The traumatic surreal: Germanophone women artists and Surrealism after the Second World War

By Patricia Allmer

The traumatic surreal is the first major study to examine the ground-breaking role played by Germanophone women artists working in surrealist traditions in responding to the traumatic events and legacies of the Second World War. Analysing works in a variety of media by leading artists and writers, the book redefines the post-war trajectories of surrealism and recalibrates critical understandings of the movement’s relations to historical trauma. Chapters address artworks, writings and compositions by the Swiss Meret Oppenheim, the German Unica Zürn, the Austrian Birgit Jürgenssen, the Luxembourg-Austrian Bady Minck and the Austrian Olga Neuwirth and her collaboration with fellow Austrian Nobel-prize winning novelist Elfriede Jelinek. Locating each artist in their historical context, the book traces the development of the traumatic surreal through the wartime and post-war period.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526149787

Patricia Allmer

Patricia Allmer is Chancellor's Fellow at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

Book preview

Introduction

And that seems to come easily to us. Ignore, overlook, neglect, deny, unlearn, obliterate, forget. (Christa Wolf)¹

Do we not know that we must first pass through Surrealism’s fields of rubble in order to be able to begin anew? (Wolfdietrich Schnurre)²

Valeska Gert (1892–1978), the Berlin-born German–Jewish cabaret performer, already notorious in Weimar Germany for her Canaille act, which represented a prostitute before, during, and after an assignation, performed in Paris at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées at 4pm on the afternoon of 6 November 1926. While Gert was probably more closely associated at that time with Dada, the show was nevertheless advertised in Le matin as a performance by ‘la danseuse surréaliste Valeska Gert’.³ This particular appearance became the occasion of a public and violent conflict between rival groups of Parisian surrealists over the long-contested proprietorship of the word ‘Surrealism’. Gert’s performance had been organised and promoted by the German–French writer Yvan Goll (born Isaac Lang, 1891–1950), aspiring leader of the surrealists and author of the first published surrealist manifesto, issued on 1 October 1924. Objecting to Goll’s use of the word ‘surréalisme’, André Breton (1896–1967), author of the second, better-known Manifesto of Surrealism, published later in October 1924, led a group of shouting, whistle-blowing fellow surrealists in an attempt to disrupt Gert’s performance. Breton was punched, and got a black eye and a police escort out of the building. Gert recalled the incident in her autobiography Ich bin eine Hexe – Kaleidoskop meines Lebens (1968):

There was a beautiful scandal (Skandal) around my dance. I couldn’t hear the orchestra any more, that’s how loud they shouted. ‘Elle est épatante! Formidable!’ [‘She’s amazing! Wonderful!’] and ‘À la porte, la vache allemande’ [‘Get out, German cow!’] and ‘La Gueule!’ [‘Shut your trap!’]. In those days what I danced was completely new and shocking. […] And the surrealists fought over me. Yvan Goll shouted: ‘This is the true Surrealism!’ André Breton cried: ‘No, this is not Surrealism!’ The audience cried alternately for and against me!⁴

This ‘scandal’ caused a minor cultural earthquake whose effects were detectable in Germany, as is clear from the report in the Berliner Tageblatt of 26 November 1926:

It was recently reported that a violent dispute over Valeska Gert in Paris had developed on the occasion of a guest dance performance, which even made it necessary for the police to intervene. As Valeska Gert tells us, this was not a dispute about her person and her dances, but a fight over Surrealism. Some supporters of this latest art form attended her dance evening, and one of them proclaimed after the dance that this was true Surrealism. The other wing of the Surrealists had protested against this with slaps in the face and roars, and this caused a riot in the front room.⁵

