Fantasies Embodied
For an artist, the quest to find the ideal woman is conflated with the capacity to create her — and that depends on one’s true talent. Botticelli, Modigliani, any painter of portraits is defining his idea of beauty. Curiously, some artists chose wives they believe resemble the women in their art work. Is it a sixth sense or just rationale?
It was love at first sight for Hans Bellmer when he met Unica Zurn. He said she resembled the perverse dolls he sculpted and painted. Some critics mistake his work as violent toward women, but his violence is directed at the Aryan ideal of women (He began his doll series in Berlin in 1933, becoming more prolific after moving to Paris in 1938, while befriending the Surrealists.)
If Zurn did not really resemble the dolls in physical likeness, she resembled their brokeness, figuratively. “One can see me as the type of man with antennae that can pick up a potential woman-victim … It remains to be seen if I immediately, from the first time we met, “sensed” that Unica was a victim. If Unica seriously asked herself this question, which she may have done, she would, I think, reply YES!” Hans Bellmer wrote a letter to his psychiatrist friend in 1964.
Artnet describes her life as reading “a bit like a Freudian case study.” Zurn, whose artistic talent matches Bellmer’s, and was also a gifted fiction writer, was plagued with deep depression and schizophrenia. She threw herself out to window to her death in 1970, (Bellmer died of old age shortly after.) It looks like I’m not the only one who thought the underrated film Love Object was a tribute to them.
In a recent profile in the New Yorker, (accompanied by this amazing portrait by Elinor Carucci,) John Currin says he was encouraged by a friend to check out a performance, because one of the artists looked like the girls he was obsessively painting. Soon they were married. But Rachel Feinstein Currin, like Zurn, is no blank canvas one might project any fantasy upon. What likely happened is her vitality brought Currin’s images to life.
Michael Guzzaniga, author of “The Mind’s Past” likes to play a somewhat cruel party trick. He will tell someone he’s thinking of four numbers that are in a pattern. After answering “no” to a several suggestions, he will then answer “yes,” to four in a row at random. After the experiment, he asks the participant what was his method for finding the answer. Rationale: everyone has one.So once love is discovered, simulacra of it begins to resemble one’s adored.
Even if Unica Zurn were Asian or forty years older, Ballmer would have found traces of her in his dolls. And Currin’s ladies are so exaggerated and parodied that plenty of wide-eyed voluptuous women could be said to resemble them.
So maybe the question is what is compels a person to draw people they’ve never seen.
Radiolab interviewed writer and painter Joe Andoe last spring. At one point in his life he was obsessively painting canvases of seemingly random images: horses, pastures, and the face of a young woman. As he let go to his obsessions a story began to emerge from the series, it was in fact a memory he’d suppressed for thirty years. I’m not going to reveal what happened as the piece is so well edited, and says so much about the interplay of the subconscious and the creative process, it’s a must-listen.
Related links:
- Unica Zurn’s Myspace tribute
- The Semiotics of Schizophrenia: Unica Zurn’s Artistry and Illness, Modern Language Studies, Vol. 30, No. 2
- Heroes: Hans Bellmer, V Magazine
- “The Lives of Muses” by Francine Prose
- “The Mind’s Past” by Michael S. Gazzaniga
- “Jubilee City” by Joe Andoe
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