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  • The Paris Review

    The Chimerical Creatures of Unica Zürn

    by Natalie Haddad Apr 04, 2018 4 minutes

    Left: Unica Zürn, Untitled, 1965. Right: Unica Zürn. © Verlag Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin.

    In 1970, after over a decade of intermittent hospitalization for mental illness, Unica Zürn committed suicide by jumping out the window of the apartment of her longtime companion, the Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer. Zürn is best known as the author of anagrammatic poetry and the semi-biographical novellas and , but she was also a visual artist. She had a preternatural skill for creating phantasmagorical worlds. Her pen-and-ink drawings were exhibited at galleries throughout Paris and Berlin, and she participated in the 1959 International Surrealist Exhibition.

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