Z¨urn’s hallucinated experiences of being possessed by her ‘Mortal Enemy’. Written two-and-a-half years before her first internment in the psychiatric clinic Karl Banh¨offlerHeist¨atten in Germany, Z¨urn created a monadic space with no gaze outward. This space, which became a theatre of her inner experience, is emphasised by the possession of her sight in a restricted direction, communicating the visibility of her dreamscape to the reader. The narrative begins with Z¨urn receiving the news that ‘[t]he two hearts of [her] eyes have been shot right through the chest’.39 What is described as this ‘masterly shot’, illustrated in an accompanying drawing, takes over Z¨urn’s vision and guides her to see and experience various events that take place within the different rooms of the ‘House of illnesses’. These experiences are communicated through short chapters of daily happenings that are coherent in time and follow sequential days of the week with night and day accordingly. These chronological events are experienced in a fragmented space, transforming the narrator ‘self ’ expressed in the first person ‘I’ into a series of ‘others’ within and outside of each compartment of the house. In Z¨urn’s illustration ‘The Plan of the House of Illnesses’ each identified room is transformed into particular body parts: the ‘cabinet of the solar plexus’; ‘the room of eyes’; ‘the hall of bellies’; ‘the bosom room’; ‘chambers of the hands’; ‘the ‘vaults of the head’; and ‘the suite of the heart’ (Fig. 21). The supernatural elements of the fairy tale and children’s games are incorporated into all of Z¨urn’s writings, as pointed out by Mererid Puw Davies in her discussion of The House of Illnesses. The house clearly carries the topography of a female body, which Davies suggests is ‘a manner of representing the body identified by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) as typical dream logic’.40 Davies very successfully discusses Z¨urn’s literary references to the German Kunstm¨archen41 in

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Figure 21 Unica Z¨urn, ‘Plan of The House of Illnesses’, 1958. Ink on paper, unknown dimensions. Atlas Press. 1993

detail, particularly Bluebeard, though perhaps remaining too attached to a Freudian reading of the tale. While Z¨urn’s semi-fictive narrative is aware of its psychoanalytic conditions, she conspicuously expresses the state of illness as magical, visionary and pleasurable. Produced between the fantastic realm of her illness and the realities of the institution as well as the outside world, the text mentally and metaphorically plays on the immersion of myth and madness. The House of Illnesses uses the model of the Kunstm¨archen in a systematic artistic process where the plot slowly breaks down, spirals, and deconstructs itself. Z¨urn’s work has an intricate connection to experiences of mental disturbances as expressed in both The Man of Jasmine and The House of Illnesses. The Man of Jasmine has been discussed by Z¨urn’s acquaintance Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain and others in reference to Daniel Paul Schreber, who was infamously one of Freud’s case-studies on paranoiac-psychosis. The likeness that has been pointed out between Z¨urn’s narrative and Schreber’s book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness42 is self-evidently the record of a ‘mental illness’ in an implied autobiographical ‘memoir’ format. While is it very likely that Z¨urn was familiar 169

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with the text, there is an overlooked similarity found not in The Man of Jasmine but in The House of Illnesses. The House of Illnesses, now known as a book, was actually part of Z¨urn’s handmade notebook series labelled as ‘Manuscripts’. This manuscript, numbered 2, is in the same format as the 1960 ‘Serment, conjuration, evocation manuscript No. 6’ and consists of a narrative with drawings. The drawings in The House of Illnesses also incorporate text and illustrate components of the narrated story. The drawings are most powerful when they depict a corporeal translation of the topography of the institution. Z¨urn’s maps fragment the body into rooms of the institution, assigning certain bodily features to every component. Schreber, who also included the floor plan of the institution in his book, could have provided an inspiration for Z¨urn. Therefore, the maps in The House of Illnesses might be regarded as a reference to Schreber: however, Z¨urn’s re-appropriation of the institutional space into a bodily representation deforms the body into mutilated fragments and encapsulates the fragmentary expression of a ‘schizophrenic’ characteristic that narrates the story line. The representation of the house as body is amplified in the narrative where Z¨urn clearly assigns corporeal qualities to the various compartments. Looking at the illustrations in The House of Illnesses, one realises the strong bond between text and image that intertwines both physical and mental experience. In the original facsimile of the manuscript, at the very end, Z¨urn includes a list of ‘contents’ divided into two parallel groups, illustrations and text. The order of the illustrations and texts does not show the contents as they were written in the notebook, but appear as instructions for an order that later publications have followed. This list, which is taken as Z¨urn’s insistence on a particular layout of the drawings and text, implies a conscious staging of text and image.43 In this deliberate staging, the body (represented by the house) is fragmented and later assigned corporeal associations according to the mental experiences or perception of the protagonist. Thus, fragmentation of the body takes place on a psychological scale, relating the body’s dismemberment to the mind’s fragmentation by multiple memories or experiences. In The Man of Jasmine, The House of Illnesses is mentioned as a product of a feverish, dream-like state of delirium. Thus, the imagined characters and events are structured by ‘illness’. The narrator states that

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‘not having any eye-hearts was like an illness after all’,44 associating what she calls ‘her new line of vision’ with a mental condition. Playing between the implications of physical and mental illness, the text consciously allows the ‘illness’ to take over the protagonist’s senses and production. The division, as seen in ‘The Plan of The House of Illnesses’, is taken further by Z¨urn into a splitting of the self, where she cuts the characters identity in two – the ill receiver and the literate producer selves. In another quotation from the same text, the act of producing is associated with the body being in a state of illness, eliciting and tempting the body to remain ‘ill’. ‘House of Illnesses, you are not a house of recuperation. How is anyone in this house to find his way back to life if the dreams never cease offering invitations to join their dance?’45 Thus, the body becomes a house of illness and of production. She is bound to her body as she is bound to her malady. Similar to her obsessive fixation on producing anagrams, which Marcelle Fonfreide described as ‘the clown who cannot escape his garden if he has not found the imaginary door’,46 Z¨urn creates a space of her own and clings to her illness. Unable, or perhaps unwilling to find the door, Z¨urn is stuck in ‘the house of illnesses’. In Z¨urn’s symbolic weave of sight and illness, one cannot help but recall Rimbaud’s account of Symbolism: The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, immense and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he seeks himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself to keep only their quintessences. An indescribable torture in which he has need of all faith, all superhuman force, in which he becomes, among all, the great sick man, the great criminal, the great accursed.47

A submission to the derangement of the senses leads to a fragmentation of the ‘self ’: she divides her fictional and constructed self in two, becoming ‘a better half ’, which she describes as ‘clever and wise, [which wants her] to remain ill for some time, for it knows that one can gain from [such] an illness’ and ‘a worse half ’, which ‘wants [her] to return to [her] few duties . . . to show a bit of consideration for [her] surroundings’.48 Therefore Z¨urn’s use of fragmentation occurs not only physically but mentally, playing on the association of physical 171

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and psychic world with the outside or inside of an institution. This renunciation of the experience of the outside world for the experience of the imagination alone reflects Z¨urn’s adoption of the Symbolist withdrawal of the individual from society for a study of the self for its own sake. Though there is no ‘true’ unified consistent subjectivity in Z¨urn’s narrative, the protagonist’s experiences are always variations on constructed and fictional experiences that also resonate with actual historical socio-political issues. In The House of Illnesses Z¨urn clearly identifies ‘inactivity’ as the chosen state in which the protagonist wishes to remain. Here, inaction (passivity) is explicitly said to be a form of deliberate action against an act that would be against her will. Whilst passivity is considered to be a lack of ‘female desire’ by feminist theories based on readings of Freud, Z¨urn is re-appropriating this state as an active expression of desire: I realise that a really spiteful attempt is being made to dupe me, to force me into a new misfortune. I am supposed to feel strong so that I can act once more, but inaction is precisely the best state for me at the moment. I shall stumble over one of these enforced actions and fall flat on my nose. Ha! I shan’t give him the pleasure! Do you, my misfortune, want to begin over and over again?49

In Z¨urn’s imaginary landscape, multiplication and splitting take creative and complex roles, bringing the body-text relationship to another level by intermingling corporeal and spiritual experience. As Margaret Littler observes in ‘Madness, misogyny and the feminine in aesthetic modernism: Unica Z¨urn and Claire Goll’, Z¨urn does not manipulate language as Bellmer does in his anagrammatic permutations of the doll, rather ‘it represents an escape from authorship and a search for meaning beneath rational, symbolic discourse’.50 The often discussed ‘she’ in Z¨urn’s writings has also been interpreted as pointing towards the possible ‘existence of a third, imaginary character’51 between the protagonist and author. In The House of Illnesses, however, we are confronted with the first person ‘I’, which is presumed to have a comforting effect of creating the illusion of a coherent self.52 Contrarily, the symbolic representation of Z¨urn’s investigation between the boundaries between fantasy and reality also develops into an investigation of a variety of selves. 172

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The split of the ‘self ’ into two takes form in a dream-state, where a number of fantastic visions are encountered while trying to escape the ‘trapper’. The ‘trapper’ is described as a shielding guard who is determined to protect the protagonist from her ‘Mortal Enemy’, who on the other hand is the danger that has taken possession of her ‘eye hearts’. The ‘trapper’ is identified as Dr Mortimer, who tries to treat this ‘illness’ by giving her duties. In the illustration ‘Portrait of a Whispered Message’,53 we find the bust of a man with claw-like hands and sharp fingernails. The text at the bottom-right corner of the image claims that this drawing is of Dr Mortimer. The limbless bust, carrying its large head, is divided into two by a singular thin line, creating two arches around the figure’s abdomen. Through one arch the compartments of the house of illnesses are projected, while the other arch reveals a white void. In the chapter, Dr Mortimer is transformed into an army officer, illustrated in ‘Second Portrait’,54 where he is depicted with a single leg and arm. Z¨urn’s fragmentation of the body carries a violence that is not only directed towards the female protagonist but also towards the male authority figures, who are amputated, eviscerated and deformed. In his hand, the officer holds a needle from which he administers ‘sleeping injections’. These ‘sleeping injections’ carry the protagonist into a ‘dreamless sleep’ allowing ‘the trapper’ (Dr Mortimer) to perform secret ‘health-trap’ operations on her. This needle greatly resembles the voodoo pin we find in the claw of the ‘Mortal Enemy’ in the illustration ‘Black Magic’. From this, we begin to observe an exchange between a state of illness and healthiness. The ‘mortal enemy’ is represented by a two-headed eagle, often disguising its double head in profile. A further association is made between the portrait, the ‘Mortal Enemy’, and the ‘Second Portrait’, where the single leg of the army officer resembles the single claw of the eagle which carries a heart that might symbolise both vision and affection. The two opposite figures of Dr Mortimer and the ‘mortal enemy’ symbolise the ‘better’ and ‘worse’ halves of Z¨urn’s subject, which merge into the figure of the army officer. The illustration of the Mortal Enemy, depicted as the wide-winged double-headed eagle, foretells the duality of the character expressed in binaries of love/hate for what is desired/feared. The double-headed eagle is the idolatrous image of Masonic Judaism, the treasured symbol from Albert Pike’s classic text Morals and Dogma.55 The Judaic symbol of the eagle as the Mortal

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Enemy, and its transformation into the army officer, could expresses Z¨urn’s mixed feelings regarding the Nazi regime, which she detested but which she was also a part of while working for UFA throughout the 1930s. In another text written a year after The House of Illnesses this is again related to a fragmentation of the ‘self ’: ‘I already divided myself into two halves very early on. / And this division torments me.’56 Dr Mortimer is transformed into the Mortal Enemy who represents the loved/dreaded provider of insight and creativity.57 Building a subdued border between love and hate, Z¨urn questions the relationship between passion and violence. With reference to Goethe and Strindberg, Z¨urn writes that one must not direct overpassionate thoughts of love or hate at distant persons. Reminiscent of Z¨urn’s references to ‘erotomania’ in The Man of Jasmine, she states: ‘I complain about the fact that no one ever really knows whether they are being loved or hated.’58 Similarly, the ambiguity of love and hate can be found in the writings of Strindberg, who believed himself to be guided by mysterious forces. Strindberg was interested in black magic, German mythology and alchemical experiments, and often explored psychological realism and the role of the subconscious.59 The language of The House of Illnesses reflects such explorations with a unique visuality in its illustrations. Z¨urn’s text is divided into short chapters, resembling Strindberg’s ‘A Dream Play’ (1901). This play introduced a style of writing that did not differentiate between dreams and reality. Jonathan Croall writes: The characters split, double, multiply, evaporate, condense, dissolve and merge. But one consciousness rules them all: the dreamer’s; for him there are no secrets, no inconsistencies, no scruples and no laws. He does not judge or acquit, he merely relates; and, because a dream is usually painful rather than pleasant, a tone of melancholy and compassion for all living creatures permeates the rambling narrative. Sleep, the liberator, often feels like torture, but when the torment is at its worst, the moment of awakening comes and reconciles the sufferer with reality, which, regardless of how painful it might be, is at this very moment a joy compared to the agonies of dreaming.60

In The Man of Jasmine the protagonist’s hallucinations are shown as records that have been dictated by the reincarnation of her childhood love ‘the man of jasmine’. Z¨urn constructs her characters as submissive 174

she wants to believe at all costs that [the man of jasmine] is ‘hypnotising her’. Her brain, as small as a chicken’s, is unable to grasp that it is she who has hypnotised herself by allowing her thoughts constantly to revolve around the same person. He is the eagle which describes circles above the masochistic chicken.61

The psychological ties of the protagonist with the man of jasmine suggest a similarly productive and masochistic relationship between Z¨urn and her characters, where she willingly engages in, and at times projects, a torturing domination of hopeless love over the subject’s mind in order to become possessed by a creative agent. Like Strindberg’s characters, Z¨urn’s subjects split, double, multiply and merge into an inconsistent dream-state. Z¨urn’s representation of such states is developed further in The Man of Jasmine and Dark Spring, where this inquiry is channelled towards eroticism.

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and impressionable to external forces, demonstrated by a deliberate and willing possession by illness in The House of Illnesses. In The Man of Jasmine Z¨urn writes:

Dark Spring Written a decade after The House of Illnesses, Dark Spring presents what Z¨urn described as ‘the erotic life of a little girl based on my own childhood’.62 Though still full of symbolic language often borrowed from the text of The House of Illnesses, we find that is it a more straightforward text, with emphasis on a psychological turmoil with love, built around an imaginary construction of the experiences of fantasy and dream. The narrative, often described as a ‘coming-of-age’ novel, presents us with the story of a young girl’s ‘simultaneous introduction to sexuality and mental illness’.63 The story, attributed by Z¨urn to a childhood memory, again creates a subject from fabricated and exaggerated experiences. In Dark Spring the protagonist imagines violent sexual acts inflicted on her that involve abuse, aggression and force. These are, however, clearly identified in the narrative as either daydreams or reality. Unlike The House of Illnesses, where daydreams and reality are blurred in fantastic mirages, here fantasy is contained in the protagonist’s dark and masochistic imagination. The short, declarative sentences of the childprotagonist’s obsessions in Dark Spring exude a gloomy awareness of 175

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the distinction between reality and fantasy with visual descriptions of delusions in its text. Even in its realistic expression, the narrative is still touched by a Symbolist sense of torture, and a pleasure that drives a willing and continuous engagement with it. Z¨urn’s use of infantile sexuality is expressed in the sado-masochistic relationships between the protagonist child and other characters. Enraged with jealousy towards her father, the young protagonist ‘takes a knife and cuts out the doll’s eyes . . . slices open the belly of the doll’.64 Trapped in the loneliness of neglect, the child becomes infatuated with the new maid, Frieda Splitter, who allows the child to stroke and kiss her, and also to pull her hair. The playful relationship with this figure becomes an erotic one, where Frieda’s displayed nudity is observed and admired by the child. The pun on the chosen name ‘Splitter’, meaning ‘splinter’ in German, refers to the role of the maid as a fragment of the absent maternal figure, and expresses the significance of ‘splitting’ for Z¨urn, which is reflected in the child’s divided feelings towards her. The homoerotic relationship also emphasises the representation of sadistic expression and violence directed towards the female body; Z¨urn had encountered a similar theme in Oppenheim’s ‘The Couple’, exhibited in 1959. It does, however, maintain a female perspective, contrary to, say, Bellmer’s use of dolls and the female body. In a game of robbers and princess with two of her male classmates, Franz and Eckbert, the child takes the role of the princess who gets caught and tied by the robbers: She suffers silently, lost in masochistic daydreams and free from any thoughts of revenge or retaliation. Pain and suffering bring her pleasure. As she struggles to free herself from her bonds, she experiences enormous pleasure as the ropes cut more deeply into her flesh. She is mocked, derided and humiliated.65

In another instance, the child comes across a dark male figure who asks her and her friend, Eliza, to touch his penis. The two frightened children initially run away, only later to recall the event. They reminisce with regret, and begin exchanging fantasies about obeying the man and being killed by him. Z¨urn’s references to rape and sadism are expressed sado-masochistically, where pain is always inflicted on the protagonist by herself. These fantasies are told from the point of view of 176

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the two girls, expressing their masochistic desires. This is taken further in the child’s admiration of Peter Paul Rubens’s ‘The Rape of the Sabine Women’, in which she adores the two robbers. Z¨urn later writes of the child’s intensely masochistic dream of ‘violence, forced upon her by some dark man . . . [to be] bound by her kidnappers . . . [whom she is frightened of ] though this fear is very important to her. She loves to feel dread and terror.’66 This imagery may be related to Z¨urn’s collaboration in Unica Litog´ee, where there is an overlooked sadomasochistic exchange between the two artists. While the word litog´ee, ‘to truss’, acts as reference to the female body as an object of desire, the identity of the subject is deliberately identified as ‘Unica’, Unica ‘bound’. As Mary Ann Caws notes: ‘Bellmer . . . enjoyed tying her up with rope so tight that it cut into her naked body . . . Z¨urn was a partner to that enjoyment.’67 Z¨urn’s fragmentary representation of her psyche and body, as illustrated in The House of Illnesses, is developed in Dark Spring into an erotic play where violence is projected onto others by whom the subject wishes to be violated. This sexual submission, by means of sadistic interplay (becoming masochistic on either end), reflects the fragmentation of the subject and body in a new domain, where the idealised love towards the Mortal Enemy is multiplied into dark strangers and new objects of affection. The source of artistic creativity, which was found in The House of Illnesses by means of danger and illness, therefore transforms into dread and terror in sexual violation and rape. A visual reference to the pictures in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea is another example of this, where the child falls in love with the dark, melancholic expression of Captain Nemo. Z¨urn’s character takes pleasure in being frightened by what she calls ‘the giant octopus tentacles that force their entry into the submarine, the “Nautilus”’. The nautilus, which typically has more tentacles (up to 90) than other cephalopods (ordinarily eight), multiplies the limbs of the creature as well as the extent of its violation towards the submarine, which could stand as a symbolic referent to the female body and genitalia. Thus the strategic use of multiplication merges with the violated body; in turn, the fragments of the body are used as a violent expression that is simultaneously creative in the recreation of its subjects. The victim in such accounts, identified as the beholder of masochistic desire, is also related to chronic (fabricated or imagined) illness:

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People have always been divided into two groups: victims and murderers. I don’t know whether it is possible to free oneself from one group and switch over to the other during one’s life. I at least have not yet managed to become a murderer. It is my fate to be an eternal victim. Naturally this has meant that I’ve become a hypochondriac, just like every victim or real murderer.68

In The House of Illnesses, Z¨urn constructs a symbolic metaphor of ‘illness’ represented in her guided drawings. As observed, the texts construct Z¨urn’s artistic identity within a frame of illness. In The Man of Jasmine, Z¨urn clearly states that ‘feelings of happiness merely make her stupid and unproductive.’69 Her metaphoric illness takes different forms as her ‘new line of vision’ in The House of Illnesses, her possession in The Man of Jasmine, and finally as a masochist infant in Dark Spring.

