The Lady of the Glove: Francesca Woodman and Surrealism

By Celia Bùi Lê

Studio Institute Research Intern, Summer 2021

I. Embodying

“I wish words had the same relationship with my images that photographs have with words in André Breton’s Nadja. He captures all the illusions and the enigmatic details of some pretty ordinary snapshots and illustrates the stories. I want my photographs to condense experience into small images that contain all the mystery of fear or whatever it is that’s latent in the eyes of the viewer, and bring it out as though it were her own experience.” (Francesca Woodman in a letter to Edith Schloss, 1980).

Woodman was referring to Nadja, an iconic work of the Surrealist movement by French writer André Breton. The cover of the 1964 Livre de Poche edition features Nadja’s self-portrait: her head and eyes emerging from the glove, but the rest of her facial expression concealed by a heart with the number “13” on it.  In the eponymous Nadja, Breton recounts a ten-day affair with the titular character, a woman named Nadja (“in Russian [Nadja] is the beginning of the word hope, and because it's only the beginning”¹). After Nadja was revealed to be mad and her character has been demystified, the narrator realizes he cannot continue a relationship with her. He stops seeing her but then longs for Nadja again in her absence. Notably, the narrator writes extensively about gloves, one worn by a woman, the other an object:

I also remember the apparently jocular proposition once made in my presence to a lady, asking that she present to the “Central Surréaliste” one of the remarkable sky-blue gloves she was carrying on the visit to us at “Centrale,” my sudden fear when I saw she was about to consent, and my supplications that she do nothing of the kind. I don’t know what there can have been, at that moment, so terribly, so marvelously decisive for me in the thought of that glove leaving that hand forever. And even then this matter did not assume its true proportions, I mean those which it has retained, until after the moment this lady proposed coming back to lay on the table, on the very spot where I had so hoped she would not leave the blue glove, a bronze one she happened to possess and which I have subsequently seen at her home—also a woman’s glove, the wrist folded over, the fingers flat—a glove I can never resist picking up, always astonished at its weight and interested, apparently, only in calculating its precise weight against what the other glove would not have weighted at all.²

Nadja, famous for its opening question “Who am I?” and its ending “Beauty will be convulsive or not be at all,” has solidified the glove as an iconography of the Surrealist movement. Breton wrote in his Manifestoes of Surrealism: “Surrealism will usher you into death, which is a secret society. It will glove your hand, burying therein the profound M with which the word Memory begins.”⁴ To glove, is to cover and protect, to mask and to hide.

Francesca Woodman was aware of this iconic symbolism and experimented continuously often with the glove motif. According to Abigail Solomon-Godeau in her essay “Body Double,” Woodman was familiar with a print cycle by Max Klinger from 1876-81, whose narrative turns on a woman dropping her glove and the compulsive pursuit of the woman by the man who picks it up.⁵ Libreria Maldoror, the bookshop that opened in 1977 on Via del Parione 41 in Rome and which Woodman frequented, was also proposing an unrealized project about gloves in which she would’ve been one of the commissioned artists.⁶ As such, Woodman would have been aware of the erotic & fetishist Surrealist connotations behind articles of women’s clothing, such as shoes and gloves. Paraphrase of the Finding of a Glove, or Glove Cycle (which Woodman was familiar with, according to Solomon-Godeau), is a series of ten drawings first exhibited at the Berlin Art Association in 1878. In Handlung (Action), a woman dropped her glove, never picking it up. And in Wünsche (Desires), the man is sitting on his bed in anguish, the glove in front of him. The glove was never returned, and instead, we see a romantic landscape in place of the bedroom walls. The glove is the dreamer’s object of desire. The narrative is focused on a trance-like state of continuous pursuit and obsession, much like Breton’s Nadja or Marcel Proust’s Albertine.

Aware of the iconography, Woodman often incorporated gloves into her photos, by holding them and staging them as a subject, or by utilizing the concealing property of a glove to hide aspects of herself.

Additionally, in Rome, she produced a series of photos in the Fassi Bar with friend Sabina Mirri, depicting themselves sitting at a table in a cafe, in which the protagonist is a glove.⁷ In the first photograph, Woodman's figure is blurred and encompassed in shadow in contrast with Mirri’s bright, sharp one (Fig 3). In the second, she moves into the foreground, her figure soft and exuding femininity while she holds the gloves, while Mirri remains at the table with the teapot (Fig 4). In the last photo, Mirri’s gaze seems to meet Woodman's as the gloves are in their most visible stage (Fig 5). The glove seems to serve its purpose for self-representation in these selected images: as Woodman continuously moves and disappears from the frame, the gloves are continually displaced, either worn or hidden. Meanwhile, Sabina Mirri remained in a mostly static position.

Another notable instance of Francesca Woodman and the iconography of gloves are some of the works she made during her time at the MacDowell Colony, New Hampshire. In these photos, she wears patterned dresses, her arms then covered in bark—which eventually blend in with her surroundings (Fig 8). The reference here, as many have pointed out, is the myth of Apollo and the river nymph Daphne. Chased by Apollo for his pursuit of love, Daphne calls upon her father, Peneus:

Her strength spent, pale and faint, with pleading eyes she gazed upon her father’s waves and prayed, “Help me my father, if thy flowing streams have virtue! Cover me, O mother Earth! Destroy the beauty that has injured me, or change the body that destroys my life.” Before her prayer was ended, torpor seized on all her body, and a thin bark closed around her gentle bosom, and her hair became as moving leaves; her arms were changed to waving branches, and her active feet as clinging roots were fastened to the ground her face was hidden with encircling leaves.⁸

Upon Daphne’s metamorphosis, Apollo vows to render Daphne, now a laurel tree, to be evergreen using his powers of eternal youth and immortality. Woodman, using the bark of the birch as gloves, has initiated this transformation by immersing herself in the landscape. A Surrealist in her own right, Francesca utilized the glove motif to mask herself, to become the object of desire, and to transcend reality—emphasizing the gnostic sur in Surrealism.