Marcel Berger’s article in the 11 November 1926 issue of Comœdia notes Gert’s already well-established ‘European reputation’ (‘réputation européenne’) and comments that she describes herself as ‘surrealist’ (‘surréaliste’) and a ‘dancer of ugliness’ (‘danseuse de la laideur’). Of Surrealism, Berger writes: ‘Surrealism! I will admit that this word remained a little vague in my eyes! I knew at least two groups, if not three, fighting over this label’.⁶ Berger’s slightly comic emphasis on this proliferation of Surrealisms is important. To German observers it had already been clear in 1925 that Parisian Surrealism was not a singular, unified movement but a multiplicity of positions. An article on Parisian art in the Hamburger Nachrichten of 21 February 1925 confirmed the establishment of the word ‘Surrealism’ in German popular critical discourse, noting that ‘in the last couple of months a surrealist direction has been created, however its members are already in disagreement with each other, so that they split into three sub-groups, each of whom claims to represent the true Surrealism.’⁷ From the German perspective, Surrealism existed in its early years as a polymorphous and competing set of rather indeterminate potentialities. Gert and her danses surréalistes provided a pretext, and the stimulus, for a public articulation in the German press of the movement(s) as something multiple and self-divergent, rather than singular and static. Most importantly, in both Paris and Germany it became clear from the controversy sparked by her performance that Parisian Surrealism suddenly belonged at that moment in 1926 to neither of the patrilinear lines adhered to by Breton and Goll, but occupied instead a contested discursive space, existing momentarily as a performance by a (German) woman that found itself situated within the trauma of a violent splitting.

A further and significant complexity resides in subsequent critical dispute over the date of Gert’s ‘scandalous’ performance. The German press coverage and the French press publicity cited above confirms its occurrence on Saturday, 6 November 1926. However, critical tradition has often misremembered and transposed its date to 1924, relocating this belated contest over ownership of the movement to the very moment of origin of Surrealism itself. Jeremy Stubbs, writing in 1997, gets both year and month wrong, asserting that ‘1924 was the crucial year for the two [sic] would-be Surrealisms. Open antagonism began in May with actual fisticuffs between Goll and Breton at a performance of danses surréalistes by the German dancer Valeska Gert’.⁸ Gérard Durozoi’s definitive History of the Surrealist Movement follows suit, clearly indicating that the performance, occasion of a ‘first skirmish’ in the Parisian dispute over Surrealism, took place in 1924:

In 1924, a spectre haunted Paris – at any rate, the spectre of Surrealism – and it was up to Breton and his friends to prove that they did not intend to allow anyone else to clarify its significance (or, inversely, to trivialize it). An evening at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées was the occasion for a first skirmish: ‘surrealist dances’ were scheduled to be performed by Valeska Gert, whose impresario was Ivan Goll; the group disrupted the performance with a concert of whistles, and then a row broke out between Goll and Breton, and the event ended abruptly with the arrival of the police.⁹

Mark Polizzotti’s biography of André Breton gets the year right but misdates Gert’s performance by a day, to 7 November.¹⁰ This historical confusion – which is of a different order to the kind of accidental error that (for example) leads Roger Luckhurst to misdate Breton’s 1928 work Nadja to Surrealism’s origin year of 1924¹¹ – indicates that at the heart of Valeska Gert’s disruptive performance is an event of ‘scandalously’ traumatic significance for Surrealism and for criticism of it, so traumatic that it has repeatedly (repetitiously) been displaced temporally by critics, resituated to the origin of Surrealism, becoming in the process a strange kind of birth-fantasy and affirming the symbolic significance of Gert’s disruptive and disrupted performance as an expression of Surrealism’s unavoidable multiplicity and of the pivotal position of the female surrealist artist (and, not incidentally, her dangerous creativity) within and as part of that multiplicity. Gert’s interrupted danses surréalistes provide the perfect, disruptive figure for the temporally disrupted narrative of Surrealism that critical tradition has perpetuated, a narrative of dislocated origins and displaced traumas.

In November 1926, then, a German woman artist notorious for her popular perversions and subversions of feminine performativity was the stimulus for a belated articulation of the foundational differences within and between competing masculine versions of Surrealism. If Gert’s performance of gender can be seen working disruptively within Surrealism’s myths of origin, we might also speculate on how such differences relate to other divisions and bifurcations between traditions, national identities, and historical developments (that will become frequent objects of scrutiny in this book). Goll’s German–French background (he was born in the Alsatian town of Saint-Dié-des-Voges, near Strasbourg on the German border), for example, distinguished him from Breton’s overtly (and onomastically signalled) French origins in the lower Normandy town of Tinchebray-Bocage, while the distinct but interwoven trajectories of male- and female-centred traditions of Surrealism have, in recent years, become the central concern of much scholarship and many exhibitions. Valeska Gert’s German identity, furthermore, alongside her self-identification in Paris as a performer of danses surréalistes, raises broader questions about national identifications of and with Surrealism in its early years, and in particular the question of its expression in Germany, where different artistic traditions and interests prevailed in the years immediately following the First World War.

