Unica Zurn

Unica Zurn

Unica Zurn is one of those artists often left out of the story of modern art, because they are thought to be of secondary significance or and this is often the case, left out because they were women, and the people who were controlling the construction of the canon were men.

Unica Zurn and Hans Bellmer 

Zurn was at one point Hans Bellmer's partner and she encouraged him in his erotic sado-masochistic ventures, allowing herself to be bound and photographed in poses very like those taken up by his dolls. 

Image of Unica Zurn tied up by Hans Bellmer 

These images of Bellmer's would be unthinkable without Zurn's participation and they sit very awkwardly in the history of Surrealism, because they are very real and in their reality they make us uncomfortable. In some ways they prefigure the work of Jenny Saville. In the mid 1990s she collaborated with photographer Glen Luchford to produce a series of photographs in which he photographed her from below lying on a sheet of clear Perspex. Her body was pushed, stretched and squashed, Saville transforming herself into a sculptural form that was constantly being moulded and re-made.

Jenny Saville: Closed Contact, 1995-6,

However Saville is in control of the presentation of her images and Zurn was often unacknowledged when Bellmer's photographs were exhibited, her name gradually disappearing from view even as Bellmer's own was being etched into the canon of modernism. 

However Zurn was also an artist in her own right and she had a convoluted relationship not just with Bellmer but with Henri Michaux with who she experimented with hallucinogenics as well as having an intense affair. She was it seemed someone who was vital to both Bellmer and Michaux's ability to function, her intensity and open nature, gradually though slipping into mental illness, especially after her drug taking period when she was first having a relationship with Michaux. In an essay he wrote in 1957 Bellmer had this to say about his relationship with Zurn. 'A man in love with a woman and himself... is in a peculiar hermaphroditic interconnection between the male and female principles in which the female structure predominates. What is always vital is that the image of a woman must have been 'lived' (experienced) by the man in his own body before it can be 'seen' by the man'. Bellmer was in effect lost in her image, an image Zurn was very aware of as being something she had been playing with and constructing for several years; her explorations into repressed desires, nightmares and the subconscious, emerging in both literary form, such as in her novel, 'The man of Jasmin and other texts: impressions from a mental illness' as well as in her visual depictions of other worldly creatures. 

Untitled 1959

Unica Zurn

We seem to have come a long way since the 1950s, the struggle to maintain a separate identity as a creative within a male dominated society must have been not just tough, but destabilising as she was used as a 'muse' and in effect a 'stage prop' for an artist who's career at the time was failing. There is something about the way her drawings of heads inside heads swirl around themselves as if swimming in their own space, that still resonate as images of a human being searching for a connection with the world around her; perhaps intuitively she was more in touch with the world than she or the male artists that surrounded her ever knew. 

I have been looking at her work as an indicator of how to tap into an more intuitive way of visualising the body and in particular I have decided that her drawing 'Untitled 1959' is a possible way for me to visualise Markov blankets, more on which I shall dwell on in a future post. 

See also:

The continuing influence of Surrealism

Pop, Expressionist Surrealism

A line of disjuncture