Unica Zürn, “without belly” and ink blood – Liberation

We used to read Unica Zürn like Georges Bataille or Michel Leiris, she seemed to be Nadja in real life, snatched by Eros and Thanatos from André Breton’s book. Fetish of a time when we loved crazy and self-destructive muses: “The Man or Woman who is sketched by him, or photographed by his pencil, shares with Bellmer the abomination of himself.” It is not certain that anyone has read Unica Zürn since the year 2000. It belongs to the very end of a macho and exalted surrealism: what to do with it now?

Before, it was: Unica Zürn, companion of the photographer and designer Hans Bellmer, who committed suicide in 1970. Two stories translated from German by Ruth Henry and Robert Valençay appeared the following year, the Jasmine Man (Gallimard) and Dark Spring (Belfond). Two third-person autofiction. In the Jasmine Mancompleted in 1966, is the present, the friendship with Henri Michaux and above all the experience of madness: the book is subtitled in French “Impressions of a mental patient”. Where we see that the forms of hallucination are also cultural – in this case borrowed from psychoanalysis and the exquisite corpse. For Dark Springwritten in 1967, is childhood without innocence: a little girl obsessed with her father’s sex and raped by her brother defends herself.

This form of suicide is recurrent in the work of Zürn: this one will join the myth to the word by throwing herself from Hans Bellmer’s apartment.…

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