MistAKE On 29 September 1960 Z¨urn returned to Berlin for several months. Even though she had travelled frequently between Paris and Berlin from 1953 onwards, this particular trip shaped the rest of her artistic production. At the time of this final trip to Berlin, Z¨urn left Bellmer and moved into a hotel, where she is said to have suffered a mental breakdown that would ultimately end in her first internment at the Wittenau psychiatric clinic in Berlin.70 This internment was a result of ‘misbehaviour’, alleged to have taken place on 9 October of that year. Z¨urn was supposedly arrested by the police and committed to the clinic the next day. The actual incident that took place is unknown; however, various allusions to the story can be found in Z¨urn’s longer narratives. In one account, she refuses to pay the hairdresser and mocks the owner; in another she throws an ashtray out of the hotel room.71 The telling of multiple inconsistent stories resists autobiography as a representation of a coherent ‘true’ self. On 2 March 1961 Z¨urn arrived in Paris in a wheelchair, marking this date (which carries a historical significance), as her final return from Berlin. Five months later that year, on 13 August, the Berlin Wall had been erected, physically dividing the city in two, fencing off West Berlin from the surrounding East Berlin and the German Democratic Republic. The Western bloc was further divided into four military occupation zones by the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the Soviet Union. These experiences preceded and continued throughout Z¨urn’s most intense period of 178

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literary and visual production and feed into the fragmentation operative within Z¨urn’s practice. On 15 September 1964 Z¨urn separated from Bellmer once again and lived in a hotel in Paris for three months. It was in this year, during her interment at La Fond Hospital at La Rochelle, that a short text with the title ‘MistAKE’, dedicated to Professor Jacques Lacan, is said to have been written. Published in a compilation of texts Z¨urn had written in French, MistAKE is a short entry from a spiral notebook which Z¨urn declared in a commentary inscription as the ‘first text in French’. The text is dated 1970 by Z¨urn. In her preface to the edition, Rike Felka notes that the date 1970, the dedication ‘for Prof. Lacan’, the title ‘MistAKE’ and the commentary inscription ‘first text in French’ are written in blue ink, while the text is written in black ink. As a result, Felka suggests that there is an ambiguity regarding precisely when the text was written, suggesting it is more likely to have been written before the signed date, around 1964. Moving from German to French reflects Z¨urn’s geographic move as well as her engagement with issues of madness, gender and identity as a developmental process through her experience with and debates surrounding these topics. Adopting yet another role, Z¨urn’s productive mimesis of the ‘psychoanalytic narrative’ produces insightful stories across Europe. The narrative MistAKE begins with a woman on a plane: ‘Without a womb, she gives birth to the city.’72 This short and strange entry presents a series of incongruous, poetic moments, which at times turn into dialogues between and the private thoughts of the woman and various others, including a doctor, who comments: ‘The misfortune for her is to arrive in Paris. She eats more, she sleeps more and she is giving birth to the city. She is on the way to an asylum for the mad.’73 Though the text could be read as an entry that records the experiences of the protagonist ‘she’, it not only focuses on the events as a reflection of her experience but is also an omniscient eye that connects the past and the future, as well as a series of factors in the scenario. The narrative therefore diverges into the thought processes of different personalities, creating a multi-voiced text that travels backwards and forwards in time, merging various narratives into the non-linear plot. The thoughts of a man referred to as ‘L’Homme maigre’ are noted: ‘“I know the asylums” thinks the poor man. But if one is to support a normal life – one chooses “an other code”’.74 The protagonist ‘she’ is not the only subject in the narrative but one of many whose paths cross within

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the contained space of the plane. Within the text there are several references to secret fates, alternative languages and misunderstandings. The title MistAKE is itself a play on the word across different languages. The prefix ‘mist’ in German means ‘manure’, while in English it suggests vapour droplets on a surface or a fog, relating the scenario of taking flight and landing with the process of excretion. The word ‘mistake’ itself implies an error or an accident, again possibly commenting on the ambiguity of language, and perhaps a pain (ache/ake) in the act of expression (excretion/mist). The title could also refer to a mistake in the experience itself, as a possible reference to wrongful incarceration or accusation. The word ‘MistAKE’, divided by the lower and upper case letters, not only plays on the ambiguity of the sign within one set of symbols (i.e. the French language) but also includes open interpretations across German, English and French. This open reference to multiple languages also reminds us that the city itself had been divided by the nations to which these languages belong. Rabain pointed to one characteristic of the text as ‘Germanism’, where grammatical mistakes are produced due to the incompatibility of the French language with a Germanic structure, disrupting the strict grammatical code of the French language.75 The text plays between these involuntary mistakes and the conscious recording of such an experience. The title, as noted by Felka, may have been retrospectively assigned, therefore one might read it as Z¨urn’s interpretation of the text as a play of language and subject-matter.76 The manuscript is inscribed with the date 1970; the retrospective date and dedication to ‘Professor Lacan’ asserts this association, where Z¨urn plays with analytic and diagnostic interpretations of codes. Before boarding a plane to Berlin, when asked to approach the plane, the woman demands a code, a password as verification for her action. The man recites the code: ‘U-L-M-3.’77 The phonetic disarticulation of the French language also reflects Z¨urn’s fragmentation of coherent meanings and selves, where the incommunicable code draws a parallel to ‘delirium’ or perhaps the ‘other code’ of ‘normal life’. While the woman recalls the advantages of being ‘mad’, there is also a moment of fright: ‘She wants to quit the plane in full flight. She wants to return below, to her life in the “social security”.’78 In this short text that tries to (mis)communicate many events; the dominant theme is a geographical move by flight. Moving between Germany and France, the text is written between languages, travelling and recording this experience

‘I do not believe in hypnosis from such a large distance’ said the doctor of Essen in the plane. ‘But if it’s possible, the man is a criminal’. The poor man in his country, in his seat [fauteuille] gave a happy message. The head of the 5th column lives in black and white. / We eat the red and the white.80

Disregarding previous treatment methods such as ‘hypnosis’, and instead focusing on recording moments of delirium, the text weaves real and imagined objects within the same space. There is a questioning within the text: ‘When did it begin?’. There is a momentary return to Z¨urn’s first mental breakdown during her final trip to Berlin, returning to Paris in a wheelchair. Could the text be a re-imagining of this experience and how Z¨urn encountered psychosis? Or, rather, is the text searching for an origin, questioning how the illness or perhaps the text came to be produced? In such passages, one notices that Z¨urn’s text goes beyond mere documentation or fiction, and even a hybrid definition does not fully suffice. Perhaps replacing Z¨urn’s question ‘When did it begin?’ with ‘How is the subject produced?’81 could lead to the consideration of the production of the subjects and the text as simultaneous, therefore tracing the experience of psychosis in the process of writing. The process of becoming ‘mad’, of experiencing ‘madness’, recording it and placing it into an institution is represented within a language which in itself goes through a parallel process of investigation by means of a play on translation and meaning.

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that leads to different effects and affects. The man who accompanies the woman is in a seat of the aircraft (fauteuil)79 that can also mean wheelchair, playing on the root of the word ‘faute’ (fault/mistake) and insinuating that the man is dependent on, bound to, an error.

¨ the ‘patient’, Zurn ¨ the ‘fabulatrice’, Self-incrimination: Zurn ¨ the ‘psychoanalyst’ Zurn In The Man of Jasmine the protagonist declares herself to be a schizophrenic to salvage her ‘crimes’ against authority. The word ‘schizophrenic’ and the consequential effect or reward as a ‘liberation’ can be read as a tool that is used not only in the story-line but the whole narrative, which is itself composed of several fragments. The manuscript, which was compiled from notes, anagrammatic poems and other shorter completed pieces from the notebook ‘Palaves-les Flots’, is an 181

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intertextual piece that combines six of Z¨urn’s manuscripts, poems and stories referenced throughout the text, such as The House of Illnesses, ‘Games for two’ and MistAKe, as well as other external references such as Moby Dick, The Last of the Mohicans, The Thousand and One Nights, Faust, Hansel and Gretel and even Breton’s Mad Love. The narrated subject, therefore, is not only divided in two (between a healthy and ill self ), but rather is a multi-centred figure that brings together intertextual characters from a stream of stories, movies and poems. For the special issue on female Surrealists in 1977, the journal Obliques dedicated a section to Z¨urn, including contributions by Ruth Henry, Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain, Jean-Franc¸ois R´everzy as well as various excerpts from Z¨urn’s publications. In a short journal entry published in this issue from Ruth Henry’s personal archive, written in 1970, Z¨urn uncovered a significant revelation about her internments. She explained that the only reason why patients were taken down below was because they wanted to make it seem as if they were helping them. When the doctor asked her if everything was alright, she responded with the hallucinations she had been having: ‘animal masks, slit throats and their screams’. She then confessed: These were all lies, she had made these up because she did not want to go back home. She wanted to stay in the clinic. She said she heard voices. When the doctor asked what these voices were, she was baffled. She could not answer and looked down at the floor. It was over. The doctor was smart enough to see that she was a pathological liar [fabulatrice].82

The word ‘fabulatrice’ can be understood as both the invention of fictional stories as lies in order to deceive and also as a construction of something out of an existing prepared component. This second definition of the term Z¨urn used to define herself adheres to the process of constructing anagrammatic poems, one that is also present in her automatic drawings. At the end of the entry, Z¨urn identified the subject as herself and wrote: ‘Why did you bring me here? . . . The doctor responds: ‘you have been throwing objects out of your window and causing extreme disturbance.’ Here Z¨urn returns by means of behaviour and documentation to the hysterical classification of woman and the social propensity for internment. ‘These were great tears: why, why did they bring me here? I am not ill.’ The reiteration of the question of why she 182

Z¨urn constructs herself as a mentally ill woman artist . . . borrows from Freudian psychoanalysis as well as Surrealism. Yet as a woman, she maintains a painfully felt distance from the versions of femininity constructed by both the psychoanalytical cure and the Surrealist celebration of mental illness.83

Z¨urn’s use of the third person narrative in The Man of Jasmine can be read as a reference to the nineteenth-century narratives of hysteria, where the psychoanalytic ‘subject’ would be observed and studied to the closest degree. The documentation of the ‘hysteric’ is a particularly curious era, when the amalgamation of scientific investigation and aesthetic contemplation merges in grand narratives. Writers such as Daniel Lesueur’s, Marcel Prevost’s and Leon Daudet’s fictive adoptions of the hysteric closely resembled Legrand du Saulle’s, Max Nordau’s and Cesare Lombroso’s accounts in the contemporary medical literature, all of which emulate Jean-Martin Charcot’s parapsychological studies on hysteria.84 The adoption of this concept in avant-garde art strategies has been criticised as an essentialist conceptualisation that glosses over the pain and torment of actual psychic fragmentation experienced by real trauma.85 On the contrary, Z¨urn employs a strategic use of psychoanalytic models and cultural issues as a resistance against the oppression of women and mentally ill people. Z¨urn was highly educated in psychoanalysis and its methods, using this in her narratives to blur the authorial distinction between doctor and patient:

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was interned once again raises not only the social legacies of hysteria but also the distinction between madness and illness. Though the protagonist and narrative demonstrate strong efforts to retain and establish the status of being ‘mad’, it is important to note that this is distinct from previous historical examples, including the Surrealist celebration of madness as a harbinger of creativity. Gerstenberger wrote:

After years of the kind of intensive treatment Z¨urn would have undergone in the various clinics she describes, the contact she would have had with other, similar patients, and the intellectual relationships she had developed with such famous doctors as [Gaston] Ferdi`ere, [ Jean-Franc¸ois] Rabain and [ Jacques] Lacan, she could not help but be a knowledgeable and confident expert on the etiology of her disease.86

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In reference to Z¨urn’s shorter text ‘Notes on the last (?) crisis’, Marshall points to the thin line between patient and doctor in her writings: she writes of a group of fellow patients who were studying to be doctors after they were healed of their disease, because they would be able to understand their patients better than any doctor who had never experienced mental illness. One often has the impression that Z¨urn is trying to play this same role, with herself as the patient.87

Z¨urn’s writings carry a critical tone towards psychoanalytic models of dream interpretation: Later this dream is interpreted to me as my fear of men. / Thanks to my fear of that science which bears the name psychology (analysis), I have not studied scientific dream interpretation. My own interpretation is more plausible to me: it would seem to me that the ugly dwarf is my own life [sic].88

Z¨urn’s criticism of the institution is apparent in her resistance to authority and the anti-psychiatric tone adopted in her self-proclaimed role as psychoanalyst. In the short excerpt ‘L’Homme Poubelle’, the incomplete sequel to The Man of Jasmine, Z¨urn wrote: ‘Following the eight year training she undertook in France and Germany, she becomes a psychoanalyst. Also, this occupation earns much more than artistry.’89 Here, Z¨urn adopted yet another self, that of the analyst. MistAKE is also a key example of this; thought to be written in the early 1960s, the retrospectively transcibed date (1970) and dedication to Lacan relates this text directly to Z¨urn’s identification with the role of ‘psychoanalyst’. Breaking the traditional gender roles between patient and doctor, Z¨urn’s narratives rebel against the authorial role of the doctor by subverting ameliorative activities such as speech, reflective writing and drawing (traditionally used as therapeutic tools) to engage with and prolong states of illness. The narrative of the psychoanalytic subject’s experience, a popular form of writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that was also celebrated by the Surrealists, is adopted by Z¨urn in her narratives, mainly The Man of Jasmine, where the use of the third person pronoun ‘she’ becomes a critical appropriation of the psychoanalytic 184

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model of treatment and analysis. This form of writing (which was used to describe and evaluate illness), as well as the strategy of automatism (which was used to imitate it), is developed by Z¨urn as a means for a nuanced perspective on art, life and womanhood in a postwar context.

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Epilogue And time passes. More than a year has passed. ‘Isn’t there some remedy to overcome this depression?’ she asks a psychiatrist, and his cautious answer is: ‘It may take many months.’ If that is the case what else is there for her to do here? For a long time she had watched the woman who had unravelled for the fifteenth time the grey sock she had been carefully knitting for twenty years. The sock will never be finished.1

Within the walls of Sainte-Anne psychiatric hospital in Paris, a woman is observed unravelling the same grey sock that she has been knitting for 20 years. Looking back on the years of searching for and reading Z¨urn through her anagrams and automatic drawings one is still confronted by the question ‘Have you met Unica Z¨urn?’, without any feeling of contentment. The fragmented mind and its products leave us wondering whether the puzzle will ever be complete; whether we can ever really know ‘Unica Z¨urn’. The multiple voices in Z¨urn’s tales and narratives, as well as the images in her drawings, provide powerful accounts of being a single working mother in 1940s Berlin – a writer, a Surrealist, a woman, a partner, a mentally ill woman, an inpatient, an anaemic, a psychotherapist, a victim and an assailant – by means of a dispersed subjectivity. Like her ever-changing notebooks with endless pages, her multiple, changing ‘selves’ and the infinite permutations of her

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anagrammatic poems, it is as if Z¨urn’s automatic writing and drawings can cross borders, overflow from page, because within the ink on the surface, like the grey sock, the words and images undo themselves, and will never be finished.

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Appendix Archives, Auction Houses, Galleries and Public Collections Holding ¨ by Location Material by Unica Zurn Germany Akademie der K¨unste Archiv, Berlin Alexander and Renata Camaro Foundation, Berlin Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach (DLA), Marbach am Necktar Gallerie Bassenge, Berlin-Grunewald Galerie Brusberg, Berlin Jeschke van Vliet, Berlin Karl and Faber, Munich Ketterer Kunst, Hamburg and Munich RIAS Archive at Deutschlandradio Kultur, Berlin

North America Gallery Diet, Florida Ubu Gallery, New York

Paris Abcd Collection, Paris Beaussant and Lefevre, Paris Biblioth`eque Kandinsky at Centre Pompidou, Paris Biblioth`eque Litt´eraire Jacques Doucet, Paris 189

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Biblioth`eque National de France, Paris Gallery 1900–2000, Paris Gallery Hus, Paris Rossini, Paris Sainte-Anne Hospital, Paris

¨ Published Texts by Unica Zurn English ‘Nine anagrammatic poems’, trans. Pierre Joris, in Sulfur: Literary Bi-Annual of the Whole Art 29 (Fall 1991). ‘Notes of an Anaemic’ [1957–8], trans. James Phillips, in Sulfur: Literary BiAnnual of the Whole Art 29 (Fall 1991). The House of Illnesses: Stories and Pictures from a Case of Jaundice [1958] (London: Atlas Press, 1993). ‘The whiteness with the red spot’ [1959], in The Man of Jasmine, trans. Malcolm Green (London: Atlas Press, 1994). The Man of Jasmine [1964–9], trans. Malcolm Green (London: Atlas Press, 1994). ‘The Games for Two’ [1967], in The Man of Jasmine, trans. Malcolm Green (London: Atlas Press, 1994). ‘Notes on her Last (?) Crisis’ [1966], in The Man of Jasmine, trans. Malcolm Green (London: Atlas Press, 1994). Dark Spring [1968], trans. Caroline Rupprecht (Boston: Exact Change, 2000). ‘The experiment or the victory of the children’, trans. Peter Wortsman, in Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingebord Bachmann (London: Penguin, 2012).

