Henriette Hardenberg ...

from the German poet Henriette Hardenberg (Margarete Rosenberg) 1894-1993






 An image of fear     


Evil pond surrounded by full lips
Angry ruby glass bursting off the bottom.
Secret tiger paths, sandy,
Drawn around golden almond flowers,
Labyrinth passages.
And hot rain pouring down
Among a spark dance of bodies.
Mangling through and through,
Sound from the top of the tower of need.



Spring

Birch-white leg,
Love landscape,
Hips,
Her flower balcony,
Tender and gone to seed,
Full fragrance of narcissus,
You, man
I love!


Hands

Like rare animals they move up and down
And lie deep at the bottom of the sea;
Moon-colored is the stone, like a wound
Set in flowering plumage.

I fear this hidden motion,
Like wind held up in branches;
So few fingers, in figures,
Will excite thoughts in me.

The sea divides so that I can reach it -
In swaying underbrush of crystal night -
This hand, extended flat yet softly sunk,
There before my pallid face.

I don't know whether the little bones,
Rinsed by the sea, will drift and mingle,
Or if, wrapped in clouds,
They will reach up for music and dance.

I know that dreams without fragrance,
Like dead fingers rigid in the joints,
Do not give shrouded magic
For which the living call in sleep.



White and red

Clouds tumble from the skies,
Impenetrable hedges of white roses grow,
The heart, of marble, lies slain.
Snow stars float
In whitewashed time space.

A human being, resurrected, screams,
Blood sprays from the fountains of the heart,
Roses burn in arms,
Dusk shed by a lamp brightens the tears.


Longing

The houses wished for the moon;
unable to stand the edges, the hardness any longer,
they had to bend.
I lay in my room and felt
how they were shaking with longing,
how sick they were, how they swayed.
And the moon came,
and my heart grew along with it,
and its loneliness grew.
The houses held on to each other tight that night.
I kissed the moon and cried.

your mouth for a pillow...

Unica Zürn...new line of vision...

A few scans from one of my favourite books

The House of Illnesses

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A remarkable illustrated text produced during one of the author’s stays in a mental institution.

After a childhood which she describes as “wonderful,” a 7 year marriage and the birth of her two children, a carreer at the Ufa film studios in her home town Berlin when she also began to write and paint, Unica Zürn’s life changed abruptly following a series of chance meetings with the painter Hans Bellmer in 1953. She left at once for Paris with Bellmer, who had already established himself in Surrealist circles there. He encouraged her to make automatic drawings and to write the anagram poems which later brought her much acclaim. Although the two lived together in growing isolation from their outside surroundings, Bellmer introduced Zürn to many of his contemporaries: Brauner, Arp, Man Ray, Ernst, Waldberg, and above all Henri Michaux. This meeting precipitated the mental illness that was to hound the last thirteen years of her life, Zürn believed him to be the incarnation of a childhood fantasy figure, which she described lated in The Man of Jasmine: “A few days later she experiences the first miracle in her life: in a room in Paris she finds herself standing before the Man of Jasmine. The shock of this encounter is so great that she is unable to overcome it. From this day on she begins, very very slowly, to lose her reason.”

The House of Illnesses was written shortly after this meeting, during a bout of fever induced by jaundice. It was originally included in the book The Man of Jasmine but without the illustrations which accompany it here. With its sometimes wistful, sometimes humourous and ultimately hopeful mood, this text contrasts strongly with many of the other texts in that book, which bear harrowing testimony to her mental crises and her dizzying descent into her own self and a world of hallucinated images.

above text from publishers of this book

@tlas press

...my drawings

Happy Spring!.....a toast to the vernal equinox

"Allegory of  Spring"  1573

Giuseppe Arcimboldo

Untitled..my drawings

Ghislaine de Menten de Horne...... La jeune Parque

A little known Belgian artist Ghislaine de Menten de Horne and heroine of the Belgian Resistance, illustrations for an edition of La jeune Parque (The young Fate) published in 1935.

Spoken by a young woman, La jeune Parque is concerned with the battle between body and spirit; and between being and knowing.

