Gender ambiguity in surrealism

Anne van Lierop | S3553035

MA Thesis: Art History and Curatorial Studies | LKA098M20 Prof. Dr. Ann-Sophie Lehmann | Drs. Linda Nijenhof

Cut Off All My Curls

Gender ambiguity in surrealism

Table of contents

1. Introduction 5

1.1 Structure of the thesis 7

2. Defining gender ambiguity 9

2.1 The 20th century debate on gender 9

3. The surreal society 17

3.1 Gender anxiety after World War I 17

3.2 The mutilated body in surrealist art 22 3.3 (Self)-representation and photography in surrealism 29

4. Presenting the self & Presenting the Other 37

4.1 Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore’s endless masquerade 39 4.2 Claude Cahun’s Heroins: literary work of the 1920’s 45

5. Conclusion 52

Bibliography 56

Appendix 59

This thesis is aimed at researching the concept of gender ambiguity and its

manifestations in the Surrealist movement in France in the 1920’s. Through literary research and discussion of various artworks I will attempt to give an overview of how gender

ambiguity appeared in surrealist art and literature, and why the surrealists were concerned

with gender and gender representation. The state of gender and gender roles in France

between the wars at the start of the 20th century will be discussed, as well as the mutilated

body in surrealist art and self-representation and photography in surrealist art. To support my

arguments I will discuss the work of Claude Cahun, Marcel Moore, Hans Bellmer, Man Ray,

Lee Miller and Marcel Duchamp.

I have written this thesis in order to graduate from the master Art History and Curatorial Studies at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen. At the beginning of the year, I

managed to work my own interest in queer theory and ideas revolving gender and sexuality in my art historical research by writing a paper on curating queer art. Subsequently, I wrote a literature review on the French Surrealist artist Claude Cahun, which was the foundation of my idea for this thesis. During my research on Cahun I discovered that the surrealists’ interest in gender ambiguity extended beyond only Claude Cahun. While reading Amy Lyford’s Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France, it became clear to me that this interest had a deep-rooted and fascinating cause that had not been researched as much as I would have hoped. This, along with my personal ties to the subject, inspired me to devote my thesis to it.

I would like to thank prof. dr. Ann-Sophie Lehmann not only for her guidance on this thesis, but also for the support she has provided over the course of the whole master. My relative lack of experience has at times made me insecure, but I have learned more in the past year than I ever thought was possible, and I am incredibly grateful for the experience. I would also like to thank all of my fellow master students, particularly Neja Kaiser, Iris Rijnsewijn, and Anna Dowling-Clark, for supporting me and helping me out every time I got stuck or lost motivation. It has been wonderful to work in a group of people who are so uplifting and motivating towards each other, and truly want to see each other succeed. Lastly, I would like to thank my partner Herman for his endless patience and support.

Anne van Lierop

Groningen, June 25th 2019

1. Introduction

The main topic for this thesis is the relationship of the surrealists to gender and gender representation, and the manifestations of gender ambiguity in surrealist art. The aims and interests of the surrealists are difficult to grasp as, almost by definition, surrealism is a literary and artistic movement that relies almost entirely on irrationality. In his first manifesto, the surrealist founding father André Breton called for an overthrowing of the ‘reign of logic’ that he believed society to be living under. The surrealists had no interest in anecdotal or observed realism, and favoured the capabilities of the human imagination instead, which Breton thought to be neglected. In the first part of this thesis, I will lay the foundation for my

arguments mainly in a study of French society after World War I. My decision to concentrate in particular on France in my research is because almost all of the artists discussed are either French or can be traced back to France and the state of gender dynamics between the wars, although similar effects can be seen in other parts of Europe, seems to be particularly rigid in French society, which suffered the most casualties in World War I out of any other country in Europe. Additionally, the conception of the surrealist movement is widely regarded to have taken place in France, when André Breton wrote the manifesto. Whether one agrees with this statement or not, it can not be denied that those looking to associate themselves with the surrealists would most likely find them in France, with Paris being the epicentre of surrealism.

With my research into the dynamics of French society after World War I, and the ideology and characteristics of the surrealist movement, I intend to seek a cause or root of the

appearance of gender issues and gender-nonconformity in surrealist art. I will then continue to discuss artworks by surrealist artists who I believe show a tendency towards discussion of gender and gender ambiguity in their works, either through self-representation of by

projecting it onto someone or something else. These artists’ personal experiences or ties to the surrealist movement (although both are often intertwined) brought them on a path that contemporary feminist and queer theorists recognise as being queer in their approach of issues such as gender and sexuality.

When Isabel Hufschmidt was tasked with defining the word ‘queer’ for a symposium about queer curating in Museum Folkwang in Essen, she defined it as ‘a social aesthetics through which we might rethink society’. Many people might agree that the word signifies

Hufschmidt, I. (2018), p. 30.

1

something beyond gay and lesbian or beyond male and female, something that intends to destroy such limitations and blur definitions. As will be discussed in the third chapter of this thesis, the surrealist movement followed an ideology concerned with the destructions of distinctions and rationality, as well as the unifying or breaking down boundaries between seemingly polar opposites. In this respect, there seem to be similarities between queerness and surrealist ideology, and even between surrealist ideas and the original meaning of the word

‘queer’, meaning ‘strange’ or ‘odd’. Being queer is in itself an act of defiance. A queer person rejects the predominant notions of normative gender and sexuality, and exists on a plane of their own. It is not ‘normal’ to be queer. Just like the surrealists sought to destroy anything that is ‘normal’, queer people are able to do so just by existing as themselves.

I would like to stress that this thesis is not intended to be a psychological or sociological analysis of the psyche of the artists discussed. I do not intend to posthumously place any of these artists on the LGBTQ spectrum, nor do I mean to apply words such as ‘queer’ or

‘transgender’, which did not exist in such a context in the early 20th century, to the artists or

their work. Although postmodern queer and feminist theory is certainly helpful in defining

gender and ambiguous gender, and also has been applied to surrealist artists by scholars

before me, my analyses of the artworks are to remain largely art historical. That being said,

the specificity of ‘gender ambiguity’ is not without reason, and neither is my consulting of

queer theory. More and more museums and academic institutions are currently concerned

with the representation of women artists, of artists of colour, and of queer artists, devoting

entire shows and events to these marginalised demographics. However, even among these

marginalised groups as well as the statistical majorities, gender continues to exist on a

restrictive binary. It is naturally not explicitly stated, but I have found that ‘queer art’ is

generally intended to mean ‘homosexual art’. Those who do not fall on either end of the

gender binary are not only omitted, they are unheard of. An understanding of gender and the

experience thereof outside of a binary in an artistic context will benefit not only queer artists,

but all of the marginalised demographics we are currently working to reinstate into the art

historical canon, and possibly even alter our perspectives on the art of the male, white artists

that are so predominant in art history. I have therefore not limited my selection of artists to

discuss in this thesis to only those who come from minority backgrounds. The anxiety and

intense awareness of gender, as I hope to show, is similarly apparent in the work of the male

members of the surrealist movement that have gained the most fame over the years.

