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Komposition

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  • Dupin asked

    Bonjour, Que s'est-il passé pour Ulrica Zürn en Allemagne ? Quels sont ses rapports avec son mari membre du parti nazi ?Comment est-elle arrivée en France ? Que sont devenus ses enfants ? Sont-ils venus la visiter en France ainsi que sa famille ? Qu'elle était sa maladie ? Quelle traitement lui a-t-on administré ? Merci. Cordialement.

  • Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen answered

    Dear Ilya, thank you for your (many) questions about Unica Zürn and please excuse me for answering you in English. Zürn had left her husband since long when she met Hans Bellmer at the opening of his exhibition in the Rudolf Springer gallery (Berlin). At that time the was writing radio plays for German broadcast companies. She went to live with Bellmer in Paris, where she mingled with the surrealists around André Breton. She had a special relationship with Henri Michaux. Apart from writing surrealist poems (mainly anagrams), she started to express herself in drawings and painting. There exists extensive literature from and about Unica Zürn which you might find interesting. In this literature there is a lot of information about her illness and treatment, but I am not sure if the questions about her private life will be answered completely. I know that she stayed in touch with her children, you might learn more from her published letters. The most recent catalogue is in French: cat. exh. Unica Zürn, Musée d'Art et d'historie de l'hôpital Saint Anne (MAHHSA), 31 January-31 May 2020. I hope this information is helpful. Good luck with your researches! Els

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Unica Zürn became known as a writer and artist in the 1950s in Germany. Zürn had a tough childhood and after experimenting with mind-expanding drugs, she developed a severe mental illness from around 1960. A majority of artworks were produced during the years she spent in mental institutions. ‘Composition’ is a part of a larger body of work that reflects on the sense of being observed by both staff and fellow patients in the institution. Zürn died in 1970 after jumping from a window of her life partner Hans Bellmer’s apartment, leaving a small artistic oeuvre.

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Collection book

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Specifications

Title Komposition
Material and technique Gouache on blue paper
Object type
Drawing > Two-dimensional object > Art object
Location This object is in storage
Dimensions Height 238 mm
Width 165 mm
Artists Artist: Unica Zürn
Accession number MB 2011/T 6 (PK)
Credits Purchased with the support of FriendsLottery, 2011
Department Drawings & Prints
Acquisition date 2011
Creation date in 1955
Provenance Estate Unica Zürn; Galerie Berinson, Berlin 2011
Exhibitions Rotterdam 2017b
Internal exhibitions The Collection Enriched (2011)
Surrealism and Beyond (2016)
Collectie - surrealisme (2017)
External exhibitions Surrealist Art - Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2021)
A Surreal Shock. Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2023)
Dalí, Magritte, Man Ray and Surrealism. Highlights from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2023)
A Surreal Shock – Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2021)
Only the Marvelous is Beautiful (2022)
Research Show research A dream collection - Surrealism in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Literature Brinkmann/Helmes/Knapp 1998, pp. xxiii, 213
Material
Object
Technique
Gouache > Drawing technique > Technique > Material and technique

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Entry catalogue A dream collection - Surrealism in Museum Boijmans Van beuningen

Author: Marijke Peyser

Unica Zürn yearned for the life of an artist and initially satisfied this longing by writing short stories. Her relationship with the artist Hans Bellmer and the artistic environment in which she found herself from 1953 – the beginning of her affair with Bellmer – prompted her to start drawing. She achieved a modest yet independent-minded position in the Surrealist artists’ circle which, as well as Bellmer included Henri Michaux, Jean (Hans) Arp, Max Ernst and others, who were important to her artistic development.

Komposition was made in 1955 when Zürn was in Berlin for some months without Bellmer. The gouache depicts a web of imaginary organic shapes. Everything appears to be animated; animals, people and plants flow into one another. Depth and gravity are absent. The white network on the dark background reinforces the serene, fairy-tale mood. The detailed shapes look like dancing figures in which different eyes have been incorporated and yet there is something ominous about it.

Zürn and Bellmer met in 1953 in the Galerie Springer in Berlin, where Bellmer’s work was showing. It was love at first sight. They went to live in Paris. Thanks to the success of his Doll in early 1935, Bellmer had already become acquainted with André Breton and Paul Éluard, the kingpins of the movement. The automatism Breton and Éluard employed when writing Surrealist texts is regarded as the working process Zürn used when she drew.[1] She explained this process, like an outsider in the third person singular: ‘Without knowing what she is going to draw, she experiences the excitement and the enormous curiosity necessary for her own work to bring her a surprise.’[2]

It was Bellmer who encouraged Zürn to start using ‘automatic writing’ in her art and formulate anagrams (see also Sans titre). One of these anagrams, which feature repeatedly in her autobiographical text L’Homme Jasmin, Impressions d’une malade mentale (1962-66), describes her meeting with Bellmer.[3] L’Homme Jasmin is the account of Zürn’s mental instability and her stay in specialist clinics against the background of the presence of ‘the man in jasmine’. This imaginary figure was able to manipulate her with his supernatural talent and completely transform her.[4] Zürn accepted the passive role her hallucinations imposed on her.[5] However when she met Bellmer, a man of flesh and blood, it was impossible for her to return to her dreams: ‘Her brain, no larger than that of a chicken, does not understand that she is hypnotizing herself by allowing her thoughts to circle continuously around the same person. He is the eagle who describes circles above the masochistic chicken. That’s the impression she has. For her the situation is like a dead end’.[6]

Zürn’s autobiographical text Sombre Printemps (1971) anticipated her suicide. In this text, again in the third person singular, she describes the end of her life: ‘Dressed in her finest pyjamas she jumps out of her window after a night of conversations with Bellmer. She is in her flat on the top floor to the east of Paris. There is no sign of visible emotion; she is determined that no one sees through her plan or prevents her.’[7]

Footnotes

[1] New York 2009b, p. 12.

[2] Zürn 1994, p. 33, quoted in New York 2009b, p. 61.

[3] Conley 1996, p. 86.

[4] Zürn 1994, p. 88.

[5] Ibid., p. 105.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ruth Henry, ‘Postface: rencontre avec Unica Zürn’, in Zürns Sombre Printemps, Paris 1971, pp. 101-20.

Show research A dream collection - Surrealism in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
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All about the artist

Unica Zürn

Berlijn-Grunewald 1916 - Parijs 1970

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