French Oracles et Spectacles, with etchings by author and etched frontispiece and postscript by Hans Bellmer (Paris: Visat, 1967). Sombre Printemps, trans. Ruth Henry and Robert Valanc¸ay (Belfond: Paris, 1970/71). L’Homme Jasmin: impressions d’une malade mentale, suivi de notes concernant la derni`ere crise, trans. Ruth Henry and Robert Valanc¸ay (Paris: Gallimard, 1971).

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‘Les Jeux a` deux’, L’Homme Jasmin: impressions d’une malade mentale, suivi de notes concernant la derni`ere crise, trans. Ruth Henry and Robert Valanc¸ay (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). ‘La Maison des Maladies’, L’Homme Jasmin: impressions d’une malade mentale, suivi de notes concernant la derni`ere crise, trans. Ruth Henry and Robert Valanc¸ay (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). ‘L’Homme Poubelle’, Obliques: La Femme de surr´ealisme 14–15 (1977), p. 258. ‘Remarques d’un observateur (sure Hans Bellmer) [sic]’, Obliques: La Femme de surr´ealisme 14–15 (1977), p. 257. ‘Sombre Printempts’, [extract], Obliques: La Femme de surr´ealisme 14–15 (1977), pp. 259–60. Approche d’Unica Z¨urn, trans. Marcelle Fonfreide (Paris: Le Nouveau Commerce, 1981). ‘Hexentexte: Mots de Sorcieres (dessin et anagrammes) suivi de Lettres imaginaires’, Le Nouveau Commerce, Printemps 49 (Paris: Le Nouveau Commerce, 1981). Lettres au docteur Ferdi`ere (with Hans Bellmer, Gaston Ferdi`ere and Alain Chevrier) (Paris: S´eguier, 1994). ‘La Baignoire’, Vacances a` Maison Blanche: Derniers e´crits et autres in´edits, trans. ´ Ruth Henry (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfield, 2000), pp. 177–80. ‘Cr´ecy’, Vacances a` Maison Blanche: Derniers e´crits et autres in´edits, trans. Ruth ´ Henry (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfield, 2000), pp. 83–140. ‘Notes d’un an´emique (1957/1958)’, Vacances a` Maison Blanche: Derniers e´crits ´ et autres in´edits, trans. Ruth Henry (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfield, 2000), pp. 15–31. ‘Recontre avec Hans Bellmer’, Vacances a` Maison Blanche: Derniers e´crits et autres ´ in´edits, trans. Ruth Henry (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfield, 2000), pp. 35– 80. ‘Un rˆeve: le poisson noir de l’´etang poiss´e’, Vacances a` Maison Blanche: Derniers ´ e´crits et autres in´edits, trans. Ruth Henry (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfield, 2000), pp. 181–9. Vacances a` Maison Blanche: Derniers e´crits et autres in´edits, trans. Ruth Henry ´ (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfield, 2000). ‘Vacances a` Maison Blanche’, Vacances a` Maison Blanche: Derniers e´crits et ´ autres in´edits, trans. Ruth Henry (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfield, 2000), pp. 143–76. Lettres a` Ruth Henry 1967–1970 (Paris: Le Son Lointain and Ruth Henry, 2006).

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MistAKE (Paris: Ypsilon Editeur, 2008). Pour Unica Z¨urn: Lettres de Hans Bellmer a Henri Michaux and autres documents (Paris: Ypsilon Editeur, 2009).

German ‘Die Braut’ in Der Sozialdemokrat. 11 October 1949, Berlin. ‘Traibenlassen’ in Der Sozialdemokrat. 22 October 1949, Berlin. ‘Mama adoptiert einen Sohn’ in Der Sozialdemokrat. 26 October 1949, Berlin. ‘Der Tag ist so schon’ in Der Sozialdemokrat. 30 October 1949, Berlin. ‘Die Nacht ist dunkel’ in Der Sozialdemokrat. 20 November 1949, Berlin. ‘Verteidigung der jungen Madchen’ in Der Sozialdemokrat. 18 December 1949, Berlin. ‘Ein Tag im Jahr’ in Der Sozialdemokrat. 24 December 1949, Berlin. ‘Pagniolles Werbung’ in Der Berliner Sozialdemokrat. 8 January 1950, Berlin. ‘Man stirbt nicht dran’ in Der Berliner Sozialdemokrat. 17 February 1950, Berlin. ‘Verfuhrung des Antonius’ in Berliner Stadtblatt. 23 April 1950, Berlin. ‘Kater will nicht schlafen’ in Berliner Stadtblatt. 1 August 1950, Berlin. ‘Die Fraulein Panunzi kommen vom Berge’ in Berliner Stadtblatt. 10 September 1950, Berlin. ‘Begegnung im Wald’ in Berliner Stadtblatt. 16 September 1950, Berlin. ‘Fahrendes Volk’ in Berliner Stadtblatt. 24 September 1950, Berlin. ‘Die jagd f¨allt aus’ in Berliner Stadtblatt. 20 October 1950, Berlin. ‘Die Freie und der sehr Ergebene’ in Berliner Stadtblatt. 14 November 1950, Berlin. ‘Rat f¨ur trubestunden’ in Berliner Stadtblatt. 3 January 1951, Berlin. ‘Die wunderbaren Erlebnisse eines Grosskaufmanns’ in Berliner Stadtblatt. 28 January 1951, Berlin. Hexen-texte (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1954). Anagrams in Panderma, 1 (Basel: Panderma Verlag, 1957). Dunkler Fr¨uhling (Merlin Verlag, 1969). ‘Das Haus der Krankheiten’, Der Mann im Jasmin (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Ullstein, 1977). ‘Les Jeux a` deux’, Der Mann im Jasmin (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Ullstein, 1977). Der Mann im Jasmin (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Ullstein, 1977).

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‘Das Weisse mit dem roten Punkt’, Der Mann im Jasmin (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Ullstein, 1977). ‘Notinzen einer Blutarmen [1957]’, in Chrysalis (La Hayre, 1979). Im Staub dieses Lebens (Berlin: Alphe¨us Verlag, 1980). Das Weisse mit dem roten Punkt (Berlin: Lilith Frauenbuchladen, 1981). Das Haus der Krankheiten: Gexchichten und Bilder einer Gelbsucht (Berlin: Brinkman, Bose and Lilith, 1986). Gesamtausgabe, vols 1–6 (Berlin: Brinkman and Bose, 1988–2001). Orakel und Spektakel (Berlin: Brinkman and Bose, 1990) Bilder, Neue Gesellschaft fur Bildende Kunst (Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose, 1998). Unica Z¨urn: Alben: Bucher und Zeichenhefte, ed. Erich Brinkmann (Berlin: Verlag Brinkmann and Bose, 2009). Wenn Man Allein Unterwegs, illustration de Edith Witt, ecole superieure des arts plastiques Berlin (no date).

¨ Unpublished Texts by Unica Zurn Source: ‘Bibliographie’, Approche d’Unica Z¨urn, trans. Marcelle Fonfreide (Paris: Le Nouveau Commerce, 1981). Die sehr aufregenden geschichten von ‘M¨ummelchen’, Les aventures de ‘M¨ummelchen’ – au petit Victor, pour son anniversaire, de la part de Pex, 1949. Aus meinem ‘Manuskript-T¨aschchen’ – F¨ur meinen Lieben Alexander zum Weihnachtsfest, 1952. Das Wundertier, 23 May, 1953. FREMDLINGE IN UNSERER ZEIT, 13 September 1954. Die Schwindelmark, 28 August 1954. ‘“Was du nicht willst, das man dir tu” . . . ’, 25 October 1954. ‘Eisenbahn’, Chemin de fer, 1960. ‘Serment, Conjuration, Evocation’, 1960. ‘Wenn u¨ bers Jahr’, 1960–1965. ‘Im Hinterhalt’, 1963. ‘Velin d’angouleme’, 1963. Die Trompeten von Jericho, 1968. Die Katzengeschichte aus Ermenonville, Histoire de chat d’Ermenonville, 1969. Aufzeichnungen einer geisteskranken, Notes d’un malade mentale, 1970. ‘Herakles’, 1970.

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¨ UNICA ZURN 194

Letzte Aufzeichnungen, 1970. Der dunkle Kreis, undated. Erdachte Briefe, Lettres imaginaires, undated. Extraits des pages d’enfants, undated. Kinder Lesebuch U.Z., undated.

Notes Introduction 1. Jean-Louis de Rambures, ‘Decouvrir Unica Z¨urn’, Le Monde, 16 December 1983. 2. For sources on Artaud see Edward Scheer (ed.), Antonin Artaud: A Critical Reader (London: Routledge, 2004), Donald Nicholson-Smith (ed.), 50 Drawings to Murder Magic (Oxford and New York: Seagull Books, 2008) and Jacques Derrida and Paule Th´evenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000). For sources on Michaux see Nina Parish, Henri Michaux: Experimentation with Signs (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007), Henri Michaux, Darkness Moves: An Henri Michaux Anthology, 1927–1984, trans. David Ball (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1994). 3. Loss of Control: Crossing the Boundaries to Art from Felicien Rops to the Present, 1 November 2008–25 January 2009, MARTa Herford, Germany. 4. Unica Z¨urn: Dark Spring, 17 April–23 July 2009, The Drawing Centre, New York. 5. Due to time and financial constraints, I was unable to revisit New York for further research, and therefore could not access the collections of Herbert Lust and Daniel Filipacchi, who are also chief collectors. 6. See Chapter 5 in this book for an extensive discussion on automatism and its history. 7. Hal Foster’s essay ‘Blinded insights: on the Modernist reception of the art of the mentally ill’ has been instrumental in this. Hal Foster, ‘Blinded insights: on the Modernist reception of the art of the mentally ill’, October 97 (Summer 2001), pp. 3–10.

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NOTES TO PAGES 9–16

8. Alyce Mahon, ‘Twist the body red: the art and lifewriting of Unica Z¨urn and introduction to “Notes on her last (?) Crisis”’, n.paradoxa 3 (1999), pp. 56–64 9. Alyce Mahon, ‘Hans Bellmer’s libidinal politics’ in Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss (eds), Surrealism, Politics and Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 246–66. 10. Caroline Rupprecht, ‘The violence of merging: Unica Z¨urn’s writing (on) the body’, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature 27/2 (2003). Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1562 (accessed 24 December 2014). 11. Luce Irigaray, ‘Une lacune natale’, Le Nouveau Commerce 62–3 (1985), pp. 39–47, trans. Margaret Whitford, ‘A natal lacuna’, Women’s Art Magazine 58 (May–June 1994), pp. 11–3.

1 Beginnings of Change 1. Leitz Cameras was known for its progressive labour policies which encouraged the retention of skilled workers, many of whom were Jewish. Ernst Leitz, who took over the company in 1920, responded to the election of Adolf Hitler in 1933 by helping people of Jewish decent to leave Germany, by ‘assigning’ hundreds to overseas sales offices where they were helped to find jobs. The extent of what came to be called the ‘Leica Freedom Train’ only became public after his death well after the war. Duden Aussprachew¨orterbuch (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut and F.A. Brockhaus AG, 2006). 2. Records show that Ralph Z¨urn died on 6 January 1939 in Rapollo, Italy. 3. Unica Z¨urn, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4.2 (Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose, 1991). For details of all Z¨urn’s work cited, see the Appendix. 4. David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p. 127. At the request of von Luschan, Ralph Z¨urn (when he returned to Germany) donated a Herero skull to von Luschan’s massive skull collection and eagerly aided von Luschan in his pursuit to procure more skulls from those who had died in the Herero war. Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 244–5. 5. Unica Z¨urn, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4.1 (Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose, 1998), p. 162. 6. Unica Z¨urn, Dark Spring [1968], trans. Caroline Rupprecht (Boston: Exact Change, 2000).

196

NOTES TO PAGES 16–20

7. See Klause Kreimeier, The UFA Story: A History of Germany’s Greatest Film Company 1918–1945 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press: 1999). 8. Malcolm Green, ‘Introduction’, in Unica Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine, trans. Malcolm Green (London: Atlas Press, 1994), p. 8. 9. Ibid. 10. For more on the history of the Wartegg Zeichen test see Eka Roivainen, ‘A brief history of the Wartegg Drawing Test’, Gestalt Theory 31/1 (2009), pp. 55–71. 11. Jo˜ao Ribas, ‘Unica Z¨urn: oracles and spectacles’, in Unica Z¨urn: Dark Spring, exhibition catalogue (New York: Drawing Papers no. 86, 2009), p. 15. 12. See Unica Z¨urn, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5 (Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose, 1998). 13. Unica Z¨urn’s personal confession of having first encountered mental illness after meeting Henri Michaux in 1957 is a common and equally conjectural fact, based on her anecdotal descriptions of Michaux as the incarcerator of her childhood fantasy in The Man of Jasmine. This supposition has also been discussed in relation to the hallucinogenic drug mescaline, while Z¨urn’s experimentation with such a drug remains undisclosed. 14. Ute Frevert, ‘Family or career? Women’s dilemma in the land of the economic miracle’ in Women in German History (Oxford, New York: Berg, 1989), p. 265. 15. At a conference of the German Federation of Trade Unions in 1955, ‘a female speaker reported that it was common practice for women who want to get married and who have been working to be dismissed on the day they marry, because employers think it is enough if the husband is earning’. Ibid., p. 267. 16. Susan Bassnett, Feminist Experiences, The Women’s Movements in Four Cultures (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), p. 56. 17. This is discussed in Chapter 6. ‘Notes on The Man of Jasmine and Other Narratives’. 18. For a detailed history see Jill Stephenson, The Nazi Organization of Women (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2001) and for an illustrated history of women in the Third Reich see Matthew Stibbe, Women in the Third Reich (London: Arnold Publication, 2003). 19. Stephenson, as quoted in Bassnett, Feminist Experiences, p. 63. 20. Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth (eds), 1968 in Europe, A History of Protest, Activism, 1956–1977 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 291. 21. Bassnett, Feminist Experiences, 62.

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NOTES TO PAGES 20–24

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39.

40. 41. 42.

198

Klimke and Scharloth, 1968 in Europe, p. 286. Bassnett, Feminist Experiences, p. 64. Klimke and Scharloth, 1968 in Europe, p. 281. Ibid., p. 282. Ibid., p. 289. See Erika Runge (1970), Sarah Kirsch (1974) and Maxie Wander (1977) discussed in Bassnett, Feminist Experiences, p. 73. See Patricia Herminghouse ‘Wunschbild, Vorbild oder Portr¨at? Zur Darstellung der Frau im Roman der DDR’, in Patricia Herminghouse and Peter Uwe Hohendahl (eds), Literatur und Literaturtheorie in der DDR (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1976) discussed in Bassnett, Feminist Experiences, p. 74. Ibid., p. 75. Bassnett, Feminist Experiences, p. 76. H´el`ene Cixous, ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1/4 (Summer 1976), pp. 875–93. Bassnett, Feminist Experiences, p. 79. In Bassnett’s account, she claims that the tools of fragmentation developed outside of women’s movements and discusses the implications of this outside of a feminist context. Bassnett, Feminist Experiences, p. 81. Frevert, ‘Family or career?’, p. 272. Bassnett, Feminist Experiences, p. 58. John J. Hunt, ‘A tale of two countries: German and American attitudes to abortion since World War II’, University Faculty for Life Proceedings 4 (1994), p. 125. Available at http://www.uffl.org/vol%204/hunt4.pdf (accessed 23 January 2015). ‘How it all began: I have had an abortion’, in Edith Hoshino Altbach et al. (eds), German Feminism: Readings in Politics and Literature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984), p. 102. Z¨urn often wrote in the third person, using the pronoun ‘she’ to reflect on real and imagined events. Unica Z¨urn, ‘Cr´ecy’ (1970) in Vacances a` Maison ´ Blanche: Derniers e´crits et autres in´edits (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfield, 2000), p. 110. There groups were the ‘Frauenaktion 70’ of Frankfurt, the Socialist Women’s Federation in Berlin, and the ‘Red Women’ of Munich. ‘How it all began’, p. 103. Unica Z¨urn, Lettres a` Ruth Henry 1967–1970 (Paris: Le Son Lointain and Ruth Henry, 2006), p. 6. Quoted in ‘Notes of an anaemic’ [1957–8], trans. James Phillips, Sulfur: Literary Bi-Annual of the Whole Art 29 (1991), p. 91. Z¨urn takes up the subject matter of old age with reference to Nietzsche in ‘FREMDLINGE IN UNSERER ZEIT’ (sic) [‘Strangers in

45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

NOTES TO PAGES 24–29

43. 44.

our world’] (13 September 1954), an unpublished radio tale held at the Deutschlandradio Kultur archive in Berlin. See Marie-Dominique Massoni, ‘Surrealism and Romanticism’, in Max Blechman, Revolutionary Romanticism: a drunken boat anthology (San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1999), pp. 193–6 and Theodore Ziolkowski, ‘The madhouse: asylum of the spirit’, in German Romanticism and its Institutions (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1992), pp. 138–206. Z¨urn, ‘Notes of an anaemic’, p. 90. Marina Warner, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995), pp. xi–xxi. This short text which was first published in its original German as ‘Notizen einer Blutarmen’ in the Z¨urn Bilder and later in Vacances a` Maison Blanche as ‘Notes d’une Anemique’ in French, and has been translated from German to English in Sulfur 29, by James Phillips. In Phillips’ translation the title is translated as ‘Jottings of an anaemic woman’, where in other sources the text is referred to from its French translation as ‘Notes of an anaemic’. For the purpose of reference here, I will use the title from its French translation without disregarding the direct emphasis on a female author of the German title. Z¨urn, ‘Notes of an anaemic’, p. 96. References to Z¨urn’s earliest writings for the radio and newspapers have been previously cited by a number of scholars such as Ruth Henry (‘My encounter with Unica’, trans. Judd D. Hubert, Sulfur: Literary BiAnnual of the Whole Art 29 (Fall 1991), pp. 67–97, p. 70), Ren´ee Riese Hubert (Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Partnership (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 143), Alyce Mahon (‘Twist the body red: the art and lifewriting of Unica Z¨urn and introduction to “Notes on her last (?) crisis”’, n.paradoxa 3 (1999), pp. 56–64, p. 64) and Barbara Safarova (‘The magical encounter between writing and image’, in Unica Z¨urn (Paris: Panama, 2006), p. 54). These references are made in passing, without following up with an examination of these materials. My interview with Annemarie Schnell Frank took place on 24 July 2014 at her private home in Berlin. Lothar Kl¨unner, ‘Zweischen Nullpunkt und W¨ahrungsreform Die surreal Stadt’, Litfass. Zeitschrift f¨ur Literatur 45 (1988), p. 26. For a more detailed discussion on Berlin Surrealism, see Berlin Surreal . . . Camaro und das kunstler-kabarett Die Badewanne (Berlin: Nikolai Verlag, 2014) published for the exhibition of the same title, 25 April – 24 July, 2014, at the Camaro Haus, Berlin. Unica Z¨urn, ‘Cr´ecy’ in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5. Interview with Annemarie Schnell Frank.

