The traumatic surreal

Germanophone women artists and Surrealism after the Second World War

Patricia Allmer

• Editorial: Manchester University Press
• Año: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526149787
• Categoría: Arte
• Categoría: Historia del arte contemporáneo

The traumatic surreal is the first major study to examine the ground-breaking role played by Germanophone women artists working in surrealist traditions in responding to the traumatic events and legacies of the Second World War. Analysing works in a variety of media by leading artists and writers, the book redefines the post-war trajectories of surrealism and recalibrates critical understandings of the movement's relations to historical trauma. Chapters address artworks, writings and compositions by the Swiss Meret Oppenheim, the German Unica Zürn, the Austrian Birgit Jürgenssen, the Luxembourg-Austrian Bady Minck and the Austrian Olga Neuwirth and her collaboration with fellow Austrian Nobel-prize winning novelist Elfriede Jelinek. Locating each artist in their historical context, the book traces the development of the traumatic surreal through the wartime and post-war period.

1 Meret Oppenheim’s hauntologies

Even the Matterhorn fades from the mind, after many years. The photographs we took there, traces of the event, survive. (Susan Rubin Suleiman)¹

Tagelang nachher zeigte sein Wesen noch die Spuren der empfundenen Erschütterung … (For days he bore the signs of shock …) (Jakob Wassermann)²

For a long time (the narrative goes), around 18 years from 1936–7 to 1954, the Swiss surrealist artist Meret Oppenheim (1913–85) endured a catastrophic psychological blockage that prevented her from working. This period haunts subsequent critical engagement with her work, just as it haunted Oppenheim’s memory. Decades later, in her 1984 interview with Robert J. Belton, she would bristle at questions about this period of ‘crisis’: ‘Let’s not talk about this any longer. Remember what I said about friendship’.³ A constellation of significant events surrounds the historical origin of this period of artistic blockage. In 1936, Oppenheim held her first solo exhibition, at the Galerie Marguerite Schulthess in Basel (the city to which she would soon relocate to escape the war). In the same year, at the Surrealist objects show at the Charles Ratton gallery in Paris, her Breakfast in Fur – the work to which her entire career has frequently been metonymically reduced by critical convention – was exhibited (writes Belinda Grace Gardner) ‘almost en passant – in the lower shelf of a vitrine, surrounded by non-European objects’.⁴ The popular and endlessly repeated narrative about the creation of this object – that it was Picasso’s idea to cover things in fur, that Breton gave the object its title – performs the now familiar function of such tales, ‘celebrating’ the remarkable creativity of the young woman artist by carefully distancing her actual agency from the production of her work, which is implicitly re-credited to the male artists associated with her. Consequently, the work (as Gardner notes) ‘eclipses its author and blots her out’,⁵ to the extent that Robert Belton could write (in 1991): ‘In fact, we are justified in asking whether the work is truly Oppenheim’s at all’ because ‘she implied to me that it was not her “creation” apart from the actual manufacture’.⁶

Such erasure began early with Oppenheim, as evident from the fact that one American critic of the December 1936 MoMA Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism show, which exhibited this work (recently purchased by Alfred H. Barr) alongside around 700 others, assumed she was a man: ‘If you would go insane quite pleasantly and painlessly, let me recommend that you bag off one of the attendants a lump of 1921 sugar out of Mr Duchamp’s Sneeze-Trap, drop it into Mr Oppenheim’s Fur Cup, stir well, and then sit down to disintegrate at the hearth of Mr Terry’s “Fireplace with Waterfall”.’⁷ The uncanny, distorting, centrifugal force of Le Déjeuner en fourrure (its posthumous power described astutely by Gardner as ‘more zombie than werewolf’)⁸ – its seeming ability to suck in the critical gaze, seductive and distracting – adds a further complexity to the relations between the artist’s memory, the historical record, and the expression or representation of historical events in artworks, which will be an indirect subject of, and will thus haunt, some of the discussion below.

While Oppenheim was experiencing the international ‘succès de scandale’⁹ generated by her most famous work, historical events elsewhere in Europe were moving fast. On 3 March 1936, the Nazis banned Jewish doctors, including Oppenheim’s father, Erich, then working in Steinen, from practising in Germany (where Meret Oppenheim had been born). Erich Oppenheim relocated to the family house at Klingenthal 13 in Basel, but was also barred from practising medicine in Switzerland, meaning the family could no longer finance Oppenheim’s artistic life in Paris. In 1937, while many works by her friends were being exhibited across Europe in the Entartete Kunst exhibition, Oppenheim joined her family in Switzerland, part of the flood of surrealist artists leaving the increasingly threatening situation elsewhere in Europe. On 5 October 1938 Germany implemented (at the request of the Swiss authorities) a policy of marking all Jewish passports with a large letter J to restrict Jews from immigrating to Switzerland, a punitive law adding to the already mandatory requirement (since August 1938) for all German Jews with names of ‘non-Jewish origin’ to adopt the forenames Israel or Sara, making their identification by Swiss passport officers simple. The political climate for Jews in Switzerland in the late 1930s, while nowhere near the ever-escalating and violent oppression of Nazi Germany, was nevertheless clearly unpleasant. In her important essay on wartime and post-war Swiss exceptionalism, Regula Ludi highlights the ‘intensive economic, financial, and political entanglement between Switzerland and Nazi Germany’ and notes that ‘Swiss authorities had excluded Jewish children from popular relief programmes after the Nazis had started rounding up Jews in occupied territories’.¹⁰

