In this essay I will discuss the ways in which René Magritte and Hans Bellmer have explored the concept of the unconscious in their work, paying particular attention to any recurring symbols and strategies employed. I will begin by analysing the symbolisms and paradoxes of Magritte’s works, that deal more with the metaphysical aspects of the real and illusion, and then the symbolisms and the Oedipus Complex in Bellmer’s works, that deal with a more personal and psychological aspect. I intend to do so with reference to the essays of Sigmund Freud, in particular ‘On Dreams’, André Breton and essays on Surrealism.
Throughout history, there is evidence of the ‘awareness’ of the unconscious mind, but it was Sigmund Freud who developed a detailed and scientific approach to the subject. Freud stated that there exists “three qualities to mental processes: […] conscious, preconscious, or unconscious”[1]. To Freud, the unconscious mind was a repository for painful or traumatic memories, socially unacceptable ideas, socially unacceptable desires or fantasies, which he named Psychological Repression. It is important to note that the contents did not necessarily have to be negative. “In the psychoanalytic view, the unconscious is a force that can only be recognized by its effects — it expresses itself in the symptom.”[2] Freud wrote how dreams are like the visualisations of the unconscious mind, that “dream-symbolism […] is in all probability of a characteristic of the unconscious thinking which provides the dream-work with the material for condensation, displacement and dramatisation”[3] p.28. In his essay ‘On Dreams’, he describes how dreams, as well as other “psychopathological structures” have a “fundamental pattern”, namely “Repression – relaxation of the censorship – the formation of a compromise” [4]p.25
Surrealism, was defined by it’s founder André Breton, as:
SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern.
ENCYCLOPEDIA. Philosophy. Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all, all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principal problems of life. […][5]
Person Meditating on Madness, 1928 Oil on canvas, is considered one of the most provocative paintings by the Belgian Surrealist René Magritte. The painting shows a man, presumably Magritte, staring at a blank surface with flared nostrils and an almost evil smile. One has to question whether the protagonist is “merely meditating on the nature of madness or is he experiencing a psychotic state himself?”[6]. This painting suggests he is projecting dark thoughts and visions from his mind onto the surface, forever hidden from the onlooker. André Breton wrote, in The First Manifesto of Surrealism that “Among all the many misfortunes to which we are heir, it is only fair to admit that we are allowed the greatest degree of freedom of thought. It is up to us not to misuse it. To reduce the imagination to a state of slavery – even though it would mean the elimination of what is commonly called happiness – is to betray all sense of absolute justice within oneself. Imagination alone offers me some intimation of what can be, and this is enough to remove to some slight degree the terrible injunction; enough, too, to allow me to devote myself to it without fear of making a mistake (as though it were possible to make a bigger mistake). Where does it begin to turn bad, and where does the mind’s stability cease? For the mind, is the possibility of erring not rather the contingency of good? […] There remains madness, ‘the madness that one locks up’, as it has aptly been described. […] victims of their imagination”[7]
Throughout Magritte’s artistic career, his works can be “defined as an unending meditation on the nature of madness”[8]. Such a definition is understandable: during his upbringing, Magritte had an intimate relationship with his mother, who he perceived as being mad and in 1912, when he was just 13 years of age, she drowned herself in the River Sambre. When her body was found, her nightgown was wrapped around her face, whether from the river’s currents or to veil her eyes from the death that she had chosen.
Symbolism, viewed more a philosophy than a style of art, almost stands as a derivative of Magritte, who was often perceived as a philosopher more than an artist. So evident are symbolisms in Magritte’s work that Bernard Delvaille described his work as being “symbolism plus Freud”[9]
Rocks, which are associated with heaviness and immobility, defy gravity by floating in mid air in The Glass Key and The Battle of Argonne, 1959- the “paradoxical antithesis of gravity”[10]. One is unsure as to whether the rocks are stationary, falling or travelling through a trajectory. As with “the ambiguity of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’”, in The Seducer, 19, and Evening Falls, 19, “Magritte avoids any absolute finality of placement by playing on the bipolarity of ‘here’ and ‘now’”[11]. Magritte explains that in the objects in his paintings exists another object hidden. Similarly in Freud’s On Dreams, in which he explains that although in some dreams an “Emperor and Empress (might) stand for the parents […] and symbolism such as a staircase or going upstairs (can) represent sexual intercourse, […] one can never tell whether any particular element in the content of a dream is to be interpreted symbolically or in its proper sense”.[12]
Magritte’s objects require of the viewer what psychoanalysis does of dreams and of the unconscious mind, to forget the forms and meanings of the visible world and to look further to reveal their absolute identity. A perfect example of this, regarded as Magritte’s most famous composition, is his This Is Not a Pipe paintings, where an image of a pipe is visible with the words ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’,
Painting has no thickness: thus my painting with the cigar, for example, has no perceptible thickness. The thickness of the cigar is in the mind. This is not lacking in importance if a preoccupation with the truth has any importance. In fact, a painting conceived and painted with this preoccupation must have the unequivocal character of an image. It is not a cigar which one sees, but the image of a cigar.[13]
Born in 1902, Hans Bellmer’s great obsession was creating an artificial being – a doll- onto which he projected his hopes, longings and desires. Unlike René Magritte, who explored more the “metaphysical theories about reality and illusion”[14] and the unconscious, Bellmer’s work throughout his career depicts strongly, his own psychological repressions, sexual desires, anxieties, and an Oedipus Complex, which “in psychoanalytic theory, is a group of largely unconscious (dynamically repressed) ideas and feelings which centre around the desire to possess the parent of the opposite sex and eliminate the parent of the same sex.”[15] Bellmer, “framing his personal history in self-consciously oedipal terms, convinced his biographer, Peter Webb, that his early family experience ‘could have come straight out of one of Sigmund Freud’s casebooks’. Webb reinforces and elaborates this construction, contrasting the artists’ contempt for an authoritarian Prussian father with his lifelong affection for a gentle and supportive mother.”[16]
Professor Susan Rubin Suleiman of Harvard University, has argued for surrealism in general that the “ubiquitous representation of the female body is essentially an “accessory in the Oedipal skirmishes of male artists with their fathers.”[17]
Many of the drawings and illustrations by Bellmer, including the illustration for Petite Anatomie de l’inconscient physique ou l’anatomie de l’image (1957), show a female body with a penis or being penetrated by one, symbolising a ‘taking over’, suppression, even a rape of a female- possibly a father figure dominating a mother figure.