199

NOTES TO PAGES 29–34 200

53. At the time of writing, the piece mentioned is held in the collection of the Ubu Gallery in New York. 54. For correspondence with Alexander Koval (from 1945–64) and Enrst Schr¨oder (from 1956–65) see Akademie der Kunst Arkiv, Berlin. For correspondence with Alexander Camaro (from 1951–70) see Alexander and Renata Camaro Foundation, Berlin. 55. For a list of publications see Unica Z¨urn, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 3, Prosa 2 (Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose, 1991), pp. 221–2. Also see the Appendix to this book. 56. See my chapter on Z¨urn and Desnos’ radio tales, ‘The luminary forest: Robert Desnos and Unica Z¨urn’s tales of (dis)enchantment and transformation’, in Catriona McAra and David Calvin (eds), Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp 115– 29. 57. Berlin Surreal . . . , p. 38 58. My interview with Martin Baumg¨artel took place in June 2011 at the RIAS archive, Berlin. 59. All of the stories remain untranslated in the original German. 60. Green, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. 61. See Warren Motte (ed. and trans.), Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). For further discussion on Unica Z¨urn and Georges Perec, see Dominique de Lige, ‘Unica Z¨urn, Bellmer, Perec’, in Essaim: Revue de Psychanalyse 16, Des folies et des œuvres (Spring 2006), pp. 89–109. 62. Unica Z¨urn, ‘Rencontre avec Hans Bellmer’, in Vacances a Maison Blanche, ´ trans. Ruth Henry (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfeld, 2000). 63. Unica Z¨urn, ‘Clinic’, in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 4.2, p. 419. 64. The significance of ‘listening’ in the medium of radio broadcasting echoes the primeval qualities of the process of automatism itself, evoking Robert Desnos’s concept of the ‘periods of sleep’ that established auditory experience as central to definitions of automatism, as well as the earliest definitions of Surrealism. Introducing Unica Z¨urn’s early work into current scholarship is not to claim that the radio tales are automatic per se but rather that they portray the independent influence of various Surrealist texts and ideas which have been described as, or have been included within, the discussion of ‘automatism’. These tales also provide a nuanced reading of her later visual experimentation with automatism, where direct illustrations and references can be found in notebooks made during the 1960s. 65. A classic example of bestiality as punishment is the traditional French fairy tale La Belle et La Bˆete by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, first published in 1740.

NOTES TO PAGES 34–38

66. Although the radio tale was not broadcast until 1953, Z¨urn’s constant references to and repetition of similar motifs and events suggest that the tale may have originated from this particular painting, made three years prior to the broadcast. 67. Barbara Safarova, ‘Unica Z¨urn: the enchanted princess’, in Thomas Roske et al. (eds), Collecting Madness: Outsider Art from the Dammann Collection (Heidelberg: Sammlung Prinzhorn, 2013), pp. 120–5. 68. Similar to the cat Beau-Minon/Perfect Prince in Desnos’s tale of Blondine where the clown, who is also a mind reader, turns out to be a prince, with whom the princess elopes. The thought reading characters are male in both Desnos’s and Z¨urn’s tales which subvert the well-known Surrealist ideal of the female body as a communicating vessel. The traditional role of the evil stepmother is also reversed in Z¨urn’s tale, into an abandoning father figure about whom the princess continuously sings. 69. David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 95. 70. Ibid. 71. Ermenonville is a suburb of Paris where Z¨urn and Bellmer stayed in a cottage during the late 1950s. Z¨urn wrote many anagrammatic poems here, as well as some longer texts, often incorporating the environment in her writing. This is also where the photographic series Unica Litog´ee was taken of Z¨urn by Bellmer, which is discussed in detail in Chapter 3. Also see my article ‘The living doll: a look at Hans Bellmer’s later work from the “puppet’s perspective”’ in Dolls and Puppets as Artistic and Cultural Phenomenon (Warsaw: University of Warsaw Press, forthcoming). 72. Ren´ee Riese Hubert, ‘Unica Z¨urn and Hans Bellmer’, Sulfur: Literary BiAnnual of the Whole Art 29 (Fall 1991), pp. 98–104. In another account, Hubert observes a systematic reversal of the ‘marvellous’, which she identifies as a characteristic of fairy tales, in the anagrams ‘once upon a time there was a thought’ and ‘once upon a time there was a little one’. Here, Hubert points to the use of diminutives and compound expressions that evoke the marvellous and simultaneously ‘destroy the illusory faith expected in fairy literature’. Hubert, ‘Self recognition and anatomical junctures’. in Magnifying Mirrors, p. 143. 73. Hubert, ‘Unica Z¨urn and Hans Bellmer’. 74. The first being Der Letzte der Mohikaner (1920) made by Lederstrumpf. Several other productions were made during Z¨urn’s lifetime, in 1932, 1936, 1947 and 1963. 75. White Horse Eagle, We Indians, the Passing of a Great Race, being the Recollections of the Last of the Great Indian Chiefs, Big Chief White Horse Eagle, as told to Edgar von Schmidt-Pauli, trans. Christopher Turner (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Library, 2005).

201

NOTES TO PAGES 39–43

76. See Laura Browder, Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 77. Autograph dedication signed on printed portrait photograph. Big Chief White Horse Eagle, Indian Chief (Merano Quarazze: Adelaide Villa, [20 November] 1929). 78. Unica Z¨urn, ‘Notes on her last (?) crisis’, in The Man of Jasmine, trans. Malcolm Green (London: Atlas Press, 1994), p. 128. 79. Z¨urn, ‘Notes of an anaemic’, p. 96.

2 Exhibitions and Exposure 1. The exhibition took place between 8 June and 23 July 2011. Z¨urn’s work was previously displayed on one other occasion, in 2006 at the Whitechapel Gallery in London (20 September–23 November 2006). In the group show Vicious Circle, curated by Dr Sarah Wilson, her work was displayed among other artists’ whose work displayed the exploration of the postwar Surrealist legacy. 2. Kate Marris, ‘Louise Despont, Jutta Koether, Alicja Kwade, Anj Smith, Marianne Vitale, Unica Z¨urn’, Frieze Magazine, 5 June 2011. Available at http://www.frieze.com/shows/review/louise-despont-jutta-koetheralicja-kwade-anj-smith-marianne-vitale-unica-z/ (accessed 23 January 2015). 3. It should be noted that the numerical data presented are from my interview with gallery owner Adam Boxer in 2009. Since then, the gallery has been actively representing both Bellmer and Z¨urn and has sold off part of their collection to private collectors, and therefore these numbers are always changing. 4. A large part of the visual collection remains with the rightful proprietors; Bellmer’s daughter Dorianne Biel has roughly 80 pieces with only 15 per cent in the ownership of Katrin Ziemke, Z¨urn’s daughter. Ephemera are stored in national and institutional archives in Paris, Berlin, Marbach and Frankfurt. Please see the Appendix for further details of collections and archives. 5. Jill Conner, ‘Preview: Unica Z¨urn ‘Dark Spring’ at the Drawing Centre’, 28 March 2009. Available at http://artquips.blogspot.com/2009/03/ preview-unica-z¨urn-dark-spring-at.html (accessed 9 June 2014). 6. Unica Z¨urn: Dark Spring, 17 April–23 July 2009, The Drawing Centre, New York. 7. My interview with Jo˜ao Ribas took place on 17 June 2009 in New York.

202

NOTES TO PAGES 43–46

8. Ken Johnson, ‘Happy abandon, despite struggles with mental illness’, The New York Times Weekend Arts Review, 17 April 2009, p. 25. Other reviews in the press included Martha Schwendener, ‘Goings on about town’, The New Yorker, 11 May 2009; Joshua Mack, ‘Unica Z¨urn: Dark Spring’, Time Out New York, 14–20 May 2009, p. 54; Gary Indiana, ‘A stone for Unica Z¨urn’, Art in America, June/July 2009, pp. 71–4. 9. Interview with Jo˜ao Ribas. 10. Conner, ‘Preview’. 11. F´elix Andrada, Eimear Martin and Anthony Spira, Inner Worlds Outside, exhibition catalogue (London: Fundaci´on ‘la Caixa’, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Whitechapel Gallery, 2006), p. 10. 12. Hal Foster, ‘Blinded insights: on the Modernist reception of the art of the mentally ill’, October 97 (Summer 2001), pp. 3–10, p. 22. 13. Operation T4 lasted for two years and during that time more than 70,000 patients were murdered. ‘After the programme officially came to an end, the killing did not stop; a total of 300,000 psychologically, mentally and physically disabled people were killed under the “euthanasia” programme based on the principles of racial hygiene.’ Registered, Persecuted, Annihilated: The Sick and the Disabled under National Socialism, exhibition catalogue (Berlin: Springer Medizin, 2014), p. 214. 14. Ibid., p. 11. 15. See my ‘The comfort of standing next to walls: ill-literacy in Unica Z¨urn’s visuality’, in Mary Edgeworth Drinkwater (ed.), Proceedings of the Third Global Conference on Visual Literacy (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2011). More recently, The Menil Collection in Texas, exhibited Z¨urn’s work along with ‘outsider artists’ such as Henry Darger, Jean Dubuffet and Bill Taylor. The group show, titled Seeing Stars: Visionary Drawing from the Collection (23 September 2011–15 January 2012), placed emphasis on Z¨urn’s mental illness as the source of her artistic production. 16. The show received exceptional press coverage in a range of newspapers and journals such as Sortir a Paris: T´el`erama (4–10 October 2006), Le Monde (10 November 2006), 20 Minutes, Paris (23 October 2006), the weekend supplement of Le Figaro ‘Madame Figaro’ (25 November 2006) and a fullpage spread in Lib´eration (19 February 2007). 17. Indiana, ‘A stone for Unica Z¨urn’. 18. Loss of Control: Crossing the Boundaries to Art from Felicien Rops to the Present, 1 November 2008–25 January 2009, MARTa Herford. 19. Extract from my interview with Jan Hoet, 20 December 2008 at MARTa Herford Gallery. 20. SMAK exhibition, 1989. 21. See Foster, ‘Blinded insights’. Also see Gavin Parkinson’s response to Foster, ‘Very stupid stuff: Making sense of Adolf Wolfli’, in Richard Pine

203

NOTES TO PAGES 46–51

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

29. 30.

31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

204

(ed.), Creativity, Madness and Civilisation (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), pp. 236–64. Countless blog entries can be found online, notably ‘50 watts’ by Will Schofield (http://50watts.com/About-50-Watts), and ‘Doll work’ by Carrie McGath (http://www.dollwork.org). Jean-Jacques Leveque, ‘Mon oeil: errances ordinaires’ in Les Nouvelles Litt´eraires, 11–18 June 1981. Archival documents can be found at the Bibliotheque Kandinsky in Paris under the collection of Yves Kovacs. Jean-Jacques Leveque, ‘Unica Z¨urn’, La Quinzaine Litt´eraire, 16–31 January 1971. Jean Dal`evge, Les Nouvelles litt´eraires, 7 January 1971 and Jean Bonnet, Les Lettres Franc¸aises, 5 January 1971. Held at the Bibliotheque Kandinsky, Dossier Z¨urn. Leveque, ‘Mon oeil: errances ordinaires’. Performers for Les Jeux a Deux included Jean Gillibert (Flavius), Adelita R´equ´ena (Norma), Pierre Chartier (Pollione) and Christiane Rorato (narrator). See Unica Z¨urn, Lettres a` Ruth Henry 1967–1970 (Paris: Le Son Lointain and Ruth Henry, 2006), p. 151. Marcelle Fonfreide, ‘Profil d’Unica Z¨urn’, exhibition pamphlet, Pour Unica Z¨urn, Le Nouveau Commence, Goethe Institut and Centre Georges Pompidou, 5 December 1983–13 January 1984. Held at the Bibliotheque Kandinsky, Dossier Z¨urn. Ibid. Prominent literary and art journals like La Quinzaine Litt´erraire (16 January 1971), Les Lettres Franc¸aises (5 January 1971) and Les Nouvelles Litt´eraires (7January 1971) included coverage on the show, with reviews by JeanJacques Leveque, Jean Bonnet and Jean Dalvinge. The shows were also mentioned in national newspapers such as Le Monde (13 January 1971 and 16 December 1983). Jean-Louis de Rambures, ‘D´ecouvrir Unica Z¨urn’, Le Monde, 16 December 1983. Held at the Biblioth`eque Kandinsky, Dossier Z¨urn. Ibid. Preface by Andr´e Pierye de Mandigues (1957); ‘“Caterpillar” for Unica Z¨urn / As those from Chinese rivers / Blinking of girl’s heavy boots / On water carefully rotten / Berlin bottle of feather (ink) / Painting of phosphorus and musk / Stink of mother-of-pearl in blue rain / Beaming from all stones / By all sharpness of the moon / Between the scale / Shell and the satin / Nice to be tactless enough to shout (nice to make taste shout) / She has curved (twisted) to pleasure us better / Her finery of peacock and sow.’ My translation.

NOTES TO PAGES 51–55

36. Unica Z¨urn, ‘Rencontre avec Hans Bellmer’, Vacances a` Maison Blanche: ´ Derniers e´crits et autres in´edits, trans. Ruth Henry (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfield, 2000) p. 68. 37. Z¨urn, Lettres a` Ruth Henry, p. 14. 38. Robert Wolfgang Schnell was a German writer, self-taught painter, actor and director. Schnell spent most of his career in Berlin, where he had met Z¨urn and worked on various theatrical projects. Earlier correspondence between Schnell and Z¨urn can be found in the National Art Library Archives in Berlin. 39. Unica Z¨urn, ‘Rencontre avec Hans Bellmer’, in Vacances a` Maison Blanche: ´ Derniers e´crits et autres in´edits, trans. Ruth Henry (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfield, 2000), pp. 67–9. 40. Victoria Combalia, ‘Une cosmographie interieure’, in Lettres a` Ruth Henry, p. 58. 41. My interview with Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain took place on 20 November 2009 at his private home in Paris. 42. Z¨urn, Lettres a` Ruth Henry, p. 4. 43. Ibid., p. 58. 44. Here Max Ernst’s production of fictional biographies and interest in fairy tales becomes relevant. See Catriona McAra’s article on Dorothea Tanning and Max Ernst’s use of fairy tales, ‘Surrealism’s curiosity: Lewis Carroll and the femme-enfant’, Papers of Surrealism 9 (Summer 2011). Available at http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/ journal9/acrobat files/McAra%2013.9.11.pdf (accessed 30 December 2014). For an extended discussion on the intersections between Surrealism and the ‘fairy tale’ see Catriona McAra, ‘“Some parallels in words and pictures”: Dorothea Tanning, visual intertextuality and anti-fairy tales’, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011. 45. Z¨urn, Lettres a` Ruth Henry, p. 22. 46. The opening night took place on 15 December 1959. Z¨urn, ‘Rencontre avec Hans Bellmer’, p. 78. See Z¨urn, Vacances a` Maison Blanche, pp. 35–80. 47. Gerard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 590. Also see Alyce Mahon, ‘Embattled Eros’, in her Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), p. 152. 48. Sarane Alexandrian, Surrealist Art (London: Thames and Hudson: 1985) 227. 49. Mahon, ‘Embattled Eros’, p. 152. 50. In her account of the exhibition (ibid.), Alyce Mahon points out that Daniel Cordier had been the secretary to the wartime Resistance leader Jean Moulin, implying that Moulin’s views may have influenced Cordier in his preference for more controversial artists.