1.1 Structure of the thesis

Rather than devote a chapter to each artist, I have divided some of the artists discussed into a number of categories in surrealist art where I have found gender ambiguity to appear.

In chapter two, I discuss a number of issues to lay the foundation of my arguments and analyses in the following chapters. Firstly, I will provide a brief overview of the 20th century debate surrounding gender identity and, specifically, performativity. As the corpus of

literature surrounding this subject is simply too massive to include in this thesis and would distract from the main subject, I have made Judith Butler’s pivotal 1990 book Gender Trouble my starting point, after which I will elaborate on the ideas of a number of authors who have discussed gender and are useful to the purpose of this thesis such as Monique Wittig, Joan Riviere and Havelock Ellis. It is for this reason that I will not include authors like Jacques Lacan or Michel Foucault who, while extremely important to the field, would have my

straying too far from the topic I wish to discuss. At the end of this chapter, I hope to provide a clear definition of gender ambiguity in order to lift some of the fogginess around such a term and provide clarity on what it is exactly that we are looking for in the works of these artists. In chapter three I discuss the historical context of the status of masculinity and femininity in post World War I France, the society in which the surrealists emerged. The society the surrealists lived in was rife with heavily gendered imagery and experience, and the surrealist artists I discuss reflected on this situation in different ways in their work. I will reference Amy Lyford’s book Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Post-World War I

Reconstruction in France (2007) to support my argument, as well as Mary Louise Roberts’

Civilization without sexes: Reconstructing Gender in Postwar France 1917-1922 (1997). Both these books provide a clear picture of the dynamics of gender that the war had affected in France, with the former focusing more specifically on the relation of the surrealist movement to this subject matter. This chapter will also discuss two surrealist tendencies where I have found ambiguous representations of gender tend to manifest, namely the mutilated body and (self) representation through photography. In the context of these topics I will discuss the work of Hans Bellmer in the former category, and Man Ray, Lee Miller and Marcel Duchamp in the latter. Hans Bellmer is mostly known for his photographs of dolls he made himself,

representing young girls or mutations reminiscent of young girls, and these works have often

been discussed in a feminist context. However, Therese Lichtenstein argues in Behind Closed

Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer (2001) that Bellmer had a more deep-rooted fascination with the

figure of the hermaphrodite, as well as a (subconscious) desire to ‘become one’ with a woman.

Man Ray has similarly made a number of photographs, either independently or in collaboration with Lee Miller or Marcel Duchamp, that show a fascination with gender ambiguity that is motivated by the surrealist tendency to blur lines between the real and the imagined, for which the medium of photography lends itself especially well. I will once again refer to Amy Lyford’s Surrealist Masculinities here, as well as David Hopkins’ Dada’s Boys:

Masculinity after Duchamp (2007). Ray’s collaboration with Duchamp’s female alter ego Rrose Sélavy will be discussed, as well as his work with photographer (also his assistant and lover) Lee Miller and his photographs of the drag performer Barbette. In a final chapter, I will be discussing the French writer and photographer Claude Cahun and her partner Marcel

Moore, the main inspiration and case study for this thesis. Having only been rediscovered and

properly included into the art historical canon in the 1980’s by French art historian François

Leperlier, the timing of their rediscovery along with the subject matter of her work has

enticed postmodern feminist and queer scholars to latch onto Cahun and Moore to support

their arguments. Because of this, a large portion of the corpus of literature surrounding

Cahun and Moore’s art is written from a sociological viewpoint, rather than an art historical

one. Jennifer L. Shaw is one of the most productive scholars on Cahun who has published in

English, and I will be referencing her book Exisst Otherwise: The Life and Works of Claude Cahun

(2007), as well as the various essays collected in the catalogue Don’t Kiss Me: The Art of Claude

Cahun & Marcel Moore (2006), published by the Jersey Heritage Trust, who currently owns the

largest part of Cahun and Moore’s collection. At the end of the thesis I hope to have proven

that the consistent recurrence of issues surrounding gender in the work of the surrealists is no

coincidence and that, considering the societal context of their time, they were aware of the

predominance of this topic. As a secondary goal, I hope that the various examples I shall

discuss will allow for new insights on gender, how it is perceived, and the different ways it

might be represented.

2. Defining gender ambiguity

The word ‘gender ambiguity’ is one that most likely raises questions right off the bat.

‘Ambiguity’ in its very nature is a term that denies any type of structure or absolute truth.

When relating this to gender, a phenomenon that is thought of strictly on a binary and often relating to anatomy, providing a definition of such a term can prove to be complicated.

Because of the subject matter in the paragraphs to follow, where I will discuss the prominence of gender issues and traditional gender roles in interwar French society, as well as the known interest of Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore in the subject, who were known to have been directly involved in discussions surrounding gender identity in through their literary and artistic work, I find it necessary to provide a brief overview of the debate on gender identity and the ambiguity thereof in the 20th century, starting around the time the surrealists

emerged and leading to more postmodern ideas. While in the postmodern age there are many authors to have discussed gender, particularly the notion of gender performativity, we can easily find sources that discuss the subject matter that are contemporary to the surrealist movement. At the same time, however, as the work of Judith Butler, specifically the work about gender performativity, proves to be very important to my arguments, many of the authors discussed will be concerned with performativity as well. At the end of this chapter I hope to provide a clear definition of gender ambiguity to aid in my arguments in the following chapters, in order to clearly state what it is we are looking for and discussing in relation to these artists and their works.

2.1 The 20th century debate on gender

As Shari L. Thurer argues in The End of Gender: a psychological autopsy (2005), postmodernism has lead young scholars to deconstruct prevalent thought patterns and systems in academia, such as the overly present white male author in literature in the 70’s, or the patriarchy in the 80’s. Now, Thurer argues, it is time to put gender identity on the

chopping block. Because if postmodernist thought finds its way into every discipline where

rational thought and absolute truth holds sway, why not apply it to one of the most readily accepted certainties of them all; that of the male/female binary? As an example of

Thurer, S. (2005), p. 36.

