Unica zurn biography of christopher
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Her father’s absenteeism, her mother’s emotional coldness, and her brother’s incestuous violence would cast long, haunting shadows on her psyche and impact her eventual turn to automatic drawing.
During the 1930s, Zürn worked as a steno-typist and dramaturge for Universum-Film-AG (UFA), a film corporation appropriated by the Nazis for WWII propaganda films.
This man becomes her image of love, she wrote years later, in her semi-autobiographical novel The Man of Jasmine (1977). Zürn was born in Berlin in 1916. She leapt from the window of the sixth floor apartment in Paris that she shared with Hans Bellmer, her companion of 16 years. She also allowed Bellmer to tie her naked body with string and photograph her trussed torso.
The photos featured an almost life size doll Bellmer had made of a prepubescent girl, her body often manipulated into anatomically impossible positions.
Throughout her life, Zürn was governed by (or allowed herself to be governed by) such omens, signs and visions.
n Bellmer returned to Paris the following year, Zürn went with him. She created exquisite, entrancing drawings that speak to us still. Courtesy of Germann Auctions
Her writing career Zürn began in the 1940s. It was there in the article I came across, flicking through a listings magazine when I was living in West Berlin in 1986.
Zürn herself once said, “I always need a companion to tell me what to do … They just have to say, ‘Now you do this, now you do that.’”
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Some sentences began in French and ended in German – a confusion of language and persona that I could readily relate to.In those pre-Internet days it was difficult to find much information about Zürn.
In the Crécy Notebook (1970), she characterised their relationship as comrades in misery.
But rather than focus on her self-willed death, or the co-dependent dynamics of her relationship with Bellmer, I believe it is ultimately Zürn’s searingly honest drawings and writings that define her as a dangerous woman.
Unraveling Unica Zürn
Born in Berlin in 1916 to an upper-middle-class family, Unica Zürn’s early experiences were tinged by personal tragedy and emotional turmoil.
Her suicide was one of the first things I knew about Unica Zürn, and I admit it was one of the factors that piqued my interest in her. The move to Paris was an important turning point in Zürn’s creative life. She then scraped a living writing short stories, until in 1953 she met Hans Bellmer, at an exhibition of his drawings in a gallery in Berlin.
Bellmer was 14 years older than Zürn and already an established artist, perhaps best known for a series of hand-tinted erotic photographs he had taken in the 1930s.
Between writing and drawing with Indian ink, her body of work, markedly influenced by the Surrealist aesthetic and mental illness (the schizophrenia she suffered from until she threw herself out of a window, which was masterfully “illustrated” in L’Homme-Jasmin, 1971) shows a distinct liking for the intermedial praxis where verbal language is intertwined with pictorial language.
She married in 1942, and when the marriage ended in divorce seven years later, she lost custody of her two children. She reminded me of Sylvia Plath, a similar distance in her gaze which could be mistaken for haughtiness.