Surrealism in Germany

From its outset, Parisian Surrealism under Breton’s aegis had been projective in impetus, conceived by artists and writers (rather than critics and curators) and already at its origin in 1924 imagining future works and defining future lines of aesthetic development through its deeply Freudian emphasis on what Breton called ‘the resolution of [dream and reality] into an absolute reality, a surreality’.¹² This nexus of concerns was clearly distinct from the then-prevalent German critical focus on aesthetic objectivity. The German critic Franz Roh sought to distinguish the French movement of Surrealism from what he understood as a specifically German post-war development in modern art, for which he coined the term ‘magical realism’ (‘Magischer Realismus’). In the ‘Foreword’ to his 1925 book on this subject (published in the same year that, as noted above, ‘Surrealism’ entered German critical language), Roh asserted, pointedly using the French spelling, that ‘Under Surrealisme we for the time being understand something different. By magical, in contrast to the mystical, it is indicated that the secret does not enter into the represented world but holds itself back’.¹³

By 1928 it was evident that German critics understood automatism to be Surrealism’s most prominent feature and consequently read the movement in explicitly Freudian terms. In a Börsen-Halle article on the French movement, ‘The Hour’, critic Wolfgang Grunow described automatic writing as ‘idea-photography’: ‘The principle is: all feelings, nervous impulses, and thoughts of the author should be reproduced in their original confusion and uncertainty. The unconscious should have as much space here as the super-ego.’¹⁴ Similarly, a 1929 article also equated Surrealism with automatism, describing it as a ‘photography of the psyche’ (‘psychische Photographie’) and asserting it to be comparable with Joycean stream-of-consciousness, and therefore distinct from the focus on objects and objectness/objectivity of Magischer Realismus and the ‘New Objectivity’ (‘Neue Sachlichkeit’) of post-war German art.¹⁵ In March 1929, the Hamburger Sezession displayed an exhibition of Neue europäische Kunst, one of the few interwar German exhibitions to focus on Surrealism. Will Grohmann’s review of this exhibition in Der Querschnitt again clearly associates Surrealism with ‘psychic automatism’, describing the movement in terms of a ‘switching off of rational and traditional inhibitions’ to represent artistically ‘the totality of life […] from the inside’.¹⁶ Grohmann notes that most of the artists exhibited in the show were living in France – ‘even the Köln-based Max Ernst is so far more acknowledged in France than in Germany’ – but he claims Paul Klee as the German ‘leader’ of the movement (despite Klee being Swiss).¹⁷ This view embodies the dominant German critical perception of Surrealism at the time as principally a French movement.

The national distinctions were occasionally more pointedly asserted. Kurt Bauer reviewed the Neue europäische Kunst exhibition in Berliner Börsenzeitung, describing Surrealism as ‘a foreign stream […] trying to penetrate the emerging movement of new German art [i.e. Neue Sachlichkeit]. Of course’, he sharply added, ‘it comes from Paris again’.¹⁸ Bauer’s pronounced nationalism furthermore perceived the French surrealist artists as ‘calculated constructivists of a degenerate intellect’.¹⁹ This use in 1929 of a term – degenerate (entartet) – destined shortly to assume grim significance in German cultural history and to encompass in its pejorative staining almost the entirety of the modernist avant-garde, including Surrealism itself, indicates the tensions surrounding the reception into German contexts, in the latter years of the Weimar Republic, of clearly non-German aesthetic movements like Surrealism.