2

postmodern criticism of the gender binary Thurer discusses several contemporary queer artworks, such as works by Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano and Rona Pondick. She states how these artists tend to lay emphasis on the body:

“Whether by magnifying it, disassembling or reassembling it, shrouding it, or defining it by its absence, artists are using the body (often their own) to expose the toll inflicted by centuries of disastrous ideologies. popular targets are the binaries, the either/or system we use to classify and rank a body’s characteristics — light skin/dark skin, normal/freak, beautiful/ugly, svelte/fat, smooth/wrinkled, contained/leaky, external/

internal, and, especially, male/female, straight/gay.”

Because of how we understand gender a discussion of the body as part of a discussion of gender identity is unavoidable. We might understand ambiguous gender to be the classical figure of the transvestite, a concept that has gotten quite dated over the years. However, as we will see, many artists do not merely approach gender from a strictly physical perspective.

Naturally, the postmodernists are not the first ones to investigate and question gender through a critical lens. The debate surrounding gender identity and what it takes to have or, perhaps, to be a gender has spanned decades, but it was not until more recent years that the binary way of thinking gender has undergone questioning. Younger fields of research such as queer theory or more recent waves of feminism have started to include gender identity into their studies roughly since the publication of the pivotal book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990, written by the appointed patron saint of queer theory, Judith Butler. This book will be one of the main works to support my arguments in this thesis, and I am not the first one to do so. Gender Trouble can arguably be considered to be the first

endeavour into regarding gender as a construct. I say arguably because there have been works published on this matter years before, which are discussed by Butler, and I shall turn to these later in this chapter. Butler states that in establishing feminist structures and emancipation, the very system that is meant to emancipate its subject produces that same subject by means of a set of requirements. It is those requirements that constitute ‘woman’, and allow for a critical rethinking of female identity in a feminist environment. Butler takes this idea even further by applying it to gender in general, and even to biological sex. It is here that Butler generally

Idem, p. 39.

3

Butler, J. (1990), pp. 2-10.

4

differs from her predecessors, who tended to only apply these ideas to the female gender, rather than gender identity as a whole. The general takeaway from Gender Trouble is the, very postmodern, belief that the definitions of sex and gender we accept to be true have been put in place arbitrarily, and all outward expressions of sex and gender are therefore performative markers to adhere to the ideas of a man or a woman that these definitions have produced. A true male or female identity does not exist, we simply copy men and women who copy other men and women.

The authors that Butler draws upon to formulate her definition of gender have mostly attempted to define gender by defining the woman. In fact, it seems that a debate surrounding gender identity, and the performativity thereof, can only be born out of a discussion

surrounding the female identity. In the title of her 1981 essay ‘One is not born a woman’, feminist theorist Monique Wittig quoted her predecessor Simone de Beauvoir’s

groundbreaking 1949 book The Second Sex, in which de Beauvoir states that “one is not born a woman, but rather becomes one”. In the essay Wittig calls upon the work of sociologist

Colette Guillaumin on race to support her argument that the female sex, much like race, has to be established before people can be assigned to it:

“Colette Guillaumin has shown that before the socioeconomic reality of black slavery, the concept of race did not exist, at least not in its modern meaning, since it was applied to the lineage of families. However, now, race, exactly like sex, is taken as an “immediate given”, a “sensible given”, “physical features,” belonging to a natural order. But what we believe to be a physical and direct perception is only a sophisticated and mythic construction, an “imaginary formation,” which reinterprets physical features (in themselves as neutral as any others but marked by the social system) through the network of relationships in which they are perceived. (They are seen as black, therefore they are black; they are seen as women, therefore they are women.

But before being seen that way, they first had to be made that way.)”

While both Butler and Wittig in their respective accounts appear to discuss outward gender expression as being an artificial construct, the difference between the two accounts is that, through her theory of performativity, Butler places the control and the responsibility

De Beauvoir, S. (1949), p. 301.

5

Wittig, M. (1981), p. 12.

6

with the individual, while Wittig seems to believe that the woman, in this case, has no control over the way she is perceived. Wittig clearly states that a woman is made, and does not make herself, suggesting an external party who has the authority to decide what is and is not a woman. This notion places the woman in a passive role, while that of performance places the woman in an, ironically masculine, active role. In terms of an ambiguous gender, Wittig states that “lesbian is the only concept I know of which is beyond the categories of sex (woman and man), because the designated subject (lesbian) is not a woman, either economically, politically, or ideologically”. Wittig defines woman, or perhaps draws the conclusion on how woman is

defined, as being reliant on her relation to man, which is typically a serving relation. Lesbians are not women in the sense that they have removed themselves from what Butler refers to as the heterosexual matrix, or the expectation that heterosexuality is the default sexuality.

Because they serve no sexual or romantic purpose to men, but also make it clear that they have no desire to become one, lesbians can live a truly autonomous life.

Both Wittig and de Beauvoir state that there is in fact only one gender, the feminine, and the masculine is not so much considered a gender, but the ‘default’, with Wittig stating:

“Gender is the linguistic index of the political opposition between the sexes. Gender is used here in the singular because indeed there are not two genders. There is only one:

the feminine, the “masculine” not being a gender. For the masculine is not the masculine, but the general.”

Wittig’s (and de Beauvoir’s) argumentation on gender is useful in developing the idea of gender ambiguity that I am working towards. Indeed, her notion of the masculine being the general holds up when, for instance, we look at the fashion world, where androgynous models are in demand more than ever. However, these models are only deemed androgynous when conforming to a rather rigid standard of gender expression, which can mostly be considered to be traditionally masculine. Models like Andreja Pejic, Erika Linder and Roan Louch all, despite having different sexual anatomy, look somewhat similar. Their thin, white bodies are deemed androgynous for their capability of being a blank canvas. Any appendages that are

‘added’ to it, such as the traditionally feminine breasts or wider hips, only take away from the

Idem, p. 20.

7

See chapter 2 of Gender Trouble, ‘Prohibition, psychoanalysis and the production of the heterosexual matrix’.

8

Wittig, M. (1980), p. 60.

9

body’s androgynous qualities. This notion also renders masculinity dependent on femininity, and vice versa, as masculinity relies on the absence of a feminine characteristic, while

femininity relies on the addition of a feminine characteristic. Both femininity and masculinity constantly exist in relation to each other. A definition of gender ambiguity might be that one

‘cannot tell’ if a person is male or female. In reality, looking back on Wittig and de Beauvoir’s argument that the male gender is the general, the truly ambiguous body seems to be thin, tall, flat chested, and completely void of curves. Indeed, the opposite of this body sounds

suspiciously like the sum of a female one.