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NOTES TO PAGES 55–64

51. For example, in 1962 Yolanda Fievre was exhibited with a text by Jean Paulhan, and in 1963 Ursula (Schultze-Bluhm) by Alain Jouffroy. See ‘Catalogues des expositions organis´ees par la Galerie Daniel Cordier’, at the Biblioth`eque nationale de France. Record number: YD2 – 3458-4. 52. Mahon, ‘Embattled Eros’, p. 152. 53. Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, p. 587. 54. Whitney Chadwick, Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985). 55. Ibid., p. 11. 56. Though Z¨urn refers to Aube Breton’s object as tr`es joli, she adds that it is too naive when compared to Bellmer’s The Doll. Z¨urn, ‘Rencontre avec Hans Bellmer’, p. 77. 57. Nancy Spector, ‘Meret Oppenheim: performing identities’, in Meret Oppenheim, Jacqueline Burckhardt, Bice Curiger, Josef Helfenstein, Thomas McEvilley and Nancy Spector, Beyond the Teacup (New York: Independent Curators Inc. and Distributed Art Publishers, 1996), p. 38. 58. Z¨urn, ‘Rencontre avec Hans Bellmer’, p. 77. 59. Ren´ee Riese Hubert, ‘From D´ejeuner en fourrure to Caroline’: Meret Oppenheim’s chronicle of Surrealism’ in Mary Ann Caws (ed.), Surrealism and Women (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), p. 40. 60. All quoted correspondence letters were consulted at the Jacques Doucet Library in Paris with the consent of Mr and Mrs Bihl-Bellmer. 61. Z¨urn, ‘Rencontre avec Hans Bellmer’, p. 47. 62. Hans Bellmer and Unica Z¨urn, Unica Z¨urn: Aquarelle, Zeichnungen, Radierungen; Hans Bellmer im Studio: Druckgraphik, Zeichnungen, exhibition catalogue, 28 April–4 June 1967 (Hannover: Galerie Dieter Brusberg, 1967). 63. It should be noted that, even though Mahon does not mention Z¨urn’s participation in her detailed study of the exhibition in ‘Embattled Eros’, it is mentioned in an earlier article, ‘Twist the body red: the art and lifewriting of Unica Z¨urn and introduction to “Notes on her last (?) crisis”’, n.paradoxa 3 (1999), pp. 56–64.

3 ‘Femme de Bellmer ’: Critical Reception from 1984 to 2014 1. ‘Bound: Hans Bellmer and Unica Z¨urn’, Ubu Gallery, New York, 9 March–2 May 2012. 2. The title ‘La Venus d’Ermenonville’ is referenced in the exhibition catalogue Martine Lusardy, Unica Z¨urn, exhibition catalogue, Halle Saint Pierre (Panama, 2006). In this biographical background, compiled by Rike Felka and Erich Brinkmann, it is said that Z¨urn wrote a certain

206

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

NOTES TO PAGES 64–68

3.

letter about the series of photographs taken by Bellmer in 1957. The source of the letter is not referenced. A short prose addresses a similar theme of the anagram ‘Rose avec Coeur violet’, Die Katzengeschichte von Ermenonville [The Cat’s History of Ermenonville] published in Gesamtausgabe 4.2 (Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose, 1998), which could be the letter mentioned. There is of course the possibility that it is a false reference taken from Z¨urn’s writings, where she often embellished the truth, or simply that the document no longer exists. Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988), p. 87. Ibid., p. 52. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid.. Hans Bellmer, ‘Anatomy of love’, in Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, or The Anatomy of the Image, trans. Jon Graham (Waterbury Center, VT: Dominion Press, 2004), p. 32. See Hal Foster, ‘Armor fou’, October 56, High/Low: Art and Mass Culture (Spring 1991) and Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 101–22. Alyce Mahon, ‘Hans Bellmer’s libidinal politics’, in Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss (eds), Surrealism, Politics and Culture (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 246–66 and Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Claude Cahun and Dora Maar: by way of introduction’, in Bachelors (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2000), pp. 24–7. Therese Litchenstein, ‘The hermaphrodite in me’, in her Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer (London: University of California Press, 2001), p. 48. Bellmer, ‘Anatomy of love’, p. 27. Ibid., pp. 23–4. Ibid., p. 32. Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the AvantGarde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), p. 27. While incorrectly stating that the collage Tenir au Frais appeared on the cover of another Surrealist journal, Minotaure, Rupprecht makes no reference to the distinctive representations of the body in the collage and the photographs. Caroline Rupprecht, Subject to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006), p. 136. This can be further supported by Rosalind Krauss’ reading of Bellmer’s Doll series: ‘They are not real bodies and they are not even whole bodies.’ Though this is considered by Susan Rubin Suleiman as a failure to see the ‘aggressive sexual-visual politics’ of the photographs, it nevertheless supports my distinction between The Doll photographs and the Litog´ee

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NOTES TO PAGES 68–77

16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

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series, as well as my further distinction between the collage and photograph. Rosalind Krauss quoted in Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘Dialogue and double allegiance: some contemporary women artists and the historical avant-garde’, in Whitney Chadwick (ed.), Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 136. Mahon, ‘Hans Bellmer’s libidinal politics’, p. 265. Rupprecht, Subject to Delusions, p. 137. Mahon, ‘Hans Bellmer’s libidinal politics’, p. 265. Ibid., pp. 264–5. Ibid., p. 265. Ibid., pp. 264–5. Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., p. 263. Jean-Franc¸ois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Athlone, 1993). Mahon, ‘Hans Bellmer’s libidinal politics’, p. 263. Alyce Mahon, Surrealism and the Politics of Eros, 1938–1968 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005), p. 159. Quentin Bajac et al., La Subversion des images: Surrealisme, photographie, film, exhibition catalogue, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 23 September 2009– 11 January 2010, p. 5. Though Z¨urn’s portraits by Ray were excluded from the vast collection brought together in 2010 for the exhibition Man Ray Portraits: Paris Hollywood Paris at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the two photographs of Z¨urn nonetheless carry the same significance of the latter. See Cl´ement Ch´eroux (ed.), Man Ray Portraits: Paris Hollywood Paris from the Man Ray Archives of the Centre Pompidou, exhibition catalogue, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 13 October–1 November 2010 (Paris: Schirmer/Mosel, 2010). Unica Z¨urn, ‘Rencontre avec Hans Bellmer’, in Vacances a Maison Blanche, ´ trans. Ruth Henry (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfeld, 2000), p. 62. Peter Webb and Robert Short, Hans Bellmer (London: Quarter Books, 1985), p. 188. See Georges Bataille, Eroticism (London: Marion Boyars, 1987), ch. 3, pt 2. Unica Z¨urn and Hans Bellmer, Lettres au docteur Ferdi`ereý (Paris: S´eguier, 1994), p. 63. Alyce Mahon, ‘Twist the Body Red: The Art and Lifewriting of Unica Z¨urn’ in n.paradoxa Vol. 3 (1999). Ibid., p. 61. Ibid. Ibid., p. 62. In ‘Armor fou’, Hal Foster examines issues of aura and anxiety in relation to the uncanny, and analyses Bellmer’s work as a reaction to the

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

48.

NOTES TO PAGES 77–80

36. 37.

psychic apprehensions of fascism and Nazi commands. Foster recounts that ‘Bellmer responds directly to Nazism . . . he rejected engineering, the profession dictated by his father, for publicity, which he also rejected when the Nazis came to power lest he abet them in anyway. It was then that he turned to his poup´ees [dolls] – as an attack on fascist father and the state alike.’ Foster, ‘Armor fou’, p. 87. Although there is a strong case for Bellmer’s denunciations of Nazism, Foster points out that ‘Bellmer contests fascism even as he participates partly in it’. Ibid., p. 93. Ibid., p. 84. Alyce Mahon, ‘“Twist the body red: the art and lifewriting of Unica Z¨urn and introduction to “Notes on her last (?) crisis”’, n.paradoxa 3 (1999), pp. 56–64, p. 62. Penelope Rosemont (ed.), Surrealist Women, An International Anthology (London: The Athlone Press, 1998), p. 313. Ruth Henry, Obliques: La Femme Surr´ealiste 14–5 (1977). See the bibliography and appendix for full details of articles by Ruth Henry. See Chapter 5 for a detailed discussion of the letters mentioned. Ruth Henry, ‘My encounter with Unica’, in Renee-Riese Hubert (ed.), Sulfur: Literary Bi-Annual of the Whole Art 29 (Fall 1991), pp. 67–97, p. 68. Jared Robert Baxter, ‘Unica Z¨urn, division of literature and languages’, undergraduate thesis, German Department, Reed College, Portland, 2010, p. 5. Rita Morrien, Weibliches Textbegehren bei Ingeborg Bachmann (Wurzburg: K¨onigshausen und Neumann, 1996), pp. 164–5. ‘La femme de Bellmer m’´etait connue comme artiste, me disait-il, mais ce livre surprenant m’a donn´e une des lectures les plus importantes de ces dernier les ann´ees.’ Ruth Henry, ‘Unica Z¨urn, la femme qui n’´etait pas la poup´ee’ [‘Unica Z¨urn: The woman who is not the doll’], in Georgiana M. Colville and Katherine Conley (eds), La Femme S’Entˆete: La Part du Feminin dans la Surrealisme (Paris: Lachanal et Ritter, 1998) 224. Katharina Gerstenberger, ‘“And this Madness is my only strength”: The Lifewriting of Unica Z¨urn’ in A/b: Autobiography Studies Issue 6:1 (Spring 1991) 51. Baxter, ‘Unica Z¨urn’, pp. 6–7. The journal Sulfur was printed by Ypsilon of Michigan Press, which later published Z¨urn’s writings in French: MistAKE (2008) and Letters to Dr Ferdiere (2009). Renee Riese Hubert, ‘Self recognition and anatomical junctures: Unica Z¨urn and Hans Bellmer’ in Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Partnership (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 159.

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49. Hubert, ‘Unica Z¨urn and Hans Bellmer’, p. 100. 50. Katherine Gerstenberger, ‘“And this madness is my only strength”: the lifewriting of Unica Z¨urn’, A/b: Autobiography Studies 6/1 (Spring 1991), pp. 40–54. 51. Jennifer Cizik Marshall, ‘The semiotics of schizophrenia: Unica Z¨urn’s artistry and illness’, Modern Language Studies 30/2 (Autumn 2000), pp 21– 31, p. 22. 52. Ibid., p. 26. 53. My interview with Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain took place on 20 November 2009 at his private home in Paris. 54. Claire Duchen, Feminism in France: From May ‘68 to Mitterrand (London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), p. 68. 55. Robert J. Belton, ‘Speaking with forked tongues: “male” discourse in “female” surrealism?’, in Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli and Gwen Raaberg (eds), Surrealism and Women (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), pp. 50–2, p. 52. 56. Ibid., p. 52. 57. Duchen, Feminism in France, p. 92. 58. See Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism: A Radical Reassessment of Freudian Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 2000) and Siblings, Sex and Violence (New York: Polity Press, 2003); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (New York: Continuum, 2004); and H´el`ene Cixous, ‘The laugh of the Medusa’, trans. Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs 1/4 (Summer 1976), pp. 875–93. 59. Duchen, Feminism in France, p. 92. 60. Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les choses. Une arch´eologie des sciences humaines ´ [The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences] (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1966). 61. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference [1967] (London and New York: Routledge, 2001). 62. Duchen, Feminism in France, p. 70. 63. Ibid., p. 71. 64. For recent scholarship on Irigaray see Tamsin E. Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze: Experiments in Visceral Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999); Alison Stone, Luce Irigaray and the Philosophy of Sexual Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Kelly Ives, Luce Irigaray: Lips, Kissing and the Politics of Sexual Difference (Kidderminster: Crescent Moon Publishing, 2008); Mary C. Rawlinson, Sabrina L. Hom and Serene J. Khader (eds), Thinking with Irigaray (New York: 2011); and for a recent anthology of her writing for educational purposes see Mary Green (ed.), Luce Irigaray: Teaching (London: Continuum, 2008).

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NOTES TO PAGES 84–86

65. Ingeborg Morgenrith, owner of the famous feminist bookstore in Berlin, was an known advocate of a social-political feminism and was a key figure in placing Z¨urn’s work within such discussions. 66. Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 36. 67. Hilary Robinson, Reading Art, Reading Irigaray: The Politics of Art by Women (London: I.B.Tauris, 2006), p. 53. 68. Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman [1974] (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) and This Sex which is not One [1971] (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985). 69. Luce Irigaray, ‘A natal lacuna’ [1985], trans. Margaret Whitford, Women’s Art Magazine 58 (May–June 1994), pp. 11–3. 70. Luce Irigaray, ‘When our lips speak together’, trans. Carolyn Burke, Signs 6/1, Women and Sexuality pt 2 (Autumn 1980), pp. 69–79. 71. Pheng Cheah and Elizabeth Grosz, ‘Of being-two: introduction’, Diacritics: Irigaray and the Political Future of Sexual Difference 28/1 (Spring 1998), pp. 3–18, p. 6. 72. Ibid. 73. It’s important to point to what Irigaray refers to as a ‘productive-mimesis’ where in order to ‘refuse to be reduced to the other of the same . . . of the one’ one must invent the self as an autonomous and different subject. 74. Robinson, Reading Art: Reading Irigaray. 75. This non-productive mimesis, in Irigaray’s terms is ‘hom(m)o-sexuality’; a term which plays on the word ‘same-sex’ as the homogeneity of men recognising other men as the same as themselves that perpetrates ‘a culture of patriarchal stasis and sameness’. For Irigaray, a ‘non-productive mimesis’ can be fatal, leading to a loss of woman as ‘other of the same’; condemning woman to ‘function in patriarchy is that of the mirror, as a result of her “otherness” reflecting back to man his “sameness”’. This is ‘fatal’ for Irigaray for two reasons; first that it requires woman to adopt and assimilate to a ‘hom(m)o-sexual culture, and second, as the ‘other’ of the ‘same’, she is forced to replicate ‘femininity’ that is a (‘masquerade’) phallocentric construct. This maintains the cultural structure and does not produce possibilities for women to attain their subjectivities. Ibid., pp. 27–8. 76. Whitford, Luce Irigaray, p. 31. 77. Ibid., p. 3. 78. Luce Irigaray, The Irigaray Reader, ed. and trans. Margaret Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 1. 79. Ibid., pp. 1–2. 80. Irigaray, ‘A natal lacuna’, p. 11.

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NOTES TO PAGES 87–95

81. For a discussion on Irigaray and women artists see Robinson, Reading Art, Reading Irigaray; for a general introduction to Irigaray’s feminist views from a philosophical point of view see Whitford, Luce Irigaray; and for a theorisation of Irigaray’s project within the more recent writings of Gilles Deleuze and visceral philosophy see Lorraine, Irigaray and Deleuze. For an article on the internal contradictions in Irigaray’s writing see Maggie Berg, ‘Luce Irigaray’s “contradictions”: poststructuralism and feminism’, Signs 17/1 (Autumn 1991), pp. 50–70. 82. Whiford, The Irigaray Reader, p. 10. 83. Luce Irigaray, This Sex which is not One [1977] (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985).

4 Anagrams 1. Unica Z¨urn, ‘Cr´ecy’ in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5 (Berlin: Brinkmann und Bose, 1998). 2. Martine Lusardy (ed.), Unica Z¨urn, exhibition catalogue, Halle Saint Pierre (Paris: Panama, 2006), p. 101. 3. Katharine Conley, Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 84. 4. Hans Bellmer, Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious, or The Anatomy of the Image [1957], trans. Jon Graham (Waterbury Center, VT: Dominion Press, 2004), p. 38. 5. Conley, Automatic Woman, p. 84. 6. Bellmer, Little Anatomy, pp. 38–39. 7. Approche d’Unica Z¨urn, trans. Marcelle Fonfreide (Paris: Le Nouveau Commerce, 1981). 8. Bellmer, Little Anatomy, pp. 39–41. 9. Z¨urn’s style is also commented on by Ruth Henry as ‘stiff and metallic’ in her introduction to Unica Z¨urn, Lettres a` Ruth Henry 1967–1970 (Paris: Le Son Lointain & Ruth Henry, 2006), p. 6. 10. Pierre Joris, ‘A note on translating Unica Z¨urn’s anagrammatic poems’, Sulfur: Literary Bi-Annual of the Whole Art 29 (Fall 1991), pp. 87–8. 11. For a detailed discussion on Z¨urn’s individual anagrammatic poems see Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain, ‘Les anagrammes d’Unica Z¨urn’, Obliques: La Femmes surr´ealiste 14–5 (1977), pp. 261–4; Alain Chevrier, ‘Sur l’origine des anagrammes d’Unica Z¨urn’, in Hans Bellmer, Gaston Ferdi`ere, Unica Z¨urn and Alain Chevrier, Lettres au Docteur Ferdi`ere (Paris: S´eguier, 1994); Ren´ee Reise Hubert, Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Partnership (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994); Victoria Appelbe ‘“You will reveal your secret”. Anagrams in the work of Unica Z¨urn’, in Unica Z¨urn, exhibition catalogue, Halle Sainte Pierre (Paris:

212

13.

14. 15.

16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

NOTES TO PAGES 95–98

12.

Panama, 2006); Gareth Sion Jenkins, ‘Reality: a “relatively” private anagram’, in Richard Pine (ed.), Creativity, Madness and Civilisation (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), pp. 216–33; Marion Fichelson, ‘Le corps anagrammatique’, MA thesis, University of Paris VIII, 2009, presented at the conference ‘Les Anagrammes du Corps’, Paris, 6 June 2010. Here, the expression ‘cruel syntax’ is borrowed from and is in reference to Pierre Joris’s essay ‘Letters and dolls: the cruel syntax of Z¨urn and Bellmer’, in his Justifying the Margins (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2009), pp. 113– 25. First published in Z¨urn, Gesamtausgabe, vol. 5 and later in Unica Z¨urn, MistAKE (Paris: Ypsilon Editeur, 2008). Throughout the chapter, I am referring to the text as published in MistAKE. Z¨urn, MistAKE, p. 23. Jean Lescure, ‘Brief history of the Oulipo’, in Warren Motte (ed. and trans.), Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), pp. 32–9, p. 34. Raymond Queneau, ‘Potential literature’, in Motte, Oulipo, pp. 51–64, p. 51. In 1967, the French translation of Hexen-texte was published as Oracles et Spectacles, with an additional eight anagrams to the previous six, eight drawings by Z¨urn and an illustration by Hans Bellmer. See Jack David Zipes, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2002) for general background on Kunstm¨archen and a political context of fairy tales in Germany. In the tale, three sisters are magically carried off in turn by a Hexenmiester to his richly appointed home. The Hexenmeister forbids each sister to enter a particular room and gives each an egg to look after. On entering the forbidden room and seeing a large bowl full of dismembered human bodies, the first two sisters drop their egg into the bowl and the egg becomes bloody. The wizard discovers their disobedience and murders them. The third sister puts her egg away safely before she explores the house. She resurrects her sisters and steals the wizard’s gold. She escapes by disguising herself as a bird, covering herself in honey and feathers. The girl’s brothers and relatives burn the wizard in his home. Mererid Puw Davies, The Tale of Bluebeard in German Literature: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 61. Lescure, ‘Brief history of the Oulipo’, p. 37. Ren´ee Riese Hubert, ‘Unica Z¨urn and Hans Bellmer’, Sulfur: Literary BiAnnual of the Whole Art 29 (Fall 1991), pp. 98–104.

