The automatic drawings of Unica Zurn. German (1916-1970).

Automatic drawing originated with the Surrealists as a way of losing all rational control and thought from their art. The movement of the pen, pencil or paint was thought to be a reflection of the psyche. It was a means of expressing the sub-conscious. Think of it as being spiritual in nature.

"Automatic drawing was pioneered by André Masson. Artists who practiced automatic drawing include Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí, Jean Arp and André Breton. The technique was transferred to painting (as seen in Miró's paintings which often started out as automatic drawings), and has been adapted to other media; there have even been automatic drawings in computer graphics. Pablo Picasso was also thought to have expressed a type of automatic drawing in his later work, and particularly in his etchings and lithographic suites of the 1960s". (Wiki)

"Unica Zurn was born in Berlin-Grunewald as Nora Berta Unica Ruth, her childhood was tainted by her family that suffered from a history of mental health issues. Her father, Ralph Zurn, and her mother, Helene Pauline Heerdt, divorced in 1930. The only single male figure who remained part of her life was her brother who she claimed used to inflict acts of sexual violence upon her as a young girl. In 1942 she married a wealthy man named Erich Laupenmuhlen. In 1943 she had her first child, Katrin, and in 1945 she had her second child, Christian^, In 1953, she and Erich divorced, forcing her to lose custody of her children. She could not afford a lawyer and provide the means to take care of them. In 1953 she met surrealist painter Hans Bellmer in Berlin at an exhibition at the Galerie Springer. She moved with him to Paris, becoming his partner and model. The relationship lead to some physical complications for Zürn. She suffered from a surgical procedure gone wrong for a genital tear from childbirth and relations with Bellmer. Additionally, she had to endure multiple back-alley abortions during the affair".

"Together with Hans Bellmer, Unica Zürn frequented surrealist circles and befriended people such as André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Henri Michaux, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst. Zürn made her way into the Surrealist movement amongst other successful women as Leonora Carrington, Dorthea Tanning, Kay Sage, IthellColquhoun, Toyen, Leonor Fini and Valentine Hugo.  Bellmer incorporated Unica into his piece titled, “Unica Tied Up,” which was exhibited in his 1959 exhibit “Doll”. That same year, Zürn was involved in an exhibition at the Galerie Cordey in Paris that included many other surrealist artists".



"In 1960 she experienced her first hallucinatory crisis. From this point on she suffered from long periods of depression and spent most of her time in and out of psychiatric hospitals. After two suicide attempts, she returned home in a wheelchair and destroyed most of her drawings and writings. The years 1960-1962 were spent in Jacques Lacan’s Psychiatric clinic of St. Anne. It wasn't until recently that researchers claimed she most likely suffered from schizophrenia. One of her doctors was Gaston Ferdière, a friend of the surrealists, who was also psychiatrist to Antonin Artaud. Regardless of her battle with mental illness she continued to draw, write, and formulate anagrams. Her illness inspired much of her writing, above all Der Mann im Jasmin, written between 1963 and 1965.
She committed suicide in Paris, France in 1970, at the age of 54, by leaping from the window of the apartment she shared with Bellmer". (Wiki)

The website History of Mental Health begins their study thusly:

October 19, 2014

By Henk van Setten

Tormented Artist 

"October 19, 1970 – This day German-French artist, writer and poet Unica Zürn (54) killed herself by jumping from her 6th-story apartment at 4 Rue de la Plaine in Paris. Her death looked like taken from the story in her own book Dunkler Frühling (“Dark Spring”) that had been published the year before.

In 1949 (when she was 33) Zürn had separated from her first husband and lost the custody of her children. She began to move in German artistic circles and in 1953 she met surrealist artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975). She went to live with him in Paris.

Although sometimes they had difficulties and tried to separate, in fact they remained a couple until shortly before Unica’s death.

Bellmer’s work had strong sexual elements with explicit sadist and fetishist elements. He used Unica as a model; some think she must have been masochist to lend herself to it. There certainly were masochist fantasies in Unica’s own writings.

Notorious is a series of photos Bellmer took in 1958 of her nude body bound with thin, flesh distorting string. These photo’s leave a shocking impression of degrading the nude female body (Unica’s head is not shown) in a deeply humiliating way. I find them disturbing enough to not show them here. If you insist on seeing some, Google Image Search will help you out.

On the other hand, Bellmer also kept stimulating Unica to write and to make drawings. Expositions of Unica’s surrealist doodle-drawings soon became a success.

Some think that the sadomasochistic element in the personal and artistic relationship of Hans Bellmer and Unica Zürn may have contributed to her mental disintegration. I don’t think we can be entirely sure about that.

Anyway, Zürn became depressed in 1959 after Bellmer persuaded her to have an abortion. It was the first of several times they separated for a while. Soon after, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Her ensuing journey reads like a slow slide down into hell.

 ● October 1959-February 1960: stay in the Karl Bonhoeffer Nervenklinik, a psychiatric clinic in Berlin-Wittenau;
● September 1960-Augustus 1962: stay in the Sainte Anne psychiatric clinic in Paris;
● July 1964-November 1964: stay in the Lafond asylum in La Rochelle; she also became a patient of the famous Paris psychiatrist Gaston Ferdière (1907-1990);
● June 1966-September 1966: first stay in the Maison Blanche psychiatric hospital in Neuilly-sur-Marne;
● December 1969-January 1970: second stay in the Maison Blanche;
● April 1970-July 1970: third stay in the Maison Blanche;
● July 1970-October 1970: stay in a beautiful old country house that had been converted into a psychiatric clinic: the La Chesnaie clinic in Chailles.

In this last place Zürn’s condition seemed to improve. But when in October she got permission to go home for a few days, it gave her the opportunity to kill herself.

Amazingly, during all these years she kept writing and making drawings. She really remained very productive until the last.

In the interval between 1964-1966 (when she was largely out of clinics) she began writing The Man of Jasmine: Impressions from a Mental Illness.

This would become a lucid and touching description of her psychotic hallucinations, depressions and anxiety attacks – the “Man of Jasmine” was derived from a fantasy figure from her childhood dreams. The book would be published in 1977, seven years after her death. (text and photos courtesy History of Mental Illness)

Thanks also to 50watts.com
Galleryhip.com and drawingcenter.org