In chapter four of this thesis we shall be discussing in depth the work of Claude Cahun, whose self-portraits and written work illustrate these ideas of performativity in gender

decades before Butler first published them. But ideas surrounding gender performativity and identity were not entirely unheard of during Cahun’s lifetime and the prime of the surrealist movement. One early example of the discussion around gender performativity, and

contemporary to the emerging of the surrealists, originates in 1929, when Joan Riviere published the essay ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ in the International Journal of

Psychoanalysis. The arguments Butler makes are very similar to those of Riviere. Riviere states that womanliness can be assumed and worn as a mask, and that women tend to do so out of an anxiety relating to their supposed masculine features and characteristics. Citing

Hungarian psychoanalyst Sándor Ferenczi, Riviere writes:

“Ferenczi pointed out (…) that homosexual men exaggerate their heterosexuality as a “defence” against their homosexuality. I shall attempt to show that women who wish for masculinity may put on a mask of womanliness to avert anxiety and the retribution feared from men.”

Riviere goes on to explain that the group of women she speaks of in her essay is a particular group of intellectual women, whose intelligence and intellectual ambitions were

‘associated almost exclusively with an overtly masculine type of woman’. Therefore Riviere

claims, by drawing the comparison to Ferenczi, that women who display overt femininity do

Aspects of appearance that are easily altered aside, such as hair length or makeup.

10

Riviere, J. (1929).

11

Idem.

12

Idem.

13

so in order to draw the attention away from their ‘masculinity’, or those characteristics that might be considered ‘unfeminine’. She provides an example of a woman she analysed who seemed to conform to every possible criterium of the ‘perfect’ woman, namely fulfilling their duties as mothers and (house)wives while simultaneously maintaining a successful career.

However, Riviere says, this same women showed signs of instability in her feminine identity which, Riviere claims, was seen through occurrences in her life such as the following:

“She had dreams of people putting masks on their faces in order to avert disaster. One of these dreams was of a high tower on a hill being pushed over and falling down on the inhabitants of a village below, but the people put on masks and escaped injury!”

The dream suggests that the woman wore the mask of ideal femininity in order to escape the seemingly negative consequences of exposing the masculine identity that lies beneath. As Riviere states: “womanliness therefore could be assumed and worn as a mask, both to hide the possession of masculinity and to avert the reprisals expected if she was found to possess it”.

Even earlier than Joan Riviere’s account is that of Havelock Ellis, who published Sexual Inversion, one of the first English books on homosexuality, in 1897. While the work of Ellis is obviously quite dated and subject to criticism, it is a known fact that Claude Cahun has translated his text ‘Studies in the Psychology of Sex: The Task of Social Hygiene - 1 - The Woman in Society’, and Ellis’ influence on Cahun is notable. Ellis defines the term ‘sexual

inversion’ as ‘sexual instinct turned by inborn constitutional abnormality towards persons of the same sex’. In another prominent book on sexual inversion, Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s

Psychopathia Sexualis, published in German in 1886 and in English in 1892, von Krafft-Ebing makes the claim, as one of the first to do so, that homosexuality is a natural phenomenon that can not be demonised. The concept of sexual inversion as carried out in the, at this time,

newly established field of sexology stated that homosexuality is an ‘inborn reversion of gender

Idem.

14

Idem.

15

Idem.

16

Bailey, L. ‘, & Thynne, L. (2005), p. 142.

17

Ellis, H. (1897), p. 1.

18

Bauer, H. (2003), p. 23.

19

traits’, meaning that sexuality and gender are inseparably linked. Because of this reversal of gender traits in one person, homosexuality would be explained as ‘latent heterosexuality’, or heterosexuality in the body of the ‘wrong’ sex, a notion very reminiscent of transgenderism which was not an established term at the time. In this sense, much like Wittig’s claim that

the lesbian is the only concept to exist outside of the male female binary, the mere act of homosexuality can already be considered a subversion of gender identity, albeit within the framework of the heterosexual matrix that Butler describes. In artists such as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, their lesbian sexuality is therefore an aspect to take into account when studying their various portrayals of gender play, especially considering Cahun’s familiarity with the work of Havelock Ellis.

In these paragraphs I have attempted to give a brief overview of the authors cited by Butler that are relevant to this thesis. As Butler’s theory relies on a notion of performativity, many of the authors cited adhere to similar ideas. As we will see in the following chapters, many of the artists discussed similarly tend to portray gender as a costume or performance.

Aside from Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore in chapter four, I will discuss in the next chapter Marcel Duchamp’s female persona Rrose Sélavy, who posed for Man Ray’s camera on a number of occasions, and Barbette, another one of Ray’s subjects who made a career out of female illusion. Other artists, like Hans Bellmer whom I shall discuss in the next chapter as well, show a more introspective portrayal of gender subversion. As I shall attempt to make clear, Bellmer shows his concern with gender not so much in a performative manner, but through projection onto his subjects, subjects that he himself has full control over. As Riviere shows in her essay, gender, especially feminine gender, is expressed through more than just outward appearance. There are aspects of character and personality that are similarly ascribed to men and women respectively, such as passivity and activity, demeanour, choice of career or lack thereof, intelligence and, to some extent, even autonomy. It would be superficial to discuss gender in the work of these artists solely in terms of outward appearance. For the purpose of this thesis, I will define (artistic) gender ambiguity as follows:

“A play on and awareness of gender in appearance, context and identity, that either differ’s from the artist’s or subject’s assigned or chosen gender identity, or is treated in a performative manner.”

Eisner, S. (2013), pp. 8-9.

20

Naturally, this definition will mainly serve as a guiding factor throughout the thesis in order to discuss surrealist artworks in the context of gender ambiguity, but narrowing down the concept in this manner will hopefully provide some clarity in what it is exactly that we are looking for. As we shall see in the next chapter, gender became a prominent topic of

discussion in post World War I France. Before moving on to discussing the artists in depth, I

would like to provide an outline of the state of male and female identity in this postwar

society that the surrealists lived in.