She was born Marie Cécile Armande Ghislaine de Menten de Horne, into anaristocratic Belgian family. She attended the Académie Julian, andstudied printmaking in the studio of the engraver Paul Bornet.Subsequently she continued her artistic studies at the Académie Royaledes Beaux Arts in Brussels.

She first exhibited at the Salon des Indépendants in 1931. The thirtieswere marked by her friendships with the philosopher Marie-Anne Cochetand the writer Paul Valéry, and by her work on La jeune Parque and theunpublished Album de vers anciens. In 1942 she exhibited in the Toisond’Or and Breughel galleries in Brussels. Swept into the maelstrom ofWWII, her work with the Luc-Marc Resistance network and the romance ofher relationship with Max Londot, she did not exhibit again until 1966,with shows at the Mont des Arts and La Licorne in Brussels. Regular shows followed in her remaining years, mostly in various Brusselsgalleries, with a posthumous exhibition in the Veilingshuis“Vanderkindere” in 1996, the year after her death. Her artistic estatewas auctioned in aid of Médecins sans frontiers.

Walerian Borowczyk > Escargot de Venus(1975) & L'Amour monstre d tous les temps(1978) ...

Two short documentaries by Borowczyk, not as powerful as his surreal animations, but the subjects are well worth a look,

Escargot de Venus

Featuring Bona Tibertelli De Pisis excellent erotic graphic works - wife of writer André Pieyre de Mandiargues ­ while working in her atelier, together with fragments of her graphic works inspired by one of Remy de Gourmont's writings.

Escargot de Venus

by svarten

L'Amour monstre d tous les temps

A portrait of Serbia's erotic surrealist painter Popovic Ljuba, with Richard Wagner's Tannhauser on the sound track.

Dolorosa ~ after Hans Sebald Beham... pencil and ink 2007

another after Hans Sebald Beham

Kleksographien, Justinus Kerner and me...

A comment by a friend on this drawing of mine, made me search for images of a favourite Justinus Kerner (1786-1862) a poet,physician and "Kleksograph" from Weinsberg, Germany.

Here’s a portrait of Kerner with a portrait of Prince Adalbert of Bavaria hanging in the background, a close friend whom he had a comprehensive correspondance with, which dealt with topics such as clairvoyance, somnambulism and occultism, which i’d love to find! in the photo there is also a copy of the book "Kleksographien" (ink blots and their interpretation, the first recorded discussion) .

Kerner created his "Klesographien"  through the numerous blots on his letters and with wine :)

"In the beginning of the 20th century Hermann Rorschach adapted them to develop a projective test, which was named after him.Hermann Rorschach was a Swiss-born physician whose first and only manuscript

about this test, Psychodiagnostik, published in June 1921, described the

Rorschach procedure that he developed between 1909 and 1913 as a psychiatric

resident at Munsterlingen Mental Hospital in Russia. His procedure for exploring

perceptual and psychological processes was influenced by, among other

things, the Word Association Test that was developed by psychoanalyst Carl

Jung. In his early studies Rorschach compared the responses of psychotic patients

on Jung’s Association Test with those on the inkblot "test" and concluded

that the two tests were tapping somewhat different psychological processes.

Rorschach did not conceive of his technique as a "test" per se but as an empirically

based tool for differentiating the responses of varied groups, including

mentally retarded, schizophrenics, and other groups with known characteristics.

He believed that perceptual processes—how people organize and structure

what they see—are closely linked to aspects of the human psyche. Since the

major symptoms demonstrated by schizophrenics, the clinical population with

which he worked, involve disorders of thought and perception, it follows that

Rorschach would explore procedures to gain better insight into this disorder.

According to Ellenberger (1954), Rorschach saw himself first and foremost

as a scientist and was most interested in pursuing a career in clinical research,

not clinical practice. His development of the inkblot technique was

empirically based. So, it is of interest to note, that some of the strongest critics

of the Rorschach are those in academia and proponents of empirically

based diagnostic and treatment techniques who view the Rorschach technique

as not empirically based."

Anyway to get back to Justinus here some images from the above book,