Valeska Gert’s claim, as a German artist performing in Paris in 1926, to be specifically a surrealist dancer is thus performed within an emergent and highly contested transnational, German–French historical space in which competing narratives of aesthetic ownership intersected dynamically with myths of national identity and of creative origin. The critical revisionism of the date of her performance indicates a desire to conflate distinct moments of trauma (contested origins, public controversy, male aggression) into a single scandalous symbolic event, suppressing the polymorphous and fractured discursive space in which competing versions of Surrealism existed. Where the bilingual Yvan Goll had unsuccessfully sought to take control of the word ‘Surrealism’ (thus potentially repositioning the movement internationally), Gert’s danses surréalistes, furthermore, demonstrated the unique significance of the Germanophone woman artist within this matrix of conflicting pressures, blurring any national or linguistic proprietorship of the term.

The Nazi Party assumed power in Germany in 1933, taking control of all the mechanisms and institutions of artistic and cultural production and fatally curtailing any immediate avant-garde future. Most of the German artists associated, however loosely, with Surrealism had by then already left for Paris. Max Ernst had gone years earlier in 1922, while Grete Stern, Richard Oelze, Josef Breitenbach, and Meret Oppenheim (the subject of Chapter 1, below) had all departed in the early 1930s. Valeska Gert, finding herself subject to new Nazi prohibitions and restrictions on Jewish people and, like Jean Améry, realising that ‘the denial of human dignity sounded the death threat’,²⁰ emigrated from Berlin to England in 1933. Only a few German surrealists, such as Werner Rohde, Edgar Ende, and Otto Umbehr (Umbo), remained in Germany under the new regime. By late 1937, the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch (who had himself left Germany in 1933) could argue that ‘Surrealism (into which, in France and Czechoslovakia much of the essence of expressionism has fled) found little response in Germany. The world around us torn to pieces and the phosphorescing on the edges – all this uncanny reality found no official expression.’²¹ In August 1939, a week before the outbreak of the Second World War, the Franco-German surrealist Yvan Goll and his French wife Claire, both from Jewish families, fled Europe for America. Claire’s mother was incarcerated in Theresienstadt concentration camp, and deported on 19 September 1942 to Auschwitz, where she died.

Germanophone women artists in Surrealism

Ernst Bloch’s lament for Surrealism’s lack of traction in Germany is also an appeal for an art that would be adequate to respond to ‘The world around us torn to pieces’ – that is, he suggests, a German version of Surrealism able to respond to what was already, in 1937, the disaster of Nazism. Where Gert’s scandalous performance disturbed French Surrealism, Bloch yearns, barely a dozen years later, for a Surrealism that would disrupt the ‘uncanny reality’ of German society under Hitler, a reality soon to shatter Europe. At the end of the war, the surrealist artists who, like Breton, had escaped to America, returned to a France traumatised by four years of Nazi occupation and the devastation resulting from military liberation, coming under the sway of the new intellectual movement of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, and furthermore traumatically ruptured by the ideological split between (in the existentialist writer Albert Camus’s terms) ‘men of the Resistance’ and ‘men of treason and injustice’.²² Sartre, in What is Literature? (1947), condemned Surrealism in the language of the new philosophy: ‘Surrealism undertook the curious enterprise of achieving nothingness through an excess of being’.²³ Alyce Mahon’s detailed history of Surrealism in this period makes clear that Paris remained the centre for Breton’s version of Surrealism after the war. The Le Surréalisme en 1947 (Surrealism in 1947) exhibition at Galerie Maeght in Paris, the first post-war gathering of the movement, was the most public expression of Surrealism’s ostensible post-war renewal and its turn (led by Breton) to a ‘New Myth’, which at least (Mahon argues) ‘had certain feminine qualities to it’,²⁴ qualities including the ‘feminine form’²⁵ of Frederick Kiesler’s gallery designs. Mahon quotes a letter by David Hare discussing the French public’s relation to Surrealism at the time: ‘they say to themselves After all, it is French, it diveloped [sic] in France and now it has come back again’.²⁶