In this chapter I want to focus attention on the early years of Oppenheim’s period in Switzerland during the war. My intention is to reconsider her shifting aesthetic allegiances (particularly to the group of Swiss artists who formed Gruppe 33) and artistic output during this period, taking as a guiding metaphor Oppenheim’s own image of the artist as seismograph discussed in the Introduction – the artist as responding to, and recording traces of, the Erschütterung or ‘shuddering’ effects of the historical events amid which she finds herself living, and reading exemplary works as expressive of a complex and insistent aesthetic response to historically traumatic experiences and events. This will involve rethinking key works in Oppenheim’s output during a period conventionally regarded by criticism as mainly unproductive, and reassessing what these works suggest about her relations to Surrealism and to other avant-garde groups in Switzerland during the war, as well as what they may reveal of the artist’s own concerns, conscious or otherwise, and her relations to historical events. Just as the critical narrative will need redirecting, we will also need to reconsider some of the apparent swerves and evasions of Oppenheim’s own subsequent autobiographical recollections, which, I will argue, work hard to construct a specific narrative, and thus an identity, that are – like some of the works she made during her ‘crisis’ – haunted by another history and a different identity, suggesting the complexity of memory and recollection in relation to traumatic and palimpsestically dense histories.

Discussing Holocaust memories, Michael Rothberg argues:

In ‘making the past present’, recollections and representations of personal or political history inevitably mix multiple moments in time and multiple sites of remembrance; making the past present opens the doors of memory to intersecting pasts and undefined futures. Memory is thus structurally multidirectional, but each articulation of the past processes that multidirectionality differently. In other words, as soon as memory is articulated publicly, questions of representation, ethics, and politics arise.¹¹

Such questions permeate Oppenheim’s oeuvre, and become particularly prominent during the period of her ‘crisis’. As noted in the Introduction, earlier paintings like Dann leben wir eben später (1933) suggest a distorted temporality that critics have tended to read psychologically and in terms partly determined by Oppenheim’s own well-known interest in Jungian theory (figure 1.1). Matthias Frehner, for example, connects this painting in general terms to Oppenheim’s characteristic symbolism and out into a wider surrealist iconography, arguing that:

a number of emblems that are part of the basic inventory in Oppenheim’s dreams and work […] are also part of the collective symbolism of Surrealism; the tower, the spiral or serpentine lines, the temple, water, plants and flowers. The round temple that crowns a long staircase in 1933 in the gouache Dann leben wir eben später is just as much an anticipation of the motif as the vortex condensed into a spiral in the picture Sterben in der Nacht (Dying at Night) of 1953.¹²

Such criticism concentrates on recurrent symbolism and repetition but ignores a crucial specific element of Dann leben wir eben später – the strange double figure descending the steps on thin, pointed legs in the foreground, a composite, Manichean image of a dark, seemingly fur-coated human apparently carrying a spectral, white figure which seems to float, arms outstretched as if crucified and wavering in a visible shiver or quaking. This ghostly hybrid form – evoking a figure burdened with its own ghostly cross, which is a chromatically inverted version of the figure itself – is both highly schematised (the faces are mere sketches of lines and dots, the legs and feet barely realised) and powerfully uncanny, conveying a vague sense of violence and threat. Connotative of burden and balance, but seemingly on the verge of toppling, it destabilises the painting’s entire formal balance, its constitutive elements confined to the left, while the right-hand half of the image depicts a vista of steps and clouded sky. Coupled with the strange, dislocated temporality indicated by the picture’s title, with its decisive emphasis (‘Well … then’) on deferral (‘we’ll live’) into an indeterminate future (‘later’), the haunting/haunted figure-pair assumes the status of a double-revenant – a ghost of a life deferred, perhaps, a spectre of a future self. Barbara Zürcher offers an oddly literal, autobiographically predictive reading of the title’s distorted temporality – with this work, she argues, Oppenheim ‘intuitively visualises the coming melancholia and later artistic crisis’.¹³ Frehner, furthermore, suggests that this painting is connected to Sterben in der Nacht (1953), but a closer thematic link might be seen in works like the charcoal drawing Gespenst (Ghost) of 1954 and the ensuing line of w...