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NOTES TO PAGES 98–103 214

22. Hans Bellmer, ‘Postface to Hexentexte’, trans. Pierre Joris, Sulfur: Literary Bi-Annual of the Whole Art 29 (Fall 1991), pp. 85–6. 23. Ibid. 24. Jacques Lacan, ‘The instance of the letter in the unconscious or reason ´ since Freud’ in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1996). 25. Dany Lobus, ‘Lacan’s science of the subject: between linguistics and topology’, in Jean-Michel Rabat´e (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Lacan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 62. 26. Ibid., p. 51. 27. Lacan, ‘The instance of the letter’, pp. 493–441. 28. Lobus, ‘Lacan’s science of the subject’, p. 62. 29. Jean-Michel Rabat´e, ‘Lacan’s turn to Freud’, in Rabat´e, The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, p. 1. 30. Rabain, ‘Les anagrammes d’Unica Z¨urn’, p. 262. 31. Conley, Automatic Woman, p. 88. 32. For a discussion on the relationship between anagrams and psychoanalysis see Andrea Bachner, ‘Anagrams in psychoanalysis: retroping concepts by Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan and Jean-Francois Lyotard’, Comparative Literature Studies 40/1 (2003), pp. 1–25. 33. Bellmer, ‘Postface to Hexentexte’, p. 86. 34. ‘Wir wessen wohl nicht viel von der geburt und der anatomie des bildes’, as translated by Joris in Bellmer, ‘Postface to Hexentexte’ Sulfur, p. 85. 35. Unica Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine [1964–9], trans. Malcolm Green, (London: Atlas Press, 1994), p. 35. 36. Appelbe, ‘“You will reveal your secret”’. 37. Ibid., p. 35. This article is published from a longer thesis: Victoria Appelbe, ‘Mapping the interior: the Surrealist writings and paintings of Leonora Carrington and Unica Z¨urn’, doctoral thesis, University of Kent, Canterbury, 1994. 38. Hans Bellmer, Gaston Ferdi`ere, Unica Z¨urn and Alain Chevrier, Lettres au docteur Ferdi`ereý (Ypsilon Editeur: Paris, 1994), p. 37. Also quoted in Conley, Automatic Woman, p. 98. 39. Unica Z¨urn, ‘Meeting with Hans Bellmer’ quoted in Lusardy, Unica Z¨urn, p. 105. 40. Appelbe, ‘“You will reveal your secret”’, p. 35. 41. Jacqueline Cheni´eux-Gendron, ‘Toward a new definition of automatism: L’immaculee Conception’ (1989), in Anna Balakian and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (eds), Andr´e Breton Today (New York: Willis Locker and Owen, 1989), pp. 74–90, 75. ´ 42. Andr´e Breton and Paul Eluard, The Immaculate Conception [1930] (London: Atlas Press, 1990).

NOTES TO PAGES 104–111

43. Cheni´eux-Gendron, ‘Toward a new definition of automatism’, p. 75. 44. Ibid., p. 76. 45. For a detailed discussion of this anagram see Appelbe, ‘“You will reveal your secret”’, p. 39. 46. Cheni´eux-Gendron, ‘Toward a new definition of automatism’, p. 62. 47. Conley, Automatic Woman, p. 83. 48. Appelbe, ‘“You will reveal your secret”’, p. 35. 49. See Susan Rubin Suleiman, Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics and the AvantGarde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 1990), p. 27. 50. Der Mann im Jasmin (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Ullstein, 1977); L’Homme Jasmin: impressions d’une malade mentale, suivi de notes concernant la derni`ere crise, trans. Ruth Henry and Robert Valanc¸ay (Paris: Gallimard, 1971). See Chapter 5 for full discussion of the letters mentioned. 51. Conley, Automatic Woman, p. 79. 52. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989). 53. Leonora Carrington, Down Below (Lexington, KY: Black Swan Books, 1944) and The House of Fear: Notes from Down Below (Lexington, KY: Black Swan Books, 1893). 54. For Lacan’s ‘The case of Aimee, or self-punitive paranoia: 1932’ see Lacanian works, http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=113 (accessed 25 January 2015). 55. The fictitious letters, first published in Le Nouveau Commerce in 1981, are of an imaginary correspondence between Norma and Flavius, originally written in a small book bound in black leather. These letters are, however, noted at the end of ‘The games for two’ as ‘too sentimental’ to be included in the text. More recently a limited edition of 80 booklets have been reprinted by Ypsilon.´editeur (2011) on the occasion of a staging of The Man of Jasmine, a theatrical adaptation by Magali Montoya at the Th´eaˆ tre de l’Echangeur, 18–28 March 2011, in Bagnolet, France. 56. Gaul in present day Western Europe includes France, Luxembourg, Belgium, most of Switzerland and the western part of Northern Italy, as well as parts of The Netherlands and Germany. Druidism is an ancient Celtic religion. 57. For reproductions of the original musical scores see Music with East, http://www.musicwithease.com/bellini-norma.html and http://www. musicwithease.com/norma-synopsis.html (accessed 22/01/2015). 58. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Mad Woman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 543. 59. Gilbert and Gubar, The Mad Woman in the Attic, p. 543. 60. Z¨urn, ‘The Games for Two’, in The Man of Jasmine, pp. 173–6.

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NOTES TO PAGES 112–116 216

61. Z¨urn, Lettres a` Ruth Henry, p. 22. Italics mine. 62. Roger Blin was a French actor and director (1907–84) who directed Samuel Beckett’s first production of Waiting for Godot in 1953. Blin also starred as Pozzo, the bald antagonist of the play in the production. 63. Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 30. 64. Ibid., p. 31. 65. ‘Desdemona’ recalls the name of a character in the Shakespearean play Othello, alluding to representations of the mad woman. 66. Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 92. 67. Jericho, another character from this film, is used in the title of an unpublished short text Die Trompeten von Jericho, written by Z¨urn in 1968. In a letter to Henry, she asks about one of Barrault’s new plays. Z¨urn, who followed Barrault’s theatre performances, also knew Jacques Pr´evert personally; Pr´evert helped Henry place Z¨urn in her last internment at the Chateau de la Chesnaie. Z¨urn, Lettres a` Ruth Henry, p. 5. 68. In Beyond Pleasure, Margaret Irvesen reveals the Surrealist aesthetic as an inherent quality of Lacanian theory – providing a history of interchange between Lacan and the Surrealists. Margaret Iversen, Beyond Pleasure: Freud, Lacan, Barthes (Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). 69. Lisa Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2007), p. 289. 70. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar, Book XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge (New York: Norton, 1998), p. 48. 71. Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p. 289. 72. Ibid. 73. Ibid., p. 293. 74. Lacan’s article on the notorious case of the Papin sisters was published in the Surrealist journal Le Minotaure in 1933 (‘Motives of paranoid crime: the crime of the Papin sisters’, Le Minotaure 3–4 (1933), pp. 25–8), shortly after his studies on Aim´ee. The d´elire a deux of the sisters resonated with much of Aim´ee’s ‘interpretative madness’, however different in their unified power to realise the criminal act. 75. See ‘Disturbances of love’ in Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, pp. 299–301. 76. It has been noted by scholars such as Angela Moorjani that Bellmer and Lacan were in correspondence; after having read Bellmer’s The Anatomy Lacan sent Bellmer a note of gratitude. In another letter to Dr Ferdiere, Bellmer writes Z¨urn’s list of medications and Lacan’s name. Z¨urn also made several references to Lacan in her notebooks and written work. 77. My interview with Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain took place on 20 November 2009 at his private home in Paris, France.

5 Automatism after 1945 1. Dawn Ades, ‘Automatism and chance: Surrealist strategies and their legacies in contemporary art and cinema’, Slade Lectures, University of Oxford, 20 January 2010. Available at http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/people/dawn-ades (accessed 24 January 2015). 2. Ren´ee Riese Hubert, Magnifying Mirrors: Women, Surrealism, and Partnership (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1994), p. 154. 3. Pierre Janet, L’Automatisme psychologique (Paris: F´elix Alcan, 1889). 4. Andr´e Breton, First Manifesto of Surrealism [1924], in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972). 5. David Lomas, The Haunted Self: Surrealism, Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity (New Heaven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 22. 6. David Hartley, Observations on Man, his Frame, his Duty, and his Expectations (London: James Leake and Wm Frederick, 1749). 7. The term is said to have been primarily used by Janet in France and later by Morton Prince (early 1900s) and Anita M¨uhl (1930s) in the United States. Definition of ‘automatic’ from Ernest Klein, A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language: Dealing with the Origin of Words and their Sense Development thus Illustrating the History of Civilization and Culture, vol. 1 (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1966–7). 8. Francis Galton, ‘Psychometric experiments’, in Inquiries into the Human Faculty [1883] (London: Macmillan, 1907). 9. Ibid., quoted in Jack J. Spector, Surrealist Art and Writing 1919–1939: The Gold of Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 249. 10. See Georges Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpˆetri`ere (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2003). 11. There is an interesting revival of electroshock therapy after the 1950s, which Unica Z¨urn writes about in The Man of Jasmine (trans. Malcolm Green (London: Atlas Press, 1994)) and her other ‘diary’ notebooks. Antonin Artaud’s unfortunate experiences with such therapy, whose experience in psychiatric wards greatly affected her, is another case Z¨urn writes about. See Stephen Barber, Artaud: Blows and Bombs (London: Creation Books, 2003) and chs 3 and 6 of this book. 12. See Anne Martin, ‘Automatism and art practice’, PhD thesis, University of Plymouth, May 2006.

NOTES TO PAGES 117–123

78. Appignanesi, Mad, Bad and Sad, p. 290. 79. Ibid., p. 291. 80. Z¨urn et al., Lettres au docteur Ferdi`ereý, p. 37.

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NOTES TO PAGES 123–127 218

13. Ian Higgins (ed.), Surrealism and Language (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986), p. 79. 14. Malcolm Haslam, The Real World of the Surrealists (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978), p. 7. ´ 15. Andr´e Breton, Paul Eluard and Philippe Soupault, The Automatic Message [1933], The Magnetic Fields [1919], The Immaculate Conception [1930] (London: Atlas Press, 1997). 16. Frederick William Henry Myers, Human Personality and its survival of Bodily Death, ed. Susy Smith (New Hyde Park, NY: University Books Inc., 1961). 17. Ibid., p. 166. 18. Myers, Human Personality, p. 32. 19. Th´eodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia, trans Daniel B. Vermilye (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900). See Mark S. Micale (ed.), The Mind of Modernism: Medicine Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America 1880–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), p. 13. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid. 22. Andr´e Breton, Nadja (Paris: Gallimard, 1928). See Micale, The Mind of Modernism, p. 13. 23. Ibid. 24. Minotaure 3–4, ed. Andr´e Breton and Pierre Mabille (Paris: 1933). 25. Breton et al., The Automatic Message, p. 11. 26. Andr´e Breton, The Soluble Fish [1924], in Manifestoes of Surrealism. 27. Anna Balakian, Andr´e Breton: Magus of Surrealism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 64–5. 28. Ibid. 29. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 21. 30. David Lomas observes Breton’s quote from Knut Hamsum’s novel Hunger (1890) as an aside to the reader in referring to the effects of hunger on creativity. Lomas, The Haunted Self, pp. 14–5. 31. Andr´e Breton, ‘The mediums enter’ [1922], in The Lost Steps, trans. M. Polizzotti (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), pp. 89– 95. 32. David Gascoyne, ‘Introduction to The Magnetic Fields’, in Breton et al., The Automatic Message, p. 42. 33. Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, p. 22. 34. The Magnetic Fields was written by Breton and Soupault in the summer of 1919. Balakian, Andr´e Breton, p. 60. 35. Ibid. 36. Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism (London: Jonathan Cape, 1964).

NOTES TO PAGES 127–132

37. Francis G´erard, ‘L’etat d’un surr´ealiste’, La R´evolution Surr´ealiste 1 (December 1924). 38. Galton quoted in Spector, Surrealist Art and Writing, p. 249. 39. Breton et al., The Automatic Message [1933], The Magnetic Fields [1919], The Immaculate Conception [1930]. 40. Anthony Melville, Introduction to The Immaculate Conception, in Breton et al., The Automatic Message, p. 152. 41. Jacqueline Ch´enieux-Gendron, ‘Toward a new definition of automatism: L’Immacul´ee Conception’, in Anna Balakian and Rudolf E. Kuenzli (eds), Andr´e Breton Today (New York: Willis Locker and Owen, 1989), pp. 74– 90, p. 77. 42. Myers, Human Personality, p. 32. 43. Ch´enieux-Gendron, ‘Toward a new definition of automatism’, p. 75. ´ 44. Andr´e Breton, Ren´e Char and Paul Eluard, Ralentir travaux (Paris: Editions surrealistes, 1930). 45. Andr´e Breton, Cahiers d’Art 5–6 (1935), p. 137, quoted in Ch´enieuxGendron, ‘Toward a new definition of automatism’, p. 75. 46. Ibid., p. 62. 47. Definition of ‘automatos’ from The Concise Oxford Dictionary, 10th edn, ed. Judy Pearsall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 48. Hans Bellmer, quoted in Ren´ee Riese Hubert, Surrealism and the Book (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 1988), p. 153. 49. One Surrealist strategy of automatic drawing was decalcomania (d´ecalquer: to transfer), which was a popular parlour pastime of the 1860s exercised by fashionable ladies. Alastair Brotchie and Mel Gooding (eds), A Book of Surrealist Games (London: Shambhala Redstone Press, 1995), p. 151. 50. Max Morise quoted in Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1993), p. xvi. 51. Spector, Surrealist Art and Writing, p. 97. 52. Ibid., p. 109. 53. Ibid., p. 97. 54. Ibid., p. 105. 55. James Randi, An Encyclopaedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1995). 56. Brotchie and Gooding, A Book of Surrealist Games, p. 142. 57. Ibid. 58. Andr´e Breton, ‘Le message automatique’, Minotaur 3–4 (1933), pp. 55–65. 59. Spector, Surrealist Art and Writing, p. 105. 60. Lomas, The Haunted Self, p. 4. 61. Ibid. 62. Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: Octopus, 1980), p. 84. 63. Ades, ‘Automatism and chance’.

219

NOTES TO PAGES 132–139 220

64. Andr´e Breton, ‘The second manifesto’ [1929], in Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1972). 65. Max Ernst, ‘Comment on force l’inspiration’, Le Surr´ealisme au service de la r´evolution 6 (May 1933), pp. 44–45. 66. Leslie Jones, ‘Tracing dreams: Surrealist drawing 1915–1950’, in Drawing Surrealism, exhibition catalogue (Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2012), p. 40. 67. Ibid., p. 59. 68. Unica Z¨urn, Unica Z¨urn: Alben: Bucher und Zeichenhefte, ed. Erich Brinkmann (Berlin: Verlag Brinkmann and Bose, 2009), p. 12. 69. See Barbara Safarova, ‘L’ouevre d’Achilles G. Rizzoli et d’Unica Z¨urn dans le cadre de l’art brut. Approche interdisciplinaire’ [‘The artistic production of Achilles G. Rizzoli and Unica Z¨urn within the framework of Art Brut: an interdisciplinary approach’, PhD thesis, University of Paris Diderot (Paris 7) 2008 and Marion Fichelson, ‘Le corps anagrammatique’ MA thesis, University of Paris VIII, 2009. presented at the conference ‘Les Anagrammes du Corps’, Paris, 6 June 2010. 70. Unica Z¨urn, Letter, Gesamtausgabe, Band 4.2 (Berlin: Brinkmann and Bose Verlag, 1998), p. 506. 71. Unica Z¨urn, ‘Rencontre avec Hans Bellmer’, in Vacances a Maison ´ Blanche, trans. Ruth Henry (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfeld, 2000), pp. 35– 80. 72. Peter Webb and Robert Short, Hans Bellmer (London: Quartet Books, 1985), p. 14. 73. Rike Felka, ‘The dreaming hand. Unica Z¨urn’s drawings’, in Z¨urn, Unica Z¨urn: Alben: Bucher und Zeichenhefte, p. 326. 74. For a detailed discussion on Antonin Artaud’s ‘written drawings’ see Paule Th´evenin, ‘The search for a lost world’, in Jacques Derrida and Paule Th´evenin, The Secret Art of Antonin Artaud, trans. Mary Ann Caws (Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1998), pp. 3–45. 75. Z¨urn, Unica Z¨urn: Alben: Bucher und Zeichenhefte, p. 12. 76. Ibid. 77. Interview with Adam Boxer at Ubu Gallery, New York on 16 June 2011. 78. Z¨urn, Unica Z¨urn: Alben: Bucher und Zeichenhefte, p. 12. 79. This book is a folder of drawings sent to Henri Michaux, now part of the Daniel Filipacchi collection. 80. Unica Z¨urn, Lettres au docteur Ferdi`ere (with Hans Bellmer, Gaston Ferdi`ere and Alain Chevrier) (Paris: S´eguier, 1994), p. 22. Linda Gertner Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 32.