The counternarrative of origins provided by the event of Valeska Gert’s danses surréalistes suggests the possibility of recalibrating this French, Parisian, and Breton-focussed trajectory of Surrealism’s post-Second World War development by inserting another potential thread into the critical discourse, shifting its emphasis away from a singular, Breton-centred, and Paris-located history and instead towards one with a Germanophone woman artist at its problematically divided beginning. Such a seismic shift in focus, traumatic from the outset for Surrealism itself, also challenges the critical tradition’s silencing or neglect of Germanophone women artists – a repression that those artists have themselves sought repeatedly to counter. This silencing is evident, of course, in the attempt by Breton’s group of (male) surrealists to prevent Gert from performing in 1926, but also in the erasure from critical history of virtually any record of the intended content of her Parisian danses surréalistes. Gert’s performances elsewhere have been, nevertheless, documented in hundreds of photographs (key elements of the marketing repertoire of dancers and performers of the time) and written accounts. Among her works was Pause, which she gave during theatrical intervals and curtain-changes. Gert walked onto the stage, assumed a pose, and remained motionless for the remainder of the performance, as the audience grew increasingly restless. Diametrically opposed to the disrupted performance in Paris, Pause, drawing on and subverting the tradition of the tableau-vivant, interrupted the conventions of dance by imposing stasis, redefining the dancer as living sculpture, still and yet dynamised by latent movement and physical tension that found expression in the audience’s increasingly tense response to the performance’s durée. The anonymous photographer of another work, La Diseuse, has captured Gert in a gestural pose (figure 0.1), simultaneously open and inviting, and confrontational; Gert’s body, arms outstretched, legs parted with the right leg raised and bent, face upturned and head twisted slightly backward, presents an almost hieroglyphic form comprising several implicit characters (a T, a W, a reversed K or R) – a compound letter indicating how Gert manipulated physical form through compression and gesticulation.

Gert performed dances like Pause and La Diseuse in Berlin theatres in the early 1920s. Fifty years later, in 1972, another Germanophone woman artist, the Austrian Birgit Jürgenssen, made a work entitled Frau (Woman) (figure 0.2), which echoes in its form and content the photograph of Gert’s La Diseuse. Jürgenssen’s Frau presents four photographic portraits of the artist in different poses, each mapping onto one of the four letters of the word FRAU, inscribed in red on each photograph over the female body in the image. In these photographs Jürgenssen wears the black short-sleeved leotard, leggings, and plimsolls of the dancer and has her hair tied back, as if the physical performance of the word involved a kind of dance. The work’s message is clear – femininity is inscribed on the female body by language, and performed by that body through a choreography of stylised movements enacting the elements and connotations of the defining word. Following Gert’s disruptive and interruptive performances of gender, Jürgenssen prefigures in Frau the definition by Judith Butler of gender as ‘the repeated stylisation of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame’.²⁷ Jürgenssen’s art will be addressed in more detail in Chapter 3 below. Here it is important to note the continuity of thematic and formal concerns between Gert’s situating of her critique of the gaze and patriarchal power in the performing female body, into which she compresses and palimpsestically overlays a series of potential signifiers, and Jürgenssen’s comparable inscription of that body with the forms of language as defining forces, parsed out into the clarity of verbal expression – a legible sign rather than a provocative hieroglyph.

Both works use performance parodically to subvert expectations and to interrupt (in order to disrupt) the routine operation of the (patriarchal) gaze. Both works situate the female body as object, in order to subvert that situation by empowering the female body to speak. If Gert’s dances arrested attention in order to challenge and resist the imposition of legibility by the defining gaze, Jürgenssen’s enactment of the German word Frau makes clear that languages gender their speakers in complex ways that are imbricated by the histories of the nations in which they are spoken. Gert’s work was produced in the aftermath of the First World War, in a historical moment distorted by traumatic legacies, the moment that also forged Surrealism. Jürgenssen’s work is a historically delayed response to the persistence of traditions (of gender-coding, in particular) that have somehow survived the hugely distorting effects of another traumatic history, that of Nazism and the Holocaust, only to reimpose themselves, in the Austria of the 1970s, on women’s bodies.

