The German artist and writer Unica Zürn’s 1964 word-image text Ein Märchenbuch für Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern (A Fairy-Tale Book for Friedrich Schröder-Sonnenstern) is a pivotal work in her oeuvre and in the post-war history of Surrealism, and exemplary of what I have defined as ‘the traumatic surreal’. Dedicated to the German artist Schröder-Sonnenstern (1892-1982), whose partner Martha Möller had died earlier that year, the Märchenbuch demonstrates Zürn’s dialogues with German Art Brut and with wider Germanic traditions. Made during her late summer 1964 visit to La Rochelle and Île de Ré, during which time she was incarcerated in La Fond, a mental institution repurposed during the Occupation as a military prison holding Resistance fighters, the distinctive palimpsestic aesthetics of the Märchenbuch also embody the productive intersections between Zürn’s political consciousness and her experiences as a psychiatric patient – that is, between different configurations of feminist ‘resistance’ manifest in the characteristic surrealist forms and processes through which the Märchenbuch and related contemporary works were made.
This lecture will explore how these works express a surrealist oppositional politics, evident in the “Atom-bombe” blots which link Zürn to other post-war women surrealists’ engagements with the ‘nuclear sublime’, in references to Vietnam and other contemporary geopolitical events, and in the persistent echoes of Nazi atrocities that inform Zürn’s works of the time. This registering of complex intermeshed histories of personal and cultural trauma suggests some of the strategies through which women artists like Zürn developed and expanded Surrealism’s potentials for a resistant aesthetics.
Patricia Allmer is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the University of Edinburgh. Her many books, exhibitions, and essays include the award-winning Angels of Anarchy: Women Artists and Surrealism at Manchester Art Gallery, the first major exhibition on this topic; Lee Miller: Photography, Surrealism, and Beyond (2016); and The Traumatic Surreal (2022), hailed in its Woman’s Art Journal review as “groundbreaking” and offering “new perspectives on female positions and lineages in the history of Surrealism”. Her co-curated 2024 Henry Moore Institute exhibition The Traumatic Surreal is inspired by and based on this book.
Her contribution to art history and her long-term international scholarly impact on the study of women artists and Surrealism have been recognised by awards including a Philip Leverhulme Prize (2010) and, most recently, an Association for Art History Fellowship (2023). Professor Allmer is also a major international scholar of René Magritte, publishing three books on the artist, and delivering the prestigious 2017-18 International Émile Bernheim Programme lectures in Brussels on his work.