3. The surreal society

3.1 Gender anxiety after World War I

In 1927, French author Pierre Drieu la Rochelle, later known as a fascist and collaborator, wrote of a postwar civilisation that “no longer has clothes, no longer has

churches, no longer has palaces, no longer has theaters, no longer has paintings, no longer has books, and no longer has sexes”. His writing expressed concern about drastic cultural

changes brought on by World War I. However, as has been pointed out by Mary Louise Roberts in Civilization without sexes: reconstructing gender in postwar France 1917-1927 (1994), the placement and even the inclusion of the last addition is notable. The implication made by Drieu la Rochelle here is that after the war, French society was left in disarray and an eventual demise was inevitable, a type of pessimism that was shared with many of his contemporaries and postwar literature in general. Authors like Benjamin Crémieux, Romain Holland, Oswald Spengler, Georges Duhamel and Paul Valéry all held similar pessimistic beliefs of a postwar society that was headed toward destruction. But Drieu la Rochelle centred and

emphasised gender in his account by placing it at the end of a list of mostly cultural casualties of war. By placing it on the end, Drieu la Rochelle not only expressed his concern that the boundaries between male and female had been blurred or even destroyed, but also that this was one of the most significant aspects that the war had affected. Similarly, by adding gender to a list of cultural markers such as art, literature, religion or architecture, Drieu la Rochelle either implies that the war affects society beyond a cultural sphere and in a natural one, or that notions of gender can be included in this list of cultural achievements, as opposed to it being a natural phenomenon. If the latter is the case, then gender, or how it has been constructed, is implied to be one of the great cultural achievements of French society. By placing it at the end, Drieu la Rochelle might even imply this French achievement of gender to be the greatest of them all, and therefore its destruction in the aftermath of the war might be considered to have the most catastrophic effects. Whether one accepts these notions or

P. Drieu la Rochelle (1927), translated in M.L. Roberts (p. 2).

21

M.L. Roberts (1994), pp. 2-3.

22

Idem.

23

not, it is evident by this account that gender and culture seem to be closely tied. If the war shakes up a culture to its core, the male-female dynamics will be similarly affected.

In Civilization without sexes, Mary Louise Roberts argues that in the years following World War I, a debate on gender, and particularly female identity, became predominant in literary circles and a vehicle for people to grasp and discuss the drastic changes the war had brought on. On all fronts, the war had been a disaster. The French population suffered the most casualties in the war; around 3.2 million men were killed or wounded, roughly half of the men deployed and around 13 percent of the overall male population as recorded in 1913, causing a significant change in the male to female ratio among French population.

Furthermore, the French economy was left in financial ruin, despite the country’s significant wealth before the war began. The franc dropped 50 percent in value within a year and did not return to stability throughout the decade. These events, along with the immediately

noticeable destruction in the cities and villages of France, left the people wondering what the war had been good for. The positive achievements of the war (for as far as there can be any positive achievements) seemed drastically out of proportion with the sacrifices made. Life as the people of France knew it was changed for good and any hope of their situation returning to how it used to be seemed out of reach. Among all this trauma, Roberts argues, gender was a relatively easy concept to grasp. It is easier to discuss an aspect so close to one’s own identity than it is to try and understand why the franc is falling or the economy is in decline.

Discussing the ‘close to home’ issue of gender helped make the impact of the war more tangible.

This begs the question what these discussions looked like. Because of the extreme damage the French population had suffered, the state felt compelled to make attempts to reconstruct the country and recover the French national identity, which they felt had similarly been under attack, while a significant amount of women were left wondering about the fate of their marital future. In a postwar society, with numerous traces of death, a system of pronatalism seems logical to consult. In order to repopulate the country, the state did

everything in its power to promote and encourage familial productivity. Social and economic programs were introduced to promote traditional family values. Families who had multiple children were given financial and economic incentives in order to popularise and promote the

A. Lyford (2007), p. 3.

24

M.L. Roberts, p. 6.

25

Idem.

26

idea of a large family. Meanwhile, the advertising industry produced campaigns and imagery promoting the traditional gender roles needed to reconstruct the country and its population.

(fig. 1 & 2) Under the guise of rebuilding national identity, women were encouraged to fulfil their domestic duties by bearing children and taking care of the household, while the men were expected to possess the physical strength and perform the manual labour necessary to repair the material damage the war had left, as well as provide the intellect to rebuild the economy. The streets of France were rife with heavily gendered imagery and language, all in an attempt to return to the traditional social order France had maintained before the war began. However, the people of France did not have much faith in the state’s ideals of social and economic progress. And how could they, when the images of strong, physically fit men that surrounded them formed such a stark contrast with the reality of the mutilated and wounded veterans that the war had actually produced? Countless men were either dead, or too drastically disabled or mutilated to provide their service in reconstructing the country.

There was a major disconnect between the state’s idealism, and the lived reality of the people of France. It is in this gap, Amy Lyford argues in Surrealist Masculinities: Gender Anxiety and the

Aesthetics of Post-World War I Reconstruction in France (2007), that the surrealists emerged. The surrealists sensed the dissatisfaction caused by this disconnect, if not due to their own lived experiences during the war. Their intent in their work, according to Lyford, was to

‘dramatise the physical and psychological trauma of a war that everyone wanted to forget’, and to ‘destabilise the gender roles that had cemented traditional ideas about the family, one of the key insititutional building blocks of French national identity’. Lyford’s book is one of

the most extensive works that aligns specifically to the subject matter discussed here. Before Surrealist Masculinities was published, the discourse surrounding gender and gender expression in surrealism mostly found its source in feminist studies, with many scholars accusing the male surrealists of misogyny. Lyford suggests instead that the surrealists preoccupation with gender and their often disturbing images of the female body have more to do with their own anxiety surrounding emasculation and the state of their manhood, rather than an aversion for the female body or misogynist beliefs. When read in the context of the self-evident postwar destruction and mutilation of so many French men, a photograph of one of Hans Bellmer’s

A. Lyford (2007), pp. 3-5.

27

André Breton and Louis Aragon had served as military medics, and trained at the military hospital of Val-de-

28

Grâce in Paris.

A. Lyford, pp. 4-5.

29

dolls, to be discussed in the next paragraph, can be regarded as a projection of male anxiety onto female bodies. Indeed, after returning from the war, the experiences of death and

trauma that haunted these men seemed to be absent in the experiences of women back home who were profiting from the jobs and economic positions that were originally occupied by men. However, while this treatment of the female body might appear as hostile, the surrealists simultaneously seemed to embrace characteristics traditionally associated with women. By rejecting the notions of ideal manhood that the pronatalist system was promoting, surrealist men adhered to feminine ‘weakness’. The emotional behaviour many of the traumatised veterans exhibited, which we would now associate with PTSD, showed similarities with the, up until that point, exclusively female diagnosis of hysteria. However, to diagnose a man with hysteria is to emasculate him, and physicians felt urged to rename the condition to ‘shell shock’, or ‘neurasthenia’ in France.

Surrealist founder André Breton and co-founder Louis Aragon had learned about shell shock during their military medical training and explained it in surrealist terms as a psychic release that rejected the rational in favour of the irrational.