NOTES TO PAGES 139–145

81. Nadia Choucha, Surrealism and the Occult (Oxford: Mandrake, 1991), p. 53. 82. Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley, p. 32. 83. Beardsley’s repudiation of the conventions of his time led critics to declare his art ‘immoral’. His illustrations of women were considered particularly ‘unfeminine’, and did not conform ‘to the idea that women should enjoy the “benefits” of the position of inferiority’. Beardsley does, however, largely conform to the objectification of women by accompanying his illustrated women with (dressed) male figures, drawing attention to female nudity as sexual object. However, these women, with their flowing long hair, pubescent genitalia and an older, aged sexuality were, as the ‘New Woman’, considered ‘ugly’: ‘their rapacious passion for cruelty disfigures their countenances . . . the Beardsley woman who appears by conventional standards to be cruel actually asserts herself as woman rather than paragon of inferiority’. Zatlin, Aubrey Beardsley, pp. 34. 84. Unica Z¨urn, The House of Illnesses: Stories and Pictures from a Case of Jaundice [1958] (London: Atlas Press, 1993). 85. A detailed discussion of The House of Illnesses is included in Chapter 6. 86. Unica Z¨urn, ‘The whiteness with the red spot’ [1959], in The Man of Jasmine. 87. Felka, ‘The dreaming hand’, p. 326. 88. Ibid. 89. Unica Z¨urn, letter to Mia and Johannes Lederer, Palaves, 20 August 1960. Gesamstaube, Band 4.2, p. 649. 90. Z¨urn, The House of Illnesses, p. 98. 91. See Sigmund Freud, ‘A note upon the “mystic writing-pad”’ [1925], in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Volume XIX, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961). 92. Attached to the letter sent to R.W. Schnell on 20 December 1958 from Ermenonville. Z¨urn, Unica Z¨urn: Alben: Bucher und Zeichenhefte, p. 283. 93. Jacques Derrida, ‘Freud and the scene of writing’, in Writing and Difference [1967] (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 280. 94. Ibid., p. 284. 95. Brotchie and Gooding, A Book of Surrealist Games, p. 55. ´ 96. See Jacques Lacan, ‘The Purloined Letter’, Ecrits, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman Yale French Studies 48 (1973), pp. 39–72. For a discussion of Lacan’s psychoanalytic reading see John P. Muller and William J. Richardson, The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore, MD and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988). 97. Hans Bellmer, ‘Letter 2 November 1964’, in Lettres au docteur Ferdi`ere, p. 64. My translation. 98. Ibid. My translation.

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NOTES TO PAGES 146–149 222

99. Katharine Conley, Automatic Woman (Automatic Woman: The Representation of Woman in Surrealism (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1996), p. 85. 100. Z¨urn, The House of Illnesses: Stories; The Man of Jasmine [1964–9], trans. Malcolm Green, (London: Atlas Press, 1994); Dark Spring [1968], trans. Caroline Rupprecht (Boston: Exact Change, 2000). 101. Bellmer, ‘Letter 2 November 1964’, p. 64. My translation. 102. Bellmer does not specify a date or any details of the mentioned exhibition. Max Ernst returned to Europe after the war in 1949 and had his first retrospective exhibition in 1951 at the Augustusburg Palace in Br¨uhl. The show, which was organised by his sister Loni and her art historian husband Lothar Pretzell, travelled to more than eight cities in Germany, with Berlin being a definite location. A few years later Ernst won first prize for painting at the Venice Biennale in 1954. He had his second retrospective in 1962 at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum in Cologne. Following this exhibition, he became a widely renowned artist in Germany. In her autobiographies Birthday (Culver City, CA: Lapis Press, 1987) and Between Lives: An Artist and her World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), Dorothea Tanning writes about Enrst’s exhibition in Germany. See Catriona McAra, ‘“Some parallels in words and pictures”: Dorothea Tanning, visual intertextuality and anti-fairy tales’, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011. 103. Z¨urn, Unica Z¨urn: Alben: Bucher und Zeichenhefte, p. 13. 104. For a full discussion on posthumous exhibitions, see Chapter 2. 105. Ken Johnson, ‘Happy abandon, despite struggles with mental illness’, The New York Times Weekend Arts Review, 17 April 2009. 106. Webb and Short, Hans Bellmer. 107. Bettina Brand-Claussen, ‘On several drawings by Unica Z¨urn’, in Thomas R¨oske, Ingrid von Beyme (eds), Surrealism and Madness, exhibition catalogue (Heidelberg: Sammlung Prinzhorn, Wunderhorn, 2010), p. 106. 108. Hubert, Surrealism and the Book. 109. Ibid., cited in Drawing Surrealism, 57. 110. Jones, ‘Tracing dreams’, ibid. 111. Brand-Claussen, ‘On several drawings by Unica Z¨urn’, p. 108. 112. Ibid. 113. Ibid. 114. Yves Tanguy, ‘The creative process’, Art Digest 28 (1954), p. 9, cited in Jones, ‘Tracing dreams’, p. 30. 115. Andr´e Masson, ‘Le Surrealisme et apr`es’, L’oeil 5 (May 1955), pp. 14–5, cited in Andr´e Masson, ‘200 dessins’, exposition, Mus´ee d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, 10 June–12 September 1976.

NOTES TO PAGES 149–156

116. Jones, ‘Tracing dreams’, p. 10. 117. Jo˜ao Ribas, ‘Unica Z¨urn: oracles and spectacles’, in Unica Z¨urn: Dark Spring, exhibition catalogue (New York: Drawing Papers No. 86, 2009). 118. Ibid., p. 21. 119. Ibid. 120. Andr´e Breton, First Manifesto (1924) cited ibid. 121. Henri Michaux, ‘Surrealism’, Le Disque Vert 4/1 (January 1925), p. 86. 122. Ribas, ‘Unica Z¨urn’, p. 21. 123. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959). 124. Mary Ann Caws, ‘Unica Z¨urn: beyond bizarre’ in Unica Z¨urn: Dark Spring, exhibition catalogue, The Drawing Center (New York: Drawing Papers No. 86, 2009), p. 23. 125. Brotchie and Gooding, A Book of Surrealist Games, p. 70. 126. Unica Z¨urn, Orakel und Spektakel Book IV (1960). Orakel und Spektakel (Berlin: Brinkman and Bose, 1990). 127. Unica Z¨urn, ‘Notes on her last (?) crisis’ in The Man of Jasmine, trans. Green, M. (London: Atlas Press, 1994 [1966]). 128. Ibid., p. 128. 129. Caws, ‘Unica Z¨urn: beyond bizarre’, p. 58. 130. Ribas, ‘Unica Z¨urn’, p. 22. 131. Caws, ‘Unica Z¨urn’, p. 54. 132. Alain Chevrier, Lettres au docteur Ferdi`ere (1994), p. 72, fn 7. My translation 133. Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 33. 134. ‘She hangs the fish on the nail in the kitchen where the towel hangs, for this slice of fish is evidently a threatening face, one which will protect her.’ Cr´ecy Notebook quoted in Martine Lusardy, Unica Z¨urn, Halle Saint Pierre (Panama, 2006), p. 130 and Z¨urn, ‘Notes on her last (?) crisis’, respectively.

¨ 6 Notes on Unica Zurn’s The Man of Jasmine and Other Narratives 1. Unica Z¨urn, ‘Cr´ecy’ [1970], in Vacances a` Maison Blanche: Derniers e´crits ´ et autres in´edits (Paris: Editions Jo¨elle Losfield, 2000). 2. Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 92. 3. Th´eodore Flournoy, From India to the Planet Mars: A Study of a Case of Somnambulism with Glossolalia, trans Daniel B. Vermilye (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1900).

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NOTES TO PAGES 156–160 224

4. Joseph Breuer and Sigmund Freud, Studies on Hysteria [1895], trans. and ed. James Strachey in collaboration with Anna Freud (Scranton, PA: Basic Books, 1982). 5. For Lacan’s ‘The case of Aimee, or self-punitive paranoia: 1932’ see Lacanian works, http://www.lacanianworks.net/?p=113 (accessed 25 January 2015). 6. Z¨urn, ‘Notes on her last (?) crisis’, in The Man of Jasmine, p. 130. 7. Jennifer Cizik Marshall, ‘The semiotics of schizophrenia: Unica Z¨urn’s artistry and illness’, Modern Language Studies 30/2 (Autumn 2000), pp. 21– 31. 8. For a detailed discussion on exhibitions see Chapter 2. 9. All quoted correspondence letters were consulted at the Jacques Doucet Library in Paris with the consent of Mr and Mrs Bihl-Bellmer. 10. Unica Z¨urn, Lettres a` Ruth Henry 1967–1970 (Paris: Le Son Lointain & Ruth Henry, 2006, p. 151. 11. ‘M´emoire brulante et de son imagination jubilatoire.’ Ibid. 12. All references in the chapter are to the 1994 publication of The Man of Jasmine by Atlas Press, which is the only English translation to date. 13. Jared Robert Baxter, ‘Unica Z¨urn, division of literature and languages’, undergraduate thesis, German Department, Reed College, Portland, 2010, p. 5. 14. Rita Morrien, Weibliches Textbegehren bei Ingeborg Bachmann (Wurzburg: K¨onigshausen und Neumann, 1996), pp. 164–5, quoted in Baxter, ‘Unica Z¨urn’, p. 5. 15. ‘In the main, as far as the readers of what Eifler calls the New Women’s Movement have been concerned, Z¨urn has thus come to figure nothing so much as a kind of artistic still birth.’ Ibid. 16. See Luce Irigaray, ‘Une lacune natale’, Le Nouveau Commerce 62–3 (1985), pp. 39–47, trans. Margaret Whitford as ‘A natal lacuna’, Women’s Art Magazine 58 (May–June 1994), pp. 11–3. For a detailed discussion on the critical reception of Z¨urn see Chapter 2. 17. Baxter claims that Z¨urn’s reception has been grudging because of the unavailability of her work. He wrongfully notes that her prose writing was first published in 1977, though interestingly pointing out that the German version of The Man of Jasmine was first published as part of Ulstein Verlag’s ‘Die Frau in der Literatur’, which he gives as a reason why her work has been read within a feminist context. Baxter, ‘Unica Z¨urn’, p. 6. 18. Sabine Werner-Birkenbach, ‘Trends in writing by women, 1910–1933’, in Jo Catling (ed.), A History of Women’s Writing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 129. 19. ‘La femme de Bellmer m’´etait connue comme artiste, me disait-il, mais ce livre surprenant m’a donn´e une des lectures les plus importantes

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

NOTES TO PAGES 160–168

20.

de ces dernier les ann´ees.’ Ruth Henry, ‘Unica Z¨urn, la femme qui n’´etait pas la poup´ee’ [‘Unica Z¨urn: the woman who is not the doll’] in Georgiana M. Colville and Katherine Conley (eds), La Femme S’Entˆete: La Part du Feminin dans la Surrealisme (Paris: Lachanal and Ritter, 1998), p. 224. Z¨urn’s insistence that the novel be published in France subjects it to reception within the French literary genre of autobiography that became a particularly prominent tool for women writers during this period. See Katharina Gerstenberger, ‘“And this madness is my only strength”: the lifewriting of Unica Z¨urn’, A/b: Autobiography Studies 6/1 (Spring 1991), pp. 40–54. Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 25. Ibid., p. 26. For a detailed discussion on ‘The Games for Two’ see Chapter 3. Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 35. For a detailed discussion on the role of anagrams in The Man of Jasmine see Chapter 3. Caroline Rupprecht, Subject to Delusions: Narcissism, Modernism, Gender (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2006). Rupprecht, ‘The Violence of Merging: Unica Z¨urn’s writing (on) the body’, Studies in Twentieth and Twenty-first Century Literature 27/2 (2003), p. 141. Available at http://dx.doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1562 (accessed 24 December 2014). Jennifer Cizik Marshall, ‘The semiotics of schizophrenia: Unica Z¨urn’s artistry and illness’, Modern Language Studies 30/2 (Autumn 2000), pp 21– 31. Ibid., pp. 27–8. Ibid., p. 28. Ibid., p. 29. ‘How it all began: I have had an abortion’, in Edith Hoshino Altbach, Jeanette Clausen, Dagmar Schultz and Naomi Stephan (eds), German Feminism: Readings in Politics and Literature, (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984), p. 102. Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine, pp. 74–5. Susan Bassnett, Feminist Experiences, The Women’s Movements in Four Cultures (London: Allen and Unwin, 1986), p. 76. Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 57. Ibid., p. 58. See Mahon, ‘Twist the Body Red’ (1999), Rupprecht, Subject to Delusions (2006) and Irigaray, ‘A Natal Lacuna’ (1985). Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 29. Z¨urn, The House of Illnesses, p. 9.

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NOTES TO PAGES 168–173 226

40. Davies, The Tale of Bluebeard in German Literature (2001) 206. 41. Kunstm¨archen, stems from the German word ‘m¨archen’, which originally meant ‘little tale’, though it is often translated as ‘folktale’ or ‘fairytale’. A kunstm¨archen, on the other hand, implies a literary or artistic tale that can be considered an ‘anti-tale’. See Laura Martin, ‘The German Enlightenment and Romantic M¨archen as Anti-M¨archen’ in Catriona McAra and David Calvin (eds), Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2011), pp 18–37. 42. Daniel Paul Schreber, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness [1903] (New York: New York Review of Books, 1955). 43. There are several editions of The House of Illnesses; in 1971 by Gallimard, Paris; in 1977 by Verlag Ullstein GmbH, Frankfurt/M. – Berlin; in 1986 by Brinkmann and Bose, Berlin; and most recently in 1993 by Atlas Press (The House of Illnesses: Stories and Pictures from a Case of Jaundice [1958] (London: Atlas Press, 1993), which is the edition used in this book. The first and only facsimile edition was published in 1999 by Verlag Brinkmann and Bose, Berlin. The outcome of the rearrangement offers an interesting study of the constructed symbolism. 44. Z¨urn, The House of Illnesses, p. 12. 45. Ibid., p. 39. 46. ‘Tel le chat d´elimitant le domaine qui il fait sien, ou le clown sur la piste, ne pouvant sortir de son jardin, s’il ne retrouve pas la porte imaginaire. . . . ’ Unica Z¨urn, Approche d’Unica Z¨urn, trans. Marcelle Fonfreide (Paris: Le Nouveau Commerce, 1981). 47. Edmund Wilson, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959), pp. 270–1. 48. Z¨urn, The House of Illnesses, p. 45. 49. Ibid., p. 26. 50. Margaret Littler, ‘Madness, misogyny and the feminine in aesthetic modernism: Unica Z¨urn and Claire Goll’, in Eric Robertson and Robert Vilain, Yvan Goll – Claire Goll: Texts and Contexts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), pp. 153–73, p. 158. 51. Caroline Rupprecht, ‘Introduction’, in Dark Spring [1968], trans. Caroline Rupprecht (Boston: Exact Change, 2000), p. 13. 52. Ibid. 53. ‘Portrait of a Whispered Message’ is an illustration placed within the chapter ‘A Revealing Conversation’. Z¨urn, The House of Illnesses, p. 48. 54. ‘Second Portrait’ is an illustration placed within the chapter ‘The Last Adventure’. Z¨urn, The House of Illnesses, p. 50. 55. Albert Pike, Morals and Dogma (Charleston, SC: Southern Jurisdiction of the United States, 1871).

NOTES TO PAGES 174–182

56. Unica Z¨urn, ‘The whiteness with the red spot’ [1959], in The Man of Jasmine, p. 153. 57. The character Dr Mortimer may have been inspired by the character Mortimer Brewster in Joseph Kesserling’s 1941 farcical black comedy Arsenic and Old Lace. 58. Z¨urn, The House of Illnesses, p. 19. 59. Jonathan Croall, National Theatre Background Pack: A Dream Play (2005). See http://d1wf8hd6ovssje.cloudfront.net/documents/a dream play.pdf (accessed 25 January 2015). 60. Ibid. 61. Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 30. 62. Z¨urn quoted in Rupprecht, ‘Introduction’ in Dark Spring, p. 11. 63. Ibid., back cover summary. 64. Ibid., p. 40. 65. Ibid., p. 47. 66. Ibid., p. 62. 67. Mary Ann Caws, ‘Unica Z¨urn: beyond bizarre’, in Unica Z¨urn: Dark Spring, exhibition catalogue The Drawing Center (New York: Drawing Papers No. 86, 2009), p. 44. 68. Z¨urn, The House of Illnesses, p. 29. 69. Ibid., p. 49. 70. The Wittenau Clinic was renamed the Karl-Bonh¨oeffer-Nervenklinik in 1957 and was the only psychiatric hospital in Mitte, West Berlin. 71. Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 57; ‘Notes on her last (?) crisis’, p. 132. 72. Unica Z¨urn, MistAKE (Paris: Ypsilon Editeur, 2008), p. 13. 73. Ibid., p. 17. 74. Ibid., p. 19. 75. My interview with Jean-Franc¸ois Rabain took place on 20 November 2009 at his private home in Paris. 76. Rike Felka, ‘Feuille volante franco-allemande’, in Z¨urn, MistAKE, p. 7. 77. Phonetically, the code may sound-out the phrase ‘Un elle aime’ (‘one she loves’), referring to the woman ‘Elle’ who recites at the end of the text that contemplation of the word ‘love’ has lead her down this path. Ibid., p. 20. 78. Ibid., p. 19. 79. ‘Fauteuil’ is misspelled as ‘fauteuille’. Ibid., p. 13. 80. Ibid., p. 15. 81. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (New York: Continuum, 2004), p. 18. 82. Unica Z¨urn, untitled journal entry in Obliques: La Femme Surr´ealiste 14–5 (1977), p. 254.

227

NOTES TO PAGES 183–186

83. Gerstenberger, ‘The lifewriting of Unica Z¨urn’, p. 40. 84. Mark S. Micale, The Mind of Modernism: Medicine Psychology, and the Cultural Arts in Europe and America 1880–1940 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 86–7. 85. Lynne Layton, ‘Trauma, gender identity, and sexuality: discourses on fragmentation’, American Imago 52/1 (Spring 1995), pp. 107–25. See also writings of Judith Butler, Anna Kaplan and Ellen Friedman, who all make a point to differentiate between representational uses of fragmentation and actual psychic pain. 86. Marshall, ‘The semiotics of schizophrenia’, p. 29. 87. Ibid. 88. Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine, p. 155. 89. Unica Z¨urn, ‘L’Homme Poubelle’, Obliques, p. 258.