Surrealism and trauma

As is well known, Surrealism was always already a response to the traumatic experience of early twentieth-century history. Forged in the wake of, and haunted by the experiences of, the First World War, and motivated in part by disgust at that war, which it understood as a highly destructive imperialist exercise, the radical aesthetics of Surrealism responded overtly and covertly to the cultural and psychic effects of the war’s carnage on individual and cultural consciousness – both the wider cultural impact of wartime suffering and the experiences of people who lived through it. As noted above, the movement’s earliest manifesto was published by Yvan Goll (as ‘Ivan Goll’) in October 1924. This text emphasised the distracted will-to-erasure of 1920s cultural memory as already fragile: ‘The art of entertainment, the art of ballet and music hall, curious art, picturesque art, art based on exoticism and eroticism, strange art, restless art, selfish art, frivolous and decadent art will soon cease to amuse a generation that, after the war, needed to forget.’²⁸ Goll’s focus on the ‘need to forget’ pinpoints the significance for any surrealist aesthetics of the paradoxical endurance of traumatic memory: that which must be forgotten in order to protect the subject from its damaging effects cannot simply be forgotten but, instead, returns insistently as a pathological expression of trauma. The core of my argument throughout this book involves an expansion of historical parameters – from the moment of Gert’s Pause to the broader historical period, the endless ‘post-war’ of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to which works like Jürgenssen’s FRAU respond – within which surrealist art has been considered as a set of strategic and sometimes interventionist aesthetic responses to the cultural experience of trauma.

Figure 0.1 Valeska Gert, La Diseuse, n.d.

Figure 0.2 Birgit Jürgenssen, Frau, 1972

One such response can be seen in a painting by the German-born Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim, made in 1947 and thus a product of the immediate post-war period (figure 0.3), but also of the long period of depression and intermittent artist’s block Oppenheim endured between 1937 and the mid-1950s (which will be discussed later). Wir können es nicht sehen (We Cannot See It) is a small (65 × 55 cm) oil painting in deep ochre, brown, and ash-grey tones in which a central grouping of white abstract or semi-humanoid figures comprise what appears as a pile of bodies lying prostrate at or falling towards the base of a dark brown-to-black central shaft which, at its peak, breaks volcano-like into a burst of lighter reds, as if depicting an explosion. These reds are echoed on each side of the base of the central form. Higher up, from this dominant central form smaller blocks of ochre and brown branch out to left and right, echoing the pattern of the white shapes and structuring the painting into a rudimentary double-crucifix, or an abstracted study (perhaps echoing Francis Bacon) of figures at the base of a single large cross. The lower portion of the image is a field of bluish-grey in which we seem to detect reflections of the white figures, as on water or ice, but on closer inspection these greyish daubs resemble a tangle of limbs, and some of the figures seem to be stylised human shapes wearing coned hats while others resemble tree branches stripped of leaves. The top left corner fades towards the edges to a dull white. Amid these lighter fields the painting oscillates between large areas of near-darkness and the smaller central pattern of fragmented light-shapes (which are also jagged, like flashes of lightning), creating a visual rhythm suggesting elements of landscape (reinforced by the prevalence of mud and ash tones but undermined by the painting’s portrait format) from which perspective has been flattened, leaving the tension between horizontal and vertical gestures as the dynamising element.

Figure 0.3 Meret Oppenheim, Wir können es nicht sehen, 1947

The painting is mentioned briefly in Isabel Schulz’s contribution to the catalogue for the Oppenheim retrospective at Kunstmuseum Bern in 2006. This seems to be the only time it has been critically discussed. Arguing that the artist develops ‘an abstract painting that questions or eliminates the visual appearance of the phenomenon of the fleeting’, Schulz notes that works like Wir können es nicht sehen ‘make tangible seeing at the limits of visibility’.²⁹ These works, she suggests, ‘refer to the existence of a spiritual world outside of consciousness, beyond the intellect’.³⁰ This reading of the painting conforms to the dominant critical narrative about Oppenheim’s art, which centres on the persistent notoriety of her best-known work, Le Déjeuner en fourrure (Breakfast in Fur, 1936), and its dangerous and highly eroticised tactility (hence Schulz’s emphasis on ‘making tangible’).³¹ Schulz’s interpretation also inserts Oppenheim into the dominant narrative about post-war surrealist art and the Bretonian ‘New Myth’ noted above, reading outwards from the painting into the perceived nebulousness of a vague spirituality.