The symptoms of hysteria, which were deemed feminine, seemed to fit well in surrealist ideology. Breton had defined surrealism in his first surrealist manifesto as ‘psychic automatism in its pure state’. The hysteric woman’s mental state was similar to the one the surrealist

writer or artist utilising automatist methods attempted to achieve. André Breton’s character

Nadja, who occurs in his 1928 novel of the same name, as well as the 14 year old hospitalised hysteria patient Augustine are two examples of women who are celebrated by surrealists precisely for their hysteric behaviour. Nadja was written by Breton based on his real-life encounter and subsequent tumultuous relationship with Nadja, who he believes embodies the surrealist principles described in his manifesto written two years before the two met. He recalls their relationship in the rather detached, clinical language of a neuropsychologist observing Nadja as his patient. Her views of life and the world are made apparent through conversations they would have about surrealist art, and her erratic behaviour and madness, reminiscent of automatic writing techniques, eventually grow to frighten the narrator. The

Idem, p. 15.

30

Hysteria in men was not entirely unheard of. In the 1880’s, French physician Jean-Martin Charcot already

31

acknowledged the occurrence of hysteria in men and linked it to homosexuality, enforcing ties with emasculation.

A. Lyford, pp. 16-17.

32

A. Breton (1924)

33

A. Lyford, p. 18.

34

relationship ends with Nadja’s eventual institutionalisation, and Breton chooses not to visit her or seek out contact again. The psychiatric patient Augustine appears in a series of

photographs in an issue of La Revolution surréaliste of the same year as the publication of Nadja.

(fig. 3) The short amount of time in between the emerging of these women in a surrealist context makes them the embodiments of the celebrated hysteric that inspired surrealist art.

Augustine is portrayed showing symptoms of her hysteric condition, and the photographs are placed in the context of a celebration of the anniversary of hysteria, of which Breton and Aragon wrote:

“We Surrealists … are intent on celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of hysteria, the greatest poetic discovery of the latter part of the century, and we do so at a time when the dismemberment of the concept of hysteria appears to be complete.”

The surrealists believed that the hysteric’s symptoms and behaviour were a literal outward expression of her unconsciousness. They not only celebrated these women and their hysteria, but they sought to emulate it, aligning themselves willingly to a decidedly feminine diagnosis and in turn emasculating themselves. By taking Augustine and Nadja as an example, one might be able to free the subconscious mind from the repression that Breton described in his first manifesto.

The first surrealist manifesto was published in 1924 and, naturally, did not explicitly call for a destruction of gender norms and blurring boundaries between femininity and

masculinity. However, Breton did call for an undermining of the rationalism that he thought had become rampant in French society:

“We are still living under the reign of logic, but the logical processes of our time apply only to the solution of problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism which remains in fashion allows for the consideration of those facts narrowly relevant to our experience. Logical conclusions, on the other hand, escape us. Needless to say, boundaries have been assigned even to experience, It revolves in a cage from which release is becoming increasingly difficult. It too depends upon immediate utility and is

M. Herheck (2008), p. 163.

35

A. Breton and L. Aragon (1928), quoted by N. Lusty (2003).

36

A. Lyford, p. 133.

37

guarded by common sense. In the guise of civilization, under the pretext of progress, we have succeeded in dismissing from our minds anything that, rightly or wrongly, could be regarded as superstition or myth; and we have proscribed every way of seeking the truth which does not conform to convention.”

We have seen now that French society had, ‘under the pretext of progress’, assigned neatly defined roles to men and women in order to recruit them for the national mission of reconstruction. Breton called for a breaking free from these roles. He goes on to emphasise the importance of the human imagination, which he believes to be suppressed in current society, and its reintroduction in the current opinion by Sigmund Freud, a key figure to the surrealists. If the surrealist artist, following the first surrealist manifesto, is concerned with

undermining rationalism and breaking down the boundaries that have been set in place between seemingly polar opposites, then the one between male and female is a logical topic of interest. As Shari L. Thurer argued, the male to female binary might be one of the most easily accepted realities we know of. Such a self-evident truth, completely based in structure and logic, must form an attractive playing field for the surrealist artist.

In this paragraph I have attempted to provide an understanding of the heavily gendered society the surrealists lived in. In the next two paragraphs, I will elaborate further on specific surrealist practices in which notions of gender ambiguity tend to appear. Recalling the notion of the ambiguous body described in 2.1, I will in this next paragraph focus on the surrealist tendency of bodily mutilation.

3.2 The mutilated body in surrealist art

“The path of surrealism through the twentieth century is littered with corpses”. This is

the first sentence of Jonathan P. Eburne’s book Surrealism and the art of crime (2008). His book, as the title suggests, is concerned with the appearance of violence and crime in surrealist visual art and literature. Eburne states that despite much of the surrealists’ preoccupation with violence stems from their own trauma from the war, it was not limited to this trauma.

A. Breton (1924).

38

Breton states that in a Freudian milieu, “perhaps the imagination is on the verge of recovering its rights”.

39

(1924).

J. P. Eburne (2008), p. 1.

40

The surrealists, according to Eburne, considered violent crime to be a field where systems of law, science, morality and speculative thought, and the flaws and contradictions within those systems, were made apparent. They drew upon European literature from notable authors such as Marquis de Sade, Arthur Rimbaud, Alphonse Allais and of course Sigmund Freud to study the subject. Peculiarly enough, Eburne fails to analyse in depth one of the best known

characteristics of surrealist practice in terms of violence and crime, one that is often used to support the argument of surrealist misogyny: the mutilation of the (often female) body. In the previous paragraph I briefly touched upon the notion of how Hans Bellmer’s dolls, distorted representations of female-appearing bodies, might be viewed as a projection of male anxiety onto female bodies. More often than not, however, such disturbing renditions of the female body are regarded as having misogynistic motives, especially when considering the strange, objectified position of women in the surrealist movement, both female artists and artistic subjects alike. A third explanation might be, as Eburne is moving towards, a fascination with violence and crime in general.

As opposed to the more positive descriptions of surrealism as a movement concerned with dreams and liberation of the subconscious mind and repressed creativity, Hal Foster, in his book Compulsive Beauty (1997) relates surrealism to Freudian notions of the uncanny and the death drive. Freud develops these ideas in his essays ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) and ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920). The uncanny, according to Freud, is what happens when the unfamiliar (or unheimlich, as he calls it) is brought into the world of the familiar (or heimlich).

The anxiety that follows from such an occurrence produces three effects that can be related to surrealist ideology:

“(…)(1) an indistinction between the real and imagined, which is the basic aim of surrealism as defined in both manifestoes of Breton; (2) a confusion between the animate and the inanimate, as exemplified in wax figures, dolls, mannequins, and automatons, all crucial images in the surrealist repertoire; and (3) a usurpation of the referent by the sign or of physical reality by psychic reality, and here again the surreal is often experienced, especially by Breton and Dalí, as an eclipse of the referential by the symbolic, or as an enthrallment of a subject to a sign or a symptom, and its effect is often that of the uncanny: anxiety.”