There are many symbolisms that one could analyse as being ‘gateways’ into Bellmer’s unconscious, for example “Freud’s eponymous anxiety dream of the Wolf Man”[18] that can be applied, almost perfectly, to a daydream had by Bellmer, but one that I found particularly interesting, because it tells you something more sinister and, excuse the pun, deep rooted in Bellmer, is an illustration of a molar, that he engraved in the late 1950s, as if made entirely of bricks for inclusion in Petite Anatomie. It appears in the third section of Petite Anatomie, together with Bellmer’s discussion of “expression as the projection of pain or pleasure onto a ‘pre-existing image, ready to assume the role of a virtual focal point of excitation’”[19]
It is important here to note that Freud stated that “the majority of dream-symbolism serve to represent persons, parts of the body and activities invested with erotic interest; in particular, the genitals are represented by a number of often surprising symbols, and the greatest variety of objects are employed to denote them symbolically.”[20]
In The Interpretation of Dreams, which Bellmer even has noted opposite one of his tooth references in Petite Atanomie, Freud describes how the tooth is a penis symbol, “ appropriate for representational purposes when pressure is being exercised by sexual repression”[21] The illustration suggests a castration anxiety but, an early psychoanalyst and student of Freud’s, Karl Abraham’s ideas suggest aggression. He wrote that “teeth are the first instruments with which the child can do damage to the outer world. For they are already effective at a time when the hands can at most only assist their activity by seizing and keeping hold of the object …. The teeth are the only organ [small children] possess that are sufficiently hard to be able to injure objects around them. One has only to look at children to see how intense the impulse to bite is. This is the stage in which the cannibalistic impulses predominate.” [22]
Taking what Karl Abraham says of teeth, it is easy to symbolise in Bellmer’s walled tooth an “effort to check sadistic oral urges to injure, to devour. Even the misnomers given to the image, while failing to recognise the intended referent, suggest both sadism and restraint.” [23]
René Magritte and Hans Bellmer both created works that deal with the unconscious mind, yet through very different modes. René Magritte’s work derives from the metaphysical side of the unconscious mind, questioning and analysing it through various symbolisms and paradoxes. Hans Bellmer’s work, however, works as a ‘gateway’ into his own unconscious mind, his dreams.
Bibliography
Books:
Breton, André, ‘The First Manifesto of Surrealism’ in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp.447-453
Freud, Sigmund, ‘On Dreams’ in Charles Harrison & Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp.21-28;
Gablik, Suzi, Magritte, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1976)
Gedo, Mary Mathews, ‘Meditations on Madness: The Art of René Magritte’ in Terry Ann R. Neff (eds.), In the Mind’s Eye: Dada and Surrealism (Chicago: Abbeville Press, Inc., 1985), pp.63-90;
Gedo, Mary Mathews, ‘Meditations on Madness: The Art of René Magritte’ in Terry Ann R. Neff (eds.), In the Mind’s Eye: Dada and Surrealism (Chicago: Abbeville Press, Inc., 1985), pp.63-90;
Taylor, Sue, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety, (Massachusetts, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2000)
Internet:
Educational Packet, University of Wyoming Art Museum website. URL: http://www.uwyo.edu/artmuseumimages/docs/Educational%20Packet_05_Schools%20of%20Art.pdf (2009);
Oedipus Complex, Wikipedia- the free encyclopedia website.
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oedipus_complex (02/08/10);
The Structure of the Unconscious Mind by Sigmund Freud, Shippensberg University website.
URL: http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/freudselection.html\, (02/08/10);
Unconscious Mind, Wikipedia- the free encyclopedia website.
URL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscious_mind, (02/08/10);
[3] Sigmund Freud, ‘On Dreams’, p.28
[4] Sigmund Freud, ‘On Dreams’, p.25
[5] André Breton, ‘The First Manifesto of Surrealism’, p.452
[6] Mary Mathews Gedo, ‘In the Mind’s Eye: Dada and Surrealism’, p.63
[7] André Breton, ‘The First Manifesto of Surrealism’, p.447
[8] Mary Mathews Gedo, ‘In the Mind’s Eye: Dada and Surrealism’, p.63
[10] Suzi Gablik, ‘Magritte’, p.122
[11] Suzi Gablik, ‘Magritte’, p.123
[12] Sigmund Freud, ‘On Dreams’, p.27
[13] Suzi Gablik, ‘Magritte’, p.106
[14] Suzi Gablik, ‘Magritte’, p.126
[16] Sue Taylor, ‘Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety’, p.18
[17] Sue Taylor, ‘Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety’, p.21
[18] Sue Taylor, ‘Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety’, p.41
[19] Sue Taylor, ‘Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety’, p.179
[20] Sigmund Freud, ‘On Dreams’, p.27
[21] Sue Taylor, ‘Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety’, p.179
[22] Sue Taylor, ‘Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety’, p.180
[23] Sue Taylor, ‘Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety’, p.180
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