But her analysis leaves unaddressed the questions implied by the painting’s title – what is the ‘it’ that we cannot ‘see’? And how does what we can see in the painting relate to that which ‘we cannot see’? Schulz rightly connects this painting to a later sequence of ‘Fog Pictures’ Oppenheim made in the mid-1970s (notably Verborgenes im Nebel [Hidden in the Mist] of 1974, with its fragments of colour floating in a fog effected by multiple pencil lines and thin washes of light grey, and Mann im Nebel [Man in Fog] of 1975, in which a human figure seems to struggle against a gale, striding from left to right).³² This link with much later works suggests a sustained thematic preoccupation with the painterly depiction of that which cannot be seen or is obscured from clear vision. Wir können es nicht sehen also connects to a long sequence of depictions of burials and underground scenarios, such as the inverted surreality of Das Paradies ist unter der Erde (Paradise Is Under the Earth, 1940), the underground snake of Brasilia und die grosse Erdschlange (Brasilia and the Giant Earthsnake, 1968), or Baumwurzeln (Tree Roots, 1962). These extend to container works such as the wooden box and noodles of Kasten mit Tierchen (Cabinet with Small Animals, 1936/63) or the oil painting La nuit, son volume et ce qui lui est dangereux (Night, His Volume, and What Is Dangerous to Him, 1934), and depictions of burial such as In der Nacht sterben (Dying at Night, 1953), in which a horizontal corpse sprouts a tree-like object.

Burial and containment (along with concealment, demonstrated in her many masks) are, it seems, insistent tropes in Oppenheim’s work, suggesting that the ‘it’ that we ‘cannot see’ in Wir können es nicht sehen may refer not to a single thing but to a prevalent aesthetic concern with that which disappears upon being buried or hidden from view, and thus with what Schulz terms ‘the limits of visibility’, which may also be understood in painterly terms as the limits of representation. Oppenheim’s painting expresses in symbolic form, perhaps, a personal crisis (which will be addressed more fully in Chapter 1) – the tension between figural and symbolic itself figuring the blocked artist’s struggle to re-enter the field of representation, the explosive violence of the painting gesturing towards an eruption of desire. But it also intersects with the history within which it was produced – an immediate history of war and its aftermath, violence, destruction, and death, coded into the image as distorted figures, semblances of broken or fragmented human and natural forms like trees, and a colour-palette clearly redolent of paintings of the trenches of the First World War or, more pertinently, the more historically immediate firestorms of Dresden or Hiroshima. In its attempt, and failure, to represent this history directly, in its offering up instead approximation, evasion, a hieroglyphic circumlocution of that which, its title claims, we cannot see, the painting gestures towards the prohibition signalled by that title. History, it asserts, is unseeable to us. And yet. In depicting what we fail to see, that which resists or refuses representation, Wir können es nicht sehen prefigures paintings like Anselm Kiefer’s Painting = Burning, made in 1974 (when Oppenheim was producing her fog pictures), of which Andrew Benjamin has written that ‘All that is revealed is that which refuses representation: the Holocaust, nuclear annihilation, the remains of the after war’.³³

Benjamin’s insight reveals to us the significance of Oppenheim’s painting, made three decades before Kiefer’s. The central form of the painting resembles an inverted mushroom cloud like that seen in a famous press photograph of the Nagasaki bombing of 9 August 1945. The figures with cone-shaped heads resemble Japanese figures wearing the traditional hats called Kasa. The painting, in this reading, registers a seismic historical trauma – the atomic bombing of Japan, particularly as recorded in photography and movietone news documentary (both of which seem to have influenced Wir können es nicht sehen) – an iconographic motif to which Oppenheim repeatedly returns, in paintings like Rote Wolke (Red Cloud) of 1972. Such insistent thematic concerns are both reflective and interventionist. They indicate a persistent concern in Oppenheim’s art with engaging with, responding to, and aesthetically processing the impacts of major and traumatic historical events. To attend to this concern is to recalibrate critical understanding of her oeuvre and, more broadly, of art by women surrealists, shifting focus towards its enmeshing in and engagement with complex histories and repressions.

Oppenheim asserted in