The death drive, on the other hand, is what Freud defines as an instinctual desire to return to a prior state, namely, when we were not yet alive. It is directly opposed by the

Idem, p. 2.

41

H. Foster (1997), p. 7.

42

pleasure principle or life drive, which is all that drives us to live, survive, procreate and otherwise partake in acts that brings us pleasure. The death drive is the subconscious

compulsion to do just the opposite, described as the urge to return to our state before we were alive, the organic matter we were inside our mother’s womb. Any phenomenon that makes us aware of our death drive is what we perceive as uncanny. With regards to Freud’s definitions

of the uncanny and the death drive, the unfamiliarity of a mutilated body, or, in fact, an androgynous or genderless one, evokes this experience of uncanniness that Foster argues is apparent in surrealist art. An androgynous body is by definition not able to procreate; the body’s gendered features are characteristic and necessary for heterosexual reproduction. A body without gender is capable of putting an end to a family line, and therefore the continuation of life itself.

One of the practices most commonly associated with the surrealist movement is that of cadavre exquis, where a group of participants all provide an addition to an image or text, without being able to see what the other participants have contributed. The result, in an instance of a drawing or imagery, is often a fragmented figure, made up of seemingly unrelated particles. The Museum of Modern Art in New York held an exhibition titled

‘Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration’, which ran from March until July 2012. In a press release, the following text was published:

“Formless bodies, scrambled or deflated, sink into or are penetrated by their environments. Some figures are endless, proliferating into landscapes, while others are doubled, as if in uncanny mirrors. Still more are tumescent, swollen with excess bulges of flesh. The introduction of foreign objects engenders prosthetic bodies, while other figures are fragmented, their parts substituted for wholes. Merging with plants and animals, humans become fantastic hybrids; melding with machines, they incarnate industrial dreams. Finally, in literal acts of defacement, the very features that express human emotions are stretched, scratched out, and scribbled over.”

This description provides an image of the exquisite corpses that take on the form of bodies, although not instantly recognisable as such. The automatic, uncontrollable process of passing on an image to the next person, leaving the further growth of the image completely up to chance and that person’s power of creation, results in an often disturbing, uncanny

Idem, p. 9.

43

Museum of Modern Art, ‘Exquisite Corpses: Drawing and Disfiguration’, press release, 2012, https://

44

www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_389370.pdf

rendition of the human figure. This practice is one of the many manifestations of bodily mutilation that are apparent in the surrealist movement. One of the exquisite corpses in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art is one from 1927 by Yves Tanguy, Joan Miró, Max Morise and Man Ray. (fig. 4) It is described as being a female figure, and upon first glance one is certainly inclined to conclude that. But the bizarre qualities of the image, the leaves

protruding from the ‘head’, the tennis rackets attached to the ‘feet’, and the complete illegibility of the ‘torso’ as such, make it difficult to really say this is a woman. Even the legs and genital area, by far the most recognisable part of the drawing, are positioned in such a way that we still can not make out if the figure possesses male or female genitalia. In a second drawing from the same four artists made a year later, we see that the first participant has very clearly and legibly drawn a kiss between a male and female head. (fig. 5) The second

participant, however, has fused the two together into one body, that incidentally seems to be void of any gendered characteristics. Of course this is partially the result of automatism, but when we look closely at the pair of faces, we can see that they are already merged together by the neck. This means that we can not completely attribute the fusing of these male and female figures to automatic coincidence, as the author of this fragment seems to have intended to do so. It is furthermore appropriate to point out that the two heads form the shape of a heart together, perhaps to signify the unifying of male and female in a romantic relationship.

The earlier mentioned artist Hans Bellmer, known for his eerie, disturbing photographs of handmade ball-jointed dolls, was not from France, but sympathised with many of the surrealist movement’s sentiments. Born in Germany (then the Silesia district of Poland) to a nazi sympathetic father, Bellmer, who often felt the need to rebel against his domineering father, quickly grew to be anti-nazi and permanently moved to Paris after the war. Before permanently settling in Paris, Bellmer asked his cousin Ursula, who often served as Bellmer’s source of inspiration and the root of his erotic fascination, to bring photographs of his dolls to show to André Breton and the surrealists when she moved to Paris for her studies. The surrealists were so enamoured and impressed by the photographs that they immediately published them in their surrealist publication Minotaure. Bellmer’s dolls continued to be

extremely popular among the surrealists, despite not having met him yet. When Bellmer published a handmade book called Die Puppe in 1934, containing a series of 10 photographs of his first doll, surrealist member Paul Eluard arranged to have it translated into French and

T. Lichtenstein (2001), pp. 5-6.

45

published under the title La Poupee in 1936. While the German edition has less than ten copies known today, a 100 copies were published of the French version. In 1938 Bellmer travelled

to Paris himself, where he stayed until he was arrested as a German alien and imprisoned in Camp des Milles in Aix-en-Provence, where he was joined by the likes of Max Ernst. After he was released in 1940 he travelled to Marseille where he lived in exile along with many other surrealists.

The dolls that Hans Bellmer created have a disturbing, fragmented quality to them. By creating the dolls out of different, detachable parts, Bellmer was able to constantly arrange and rearrange the construction of the dolls, sometimes adding or removing limbs to create strange hybrids of the human form. All of his dolls appear to be young women which, despite their mutated state, have a lifelike expression and body language. They are the perfect

example of Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny, existing right on the edge of human and object, animated and in-animated, life and death. These relations are literally deconstructed in Die Puppe in a photograph where the individual parts of the doll are arranged and pinned against the wall, removing the lifelike qualities from the figure. (fig. 6) In her book Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer, Therese Lichtenstein points out Bellmer’s interest in studies of the anagram, the linguistic phenomenon where letters of one word can be rearranged to create another. Bellmer’s rearranging and reconstructing of the individual doll parts suggest the multiplicity in meanings and perceptions of the female body. An interesting point that

Lichtenstein points out in relation to Bellmer’s interest in the anagram is his fascination with the ideas of German neurologist Paul Schilder, who wrote the book Image and the Appearance of the Human Body (1935), of which Bellmer owned a copy. Schilder believed that the body and the inner world containing the emotions and decisions a person makes are inseparable. Each person has a ‘body-image’ which is made up of experiences from both the inner and the outer world. “One may have as many body-images as clothes. One may be enshrouded by various

body-images. They cannot form a unit, but they may form a sum.” This passage and

Bellmer’s known affinity with the ideas of Schilder (the ideas developed in his L’Anatomie de l’image show similarities, according to Lichtenstein), attest to the notion that Bellmer’s dolls

Idem, p. 24.