Epilogue 1. Unica Z¨urn, The Man of Jasmine (London: Atlas Press, 1994), p. 114.

228

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Strozier, Robert M., Foucault, Subjectivity, and Identity: Historical Constructions of Subject and Self (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2002). Suleiman, Susan Rubin, The Female Body in Western Culture: Contemporary Perspectives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986). , Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). , Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). , Risking Who One Is: Encounters with Contemporary Art and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). , ‘Dialogue and double allegiance: some contemporary women artists and the historical avant-garde’, in Whitney Chadwick (ed.), Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism and Self-Representation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998). , Crises of Memory and the Second World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). Surrealist Vision and Technique: Drawings and Collages from the Pompidou Center and the Picasso Museum, exhibition catalogue, Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University (Atlanta and Detroit Institute of Arts, 1996). Surya, Michel, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography (New York: Verso, 2002). Sylvain, R., ‘Le livre du non r´eel’, Obliques: La Femme surrealiste 14–15 (1977). Tanguy, Yves, ‘The creative process’, Art Digest 28 (1954), pp. 14–6. Tanning, Dorothy, Birthday (Culver City, CA: Lapis Press, 1987). , Between Lives: An Artist and her World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001). Taylor, Sue, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002). Turkle, Sherry, ‘French anti-psychiatry’, in David Ingleby (ed.), Critical Psychiatry (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 150–83. Waldberg, Patrick, Surrealism (London: Thames and Hudson, 1966). , ‘A propos d’Unica Z¨urn’, Obliques: La Femmes surr´ealiste 14–15 (1977). Warlick, M.E., Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2001). Warner, Marina, From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (London: Vintage, 1995).

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Waugh, Patricia, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (London: Routledge, 1989). Webb, Peter (ed.), The Erotic Arts (London: Secker and Warburg, 1975). and Leonor Fini, Sphinx: The Life and Art of Leonor Fini (Vendome Press, 2009). and Robert Short, Hans Bellmer (London: Quartet Books, 1985). Werner-Birkenbach, Sabine, ‘Trends in writing by women, 1910–1933’, in Jo Catling (ed.), A History of Women’s Writing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). White Horse Eagle, We Indians, the Passing of a Great Race, being the Recollections of the Last of the Great Indian Chiefs, Big Chief White Horse Eagle, as told to Edgar von Schmidt-Pauli, trans. Christopher Turner (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Library, 2005). White, Lancelot Law, The Unconscious before Freud (London: J. Friedman, 1978). Whitford, Margaret, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine (New York: Routledge, 1991). Wilkie-Stibbs, Christine, The Feminine Subject in Children’s Literature (New York: Routledge, 2002). Wilson, Edmund, Axel’s Castle: A Study in the Imaginative Literature of 1870– 1930 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1959). Wilson, Sarah, ‘Rites of passage: Myriam Bat-Yosef and performance’ in Fabrice Pascaud (ed.), Myriam Bat-Yosef, Paintings Objects, Performances (Paris: Editions Somogy, 2005), pp. 92–107. Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies and German Culture (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986). Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1989). Wu, Duncan (ed.), Romanticism: An Anthology (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2012). Zatlin, Linda Gertner, Aubrey Beardsley and Victorian Sexual Politics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990). Zimmerman, Andrew, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Ziolkowski, Theodore, German Romanticism and Its Institutions (Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1992). Zipes, Jack David, Breaking the Magic Spell: Radical Theories of Folk and Fairy Tales (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2002).

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Unpublished Sources Appelbe, Victoria, ‘Mapping the interior: the Surrealist writings and paintings of Leonora Carrington and Unica Z¨urn’, PhD thesis, University of Kent, Canterbury, 1994. Baxter, Jared Robert, ‘Unica Z¨urn, division of literature and languages’, undergraduate thesis, German Department, Reed College, Portland, 2010. Blancard, M., ‘The performances of Leonora domestic Carrington, Frida Kahlo, Gisele Prassinos, Dorothea Tanning and Unica Z¨urn: Dialogue between writing and art’, PhD thesis, University of Cergy-Pontoise, 2006. Desnos, Robert, ‘Blondine dans la Foret Enchant´ee’, (Biblioth`eque Litt´eraire Jacques Doucet, Paris). Fichelson, Marion, ‘Le corps anagrammatique’ [The anagrammatic body], MA thesis, University of Paris VIII, 2009, presented at the conference ‘Les Anagrammes du Corps’, Paris, 6 June 2010. France, L.H., ‘Writing bodies, rolling “truth”: the images and texts of Hans Bellmer and Unica Z¨urn, 1953–1970’, MA thesis, Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 2010. Kamien-Kazhdan, Adina, ‘Automatism and Rorschach: probing the unconscious’, presented at the International Symposium in conjunction with the exhibition Surrealism and Beyond at the Israeli Museum, 1–2 May 2007. Martin, Anne, ‘Automatism and art practice’, PhD thesis, University of Plymouth, May 2006. McAra, Catriona, ‘“Some parallels in words and pictures”: Dorothea Tanning, visual intertextuality and anti-fairy tales’, PhD thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011. Safarova, Barbara, ‘L’ouevre d’Achilles G. Rizzoli et d’Unica Z¨urn dans le cadre de l’art brut. Approche interdisciplinaire’ [‘The artistic production of Achilles G. Rizzoli and Unica Z¨urn within the framework of Art Brut: an interdisciplinary approach’], PhD thesis, University of Paris Diderot, 2008.

Index Numbers in italics refer to page numbers of illustrations. Ades, Dawn, 132 Alain-Fournier, Henri, 25 anagram, the, 10, 91, 93 automatism, 101, 102, 117 definition of, 98 unconscious, 103 Andersen, Hans Christian, 25, 97 anti-psychiatry movement, the, 162 Aragon, Louis, 36 Arp, Jean (Hans), 63, 101, 102 Art Brut, 44, 45, 46, 47 Art Nouveau, 139 Artaud, Antonin, xii, 2, 46, 71, 100, 135, 162 Aryan ideal, the, 76 automatism, 10, 123 anagram, 98 art of the mentally ill, 157 Breton, Andr´e, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 156, 182 criticism, 129, 130, 131 decalcomania, 132

definition of, 5, 121, 150 femininity, 82 free association, 121 madness, 115 mediums, 45, 122, 124, 125, 128, 131, 132 mental illness as metaphor, 127, 178 mysticism, 133 occult, the, 122, 123, 128 psychological automatism, 123 schizoghraphie, 115 thought-transference, 124 unconscious, 83 Bachelard, Gaston, 51 Balakian, Anna, 125, 126 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 113, 114 Bataille, George, 75, 130 Baudelaire, Charles, 75 Beardsley, Aubrey, 139, 140 Beauvoir, Simone de, 83, 86 Bellini, Vincenzo, 109, 113

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Bellmer, Hans, 1, 58, 61, 62, 63, 66, 72, 74, 76 alcoholism, 2 anagrams, 90, 91, 94, 98, 99, 101, 146, 172 The Doll, 59, 61, 64, 78, 80, 91, 96, 163 eroticism, 67, 75, 89 meeting with Z¨urn, 26, 90, 113, 146 Nazism, 209 (3) n.35, 65, 68, 69, portraits, 70, 71, 73 sadomasochism, 65, 177 Unica Litog´ee, 1, 61, 62, 63, 65, 66, 68, 70, 76, 77 use of media, 73, 88, 129, 134 Belton, Robert, 82 Benjamin, Jessica, 7, 8, 64, 65, 78 Benoˆıt, Jean, 56 Berlin (postwar), 18, 23 Berlin Blockade, 32 Berlin Wall, 178 Cold War, 33 Democratic Women’s Federation of Germany, 19 Deutschmark, 32 Federal Republic of Germany, 20 fragmentation, 22, 69, 75, 77, 80, 85, 87, 88, 105, 107, 119, 137, 166 Fluchtburg Familie, 18 German Women’s Labour Service, 17 Germanism, 180 G¨otterd¨ammerung, 19 Holocaust, 68, 153 National Socialism, 65 National Socialist German Workers Party, 16

Nazi Germany, 69, 77 Ostmark (East German Mark, the), 32 Third Reich, the, 19, 45, 82 women in GDR, the, 21, 166 Binet, Catherine, 81, 97 154, see also Rabain, Catherine Blin, Roger, 112, 216 (4) n.62 Bonnet, Jean, 47 Bousquet, Jo¨e, 91, 94 Boxer, Adam, 7, 42, 136 Brauner, Victor, 51, 52, 71 Breton, Andr´e, 28, 47, 51, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 104, 122, 126 Breton, Aube, 56, 206 (2) n.56, see also Elleou¨et, Aube Cabaret Voltaire, 26 Camaro, Alexander, 27, 29, 30, 31, 114, 146 Camus, Albert, 24, 96 Cardinal, Roger, 153 Carrington, Leonora, 63, 108 Caws, Mary Ann, 43, 177 Chadwick, Whitney, 55 Chaissac, Gaston, 48 Char, Ren´e, 128 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 115, 183 Ch´enieux-Gendron, Jacqueline, 103, 127, 128 Chevrier, Alain, 139, 153 Chirico, Giorgio de, 29 Cixous, H´el`ene, 22, 80, 82, 83 Cl´erambault, Ga¨etan Gatian de, 115, 117 Cooper, James Fenimore, 38 Cordier, Daniel, 54, 55 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 153

Elleou¨et, Aube, 56, 206 (2) n.56, see also Breton, Aube ´ Eluard, Paul, 28, 104, 127, 128 Entarte Kunst, 45, see also Degenerate Art Ernst, Max, 45, 53, 124, 132, 147, 149, 160, 222 (5) n.102 EROS, 54, 55, 56, 57, 60, 61, 70 erotomania, 108, 111, 115, 116, 117, 118 Faucheux, Pierre, 54 Femina, 28 feminist movement, the, 20 abortion, 21, 22, 23, 82, 165, 166 Ferdi`ere, Gaston, 2, 75, 103, 118, 216 (4) n.76 Filipacchi, Daniel-Amanda, 38, 42 Flournoy, Th´eodore, 123, 124, 125, 156 Fonfreide, Marcelle, 48, 92, 171

Foster, Hal, 65, 77 Foucault, Michel, 83 Frankenstein, Wolfgang, 24, 33 French feminism, 83 Freud, Sigmund domination, system of, 66 dream interpretation, 168, 184 ego, 163 femininity, 64, 66, 78 fetishism, 64 mystic writing pad, 142, 143 parole-plein, 123, 156 psychoanalysis, 99, 100, 126, 183 unconcious, 55, 121

INDEX

Dal`evge, Jean, 47 Dali, Salvador, 132, 139, 148, 151 Degenerate Art, 45, see also Entarte Kunst Derrida, Jacques, 83, 86, 143 Desnos, Robert, 33, 71, 131 Die Badewanne, 1, 26, 27, 28, 29, 33, 146 Po`eme-illustr´e, 29 Suicide, 23, 24, 158, 160, 165 Die Puppe, 64, 77, see also Bellmer, Hans: The Doll Dubuffet, Jean, 44, 45, 160, 161 Duchamp, Marcel, 47, 54, 62, 63, 71 Dumas, Alexandre, 97

Galerie Gerd Rosen, 28 Gauthier, Xavi`ere, 22 G´erard, Francis, 127 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 24, 35, 97, 174 Goldberg, Theo, 28 Gracq, Julien, 93 Grimm, Brothers, 97 Hartley, David, 122 Hass-Juon, Renate, 35 Heerdt, Helene Pauline, 16 Henry, Ruth, 79, 158 Hitler, Adolf, 16, 19, 20, 45 Hoet, Jan, 2, 3, 7, 46 Holm, Orla, 16, see also Strohal, Dorrit Hopp´e, Emil Otto, 39 Hubert, Ren´ee Riese, 36, 80 H¨ubner, Johannes, 26, 27 Hugenberg, Alfred, 16 Hugnet, Georges, 132 Hugo, Victor, 125 hysteria, 108, 115, 124, 183

255

¨ UNICA ZURN

Irigaray, Luce, 10, 86 fragmentation, 86, 88 multiplicity, 85 plurality, 85 productive-mimesis, 86, 211 (3) n.73 subjectivity, 84 Z¨urn, 48, 81, 84, 87, 88, 89, 159 Janet, Pierre, 122, 123, 124, 126, 127 Jarry, Alfred Jorris, Pierre, 94, 95 Kafka, Franz, 97 Kennedy, John F., 59 Klee, Paul, 43 Kl¨unner, Joachim, 27 Kl¨unner, Lothar, 27 Kunstm¨archen, 97, 168, 226 (6) n.41 Laabs, Hans, 27 Lacan, Jacques, 58, 99, 115, 179, 183 Aimee, 109, 114, 115, 116, 118, 156, see also Pentaine, Marguerite algorithm, 105 mirror stage, 118 Papin Sisters, the, 216 (4) n.74, see also Papin, Christine and L´ea seminars, 100 symbolic, 84 unconscious, 100 Lam, Wilfredo, 47, 51 Laupenm¨uhlen, Erich, 13, 15, 38 Leiris, Michel, 80, 160 Leitz Cameras, 13, 196 (1) n.1 Leveque, Jean-Jacques, 47, 48

256

L´evi-Strauss, Claude, 99 linguistics, 10, 99, 100 Lionnais, Franc¸ois Le, 96 Lomas, David, 36 Lombroso, Cesare, 45 Luschan, Felix von, 15 Lyotard, Jean-Franc¸ois, 69 Mahon, Alyce, 65, 68, 69, 70 Malraux, Andre, 96 Mandigues, Andr´e Pierye de, 51, 160 Mansour, Joyce, 56 masochism, 177 Masson, Andr´e, 82, 149 Matta (Roberto Matta Echaureen), 133 Meirowsky, Katja, 27 Melville, Herman, 16, 140, 142, 170 Michaux, Henri, 112, 124, 135, 157 Miller, Henri, 71 Mir´o, Joan, 151 Mitrani, Nora, 63, 90, 91 Molinier, Pierre, 63 Monsour, Joyce, 51 Morise, Max, 129 Morrien, Rita, 79 Mortens, Angela, 30, 114 multiplicity, 9, 10, 22, 63, 75, 84, 85, 88, 89, 137, 143, 166, 167 Myers, Frederic William Henry, 123, 124 Nadja, 125 Naville, Pierre, 130 Nerval, G´erard de, 92 New Left, the, 20 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 36

Paalen, Wolfgang, 133 Papin, Christine and L´ea, 216 (4) n.74 Parent, Mimi, 55 Pentaine, Marguerite, 114, 116, 118 Perec, Georges, 32, 96, 97 P´eret, Benjamin, 55 Perrault, Charles, 34 Pr´evert, Jacques, 113 Prinzhorn, Hans, 45, 148 psychoanalysis, xii, 5, 10, 82, 85, 86, 99, 100, 101, 121, 128, 131, 156, 183, see also Freud, Sigmund and Lacan, Jacques psychogenic process, 2, 3, 5, 123 Queneau, Raymond, 96, 97 Rabain, Catherine, 154 Rabain, Jean-Franc¸ois, 52, 58, 81, 100, 118, 154, 157 Rahon, Alice, 133 rape, 23, 176, 177 Ray, Man, 71 RIAS (Radio-Berlin), 30 Ribas, Jo˜ao, 43 Ribot, Th´edore, 122 Rimbaud, Arthur, 171 Rorschach test, 132 Rosie, Paul, 24, 33 Rubens, Peter Paul, 177 Rupprecht, Caroline, 68, 162, 163

Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 64, 75 Sade, Marquis de, 75 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 24, 86, 96 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 99, 150 schizophrenia, 19, 22, 138, 152, 164, 181 Schmidt-Pauli, Edgar, 39 Schnell, Robert Wolfgang, 26, 29, 52, 205 (2) n.38 Schnell, Ursula (Ulla), 26, 27, 29 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 169 Schroder-Sonnenstern, Friedrich, 57, 58, 59, 157 Schumann, Robert, 147 Smith, H´el`ene, 124, 156 Soupault, Pierre, 126, 127 Springer, Rudolf, 50, 97 Strindberg, Johan August, 174, 175 Suleiman, Susan Rubin, 68, 107 Surrealism automatism, 104, 123, 124 Berlin, 26, 28 internationalisation, 132 interwar years, 132 marvellous, 25, 33, 35, 36 Paris, 28 period of sleeps, 126 portraiture, 70, 71 psychoanalysis, 156 pure psychic automatism, 121 Surr´ealisme, mˆeme, 62, 63 Strohal, Dorrit, 16

INDEX

Oelze, Richard, 59 Oppenhein, Meret, 55, 56, 57, 176 Oulipo, 32, 96, 97, 98 Outsider Art, 44, 46, see also Art Brut

Tanguy, Yves, 149 Tanning, Dorothea, 47 ` Toyen (Marie Eerm´ ınov´a), 63 Universum Film Agency (UFA), 1, 16, 17, 174

257

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Varo, Remedios, 132 Verne, Jules, 16, 177 Wartegg, Ehrig, 17 Wartegg Zeichen test, 17, 18, 35 Weigel, Sigrid, 79 Woolf, Virginia, 71, 108 World War II, 1 Zorn, John, 42 Z¨urn, Ralph, 13, 15, 16 Z¨urn, Unica, 5, 35, 37, 38, 60, 106, 110, 120, 138, 144, 152, 169 ageing, 14, 24, 55, 73 anagram, 95, 96, 107 artistic identity, 46, 52, 59, 60, 61 automatism, 105, 145, 146 biography, 78 critical reception, 47, 48, 49, 50, 80, 159

258

‘Femme de Bellmer’, 79, 80, 160 fragmentation, 88, 170, 171, 179, 180 Jasmine Man, the, 112 Lacan, 100, 101, 118 magic, 24, 125, 169, 174 mental illness, account of, 155, 175, 181 miracle, 24, 25 multiplicity, 88 notebooks, 133, 134, 135, 142 portrait, 71 pseudonym, 30, 114, see also Mortens, Angela psychobiography, 81 radio-tales, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35 role-playing, 14, 39, 95, 184 suicide, xii, 6, 47 White Man, the, 111, 112, 113, 114, 116, 153, 157