46

Idem, pp. 5-6.

47

Idem, pp. 34-35.

48

Idem, pp. 35-36.

49

P. Schilder (1935), quoted by Lichtenstein (2001), p. 36.

50

might not exclusively be interpreted as depictions of the female body, but show a much more layered image, that might even comment on gender identity and sexuality. As Lichtenstein argues, Bellmer’s fascination with young girls might come from a place of identification with them.

From an early age Bellmer was no stranger to presenting himself as a girl or a woman.

In Bellmer’s birthplace of Weimar Germany, a similar destabilisation of gender identity was apparent as in France between the wars, and many of the archetypes of gender identity blew over from Paris, or were created independently. For Bellmer, who was fervently anti-nazi and

against the Weimar Republic, rejecting and subverting dominant ideas of masculinity was a way to show resistance. He’d similarly used these strategies of rebellion against his

authoritarian father. In a famous anecdote, on a train journey to Berlin with his father he emerged from the compartment wearing a dress, make-up and a wig.

In a letter to his brother, Bellmer literally assumes a female identity when he writes that ‘I, poor woman, have already brought eight doll children into this world’, and signs the letter with a feminine pseudonym: ‘Lulula’. Lichtenstein argues that in his art, namely in his drawings and

photographs of his second doll, we can see his fascination with merging with or ‘becoming’ a woman through the form of doubles. The double can be represented as twins, as a reflection image in a mirror, or, indeed, as an androgynous figure. The twins and the hermaphrodite

are common occurences in Bellmer’s work. Many of the body parts for this doll were in

two’s, meaning he constructed two pairs of legs, two pairs of arms, two pelvises, four breasts etc. Some of these assemblies take the form of a figure who has four arms and legs, but no

head, effectively removing the lifelike qualities that some of Bellmer’s more ‘traditional’ dolls possess, mutating the figure into an unfamiliar creature. The addition of multiple body parts

T. Lichtenstein (2001), p. 47.

51

Idem, p. 49.

52

In a 1936 poem titled ‘Der Vater’, Bellmer describes how he and his brother would often act like little girls in

53

order to protect themselves from their father.

T. Lichtenstein (2001), p. 48.

54

Idem.

55

Idem, p. 53.

56

Idem, p. 58.

57

Idem, p. 50.

58

enhances the metaphor of the anagram, increasing the amount of bodies that can be constructed with these parts, moving beyond the realm of the traditionally feminine.

While the dolls do portray a certain sense of gender subversion, we perhaps see

Bellmer’s fascination with gender ambiguity and his desire to become one with a woman most clearly in his self-portraits involving the artist and author (and his lover) Unica Zürn which, more specifically, express a desire to become her. Here we might recall Freud’s theory of the uncanny and the subconscious desire to return to a previous, prehuman state; that of organic matter inside the mother’s womb. Freud names a phenomenon that he considers to be the most uncanny thing of all: the dream of being buried alive. Of course the thought of ending one’s life in an enclosed space, where the walls are literally closing in around you to the point of suffocation, is a terrible nightmare. But Freud points out that this nightmare derives from the fantasy of intrauterine existence, when the child and the mother are one. According to Freud, the place one subconsciously desires to return to is the womb, and this is an image that is apparent in the self-portraits in-utero that he produced in the 1940’s and 1950’s. It is

likely that Bellmer was familiar with this theory, as the state of intrauterine existence makes several occurences in his work. In an oil painting from 1955 titled Double Cephalopod (Self- Portrait with Unica Zürn) (fig. 7), we see Bellmer’s decapitated head placed in the uterus of his lover. According to Therese Lichtenstein’s interpretation, while the image incorporates a desire to return to an intrauterine existence, the placement of the head inside of the female body gives Bellmer a sense of control over her that merges the two. In Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety (2002), Sue Taylor states that Zürn herself interpreted her reddened

genitalia in the painting as a wound to Bellmer’s neck. This not only suggests that the bodies

were once attached, but also shows the uncanny blurring of boundaries between life and death, in that the very anatomy that is meant to birth Bellmer is also the wound that bleeds him out.

There are many instances of the hermaphrodite in the work of Hans Bellmer, many of which are described by Sue Taylor and Therese Lichtenstein in their respective works. In his numerous drawings and paintings involving male and female genitalia, we see the two presented interchangeably. Taylor points out Bellmer’s belief in the interchangeability of the masculine and feminine in a passage he wrote in Petite Anatomie de l’inconscient physique ou

Idem, p. 67-68.

59

S. Taylor (2002), p. 119.

60

Idem.

61

l’anatomie de l’image (1957), in which he recalls a hallucination he experienced while studying a photo of a girl that he took. “Desire inclined there exclusively, confusing the masculine and the feminine, the Me and the You, sodomizing the Me in the You.” Lichtenstein, in turn,

goes on to describe a number of drawings explicitly portraying the figure of the

hermaphrodite, or more particularly a girl with a penis. In other drawings, the female body is portrayed with its parts substituted for male genitalia. The extent of Bellmer’s body of work

concerning this topic and the background of trauma and anxiety that his work sprouted from is too large to consider for now, but his work illustrates the notion that manipulations of the body are, intentionally or unintentionally, simultaneously manipulations of gender

representation. In the case of Bellmer this is supported by his own fascination with the hermaphrodite and an implicit desire to merge with a woman, as Lichtenstein has argued.

However, as Lyford argued, any male surrealist’s mutilation of the female body in image might not necessarily come from a place of misogyny or revulsion for the female body, but a deeper rooted anxiety or even confusion about one’s own masculinity.

We have discussed in this paragraph a tendency towards bodily mutilation in surrealist art, a tendency which is confined to the artwork’s subject matter. In the next paragraph, I will discuss a tendency in surrealism towards a specific medium. Photography, or more specifically portrait photography, proves to be a popular vehicle among surrealists for self-representation and representation of the Other, and will appear frequently in this thesis from here on out.

3.3 (Self)-representation and photography in surrealism

Photography was a frequently used artistic medium among the Surrealists, as well as their predeccors, the Dadaists. The Dadaists saw in photography a suitable vehicle to question and criticise the definitions of art and the additional expectations that previous artistic genres had brought on, while the Surrealists appreciated photography for its ability to imitate reality. The surrealists especially invented and used technical special effects, such as double

exposure and solarisation, to bring the reality of the photographic image into the fantasy world. The technique of solarisation in particular had been discovered by photographer Man

H. Bellmer (1957) quoted by Taylor (2002), p. 156.

62

T. Lichtenstein (2001), p. 69.

63

A. Lyford (2007), p. 15.

64

O. Lahs-Gonzales (1996), p. 4.

65