II. Feminizing

Dialogues about Francesca Woodman’s works are often enunciated with details of her death—almost every single publication written about her will mention that Francesca died by suicide at twenty-two (although recently in 2019, the Portrait of a Reputation exhibition from George Lange’s collection at MCA Denver did go against the grain by giving us a more nuanced view of Woodman). There were many, many attempts made to psychoanalyze Woodman’s works and why they might have foretold her impending doom. In “The Self and the World: Negotiating Boundaries in the Art of Yayoi Kusama, Ana Mendieta, and Francesca Woodman,” the author is aware of these psychoanalysis attempts, yet still decided to mention Woodman and other women artists’ personal lives:

While not attempting to psychoanalyze these artists, knowledge of such salient biographical facts as Kusama’s voluntary residence in a Tokyo psychiatric hospital for the past twenty years, Mendieta’s exile from Cuba to the United States and poignant early death, and Woodman’s suicide at age twenty-two may contribute to an understanding of the sources and meanings of their highly-intense self-representations, so deeply rooted in their own experience.⁹

It seems that too often, interpretation of Woodman’s works cannot escape the circumstances of her death. Given that the Surrealist movement was heavily influenced by Sigmund Freud's theory of the unconscious and his psychoanalysis, it’s not difficult to see why and how Francesca Woodman has been deemed a tormented genius and suicide seems like a permanent filter in interpreting her art.

When talking about the movement’s obsession with psychoanalysis and the unconscious, it’s also impossible to not talk about other obsessions with ecstasy, hysteria, and mental illnesses in the feminine body.

In The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, Salvador Dalí romanticizes women’s attitudes passionelles, once regarded as the ultimate manifestation of hysteria. The collage is made up of various photographs of women in stages of euphoria: their eyes rolled, lips slightly parted. The images are cropped to only show the women’s faces, focusing the viewer’s gaze on their expressions. The collage is disrupted by images of men’s ears and a tilting chair, and the images’ varied tints add to the disarray. In Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt (I do not see the woman hiding in the forest), René Magritte includes portraits of prominent men in the Surrealist movement (such as André Breton, Salvador Dalí, and Max Ernst) with their eyes closed, surrounding a female figure in contrapposto turning her face away, seemingly representing the feminine ideal of the Surrealist movement: La Femme-Enfant, or The Woman-Child; her body young and sexualized, an element many Surrealists incorporate into their art.

Surrealists have an obsession with stages of ecstasy, hysteria, and mental illnesses in general, especially in feminine bodies. Ecstasy and hysteria were considered poetic, freeing expressions. Mental illnesses were thought to have given people access to the Freudian unconscious. La Femme-Enfant is pure, uncorrupted by societal structures. These obsessions were used to elevate the Surrealist movement, at the expense of objectified women’s bodies. Women remain to be Muses, while Men are Seekers of the Marvelous, the ultimate meaning of reality.

We cannot talk about Surrealism without talking about women. André Breton has proclaimed in his Surrealist Manifesto: “The problem of woman is the most marvelous and disturbing problem in all the world.”¹⁰ Although women lie in the center of the movement, they are only presented as the female ideal, the femme-enfant, to be muses and companions to men. Pablo Picasso famously said that “there are only two kinds of women: goddesses and doormats.”¹¹ In a memoir, granddaughter Marina Picasso recounts: “He submitted them to his animal sexuality, tamed them, bewitched them, ingested them, and crushed them onto his canvas. After he had spent many nights extracting their essence, once they were bled dry, he would dispose of them.”¹²

When women are not seductive and without agency, they are hysteric. Indeed, the Surrealists were obsessed with the idea of submissive female bodies with mental instability and dependency. In Breton’s case, he stopped his relationship with Nadja once he felt that she was too demystified. Although Nadja features cut-out photographs of “Nadja” and her drawings, Breton never once revealed her real name. She was later revealed, through investigations, to be Léona Camille Ghislaine Delacourt. Léona Delacourt likely never saw Breton’s book. The misogyny, enacted and regulated by men, is inherent in the movement.

III. No longer muses

If misogyny is inherent in Surrealism, then, what happens should a woman enact it upon herself? Abigail Solomon-Godeau approached this question by contrasting Hans Bellmer and Francesca Woodman.

In Unica bound, artist Hans Bellmer, a man, bound his companion, artist Unica Zürn. In Horizontale, Francesca Woodman bound herself (Fig 10). Not to mention, Woodman's use of nudity is intentional, giving the photos a “timeless” and “classic” quality. Solomon-Godeau writes: “For a male artist to bind and photograph his female companion cannot be reasonably analogized to a woman artist doing it to herself for her own artistic purposes twenty years later.”¹³

Although Woodman has explicitly said that she wasn’t invoking feminism in her works, the works of Francesca Woodman have disrupted the boys’ club that is the Surrealist movement. Yet by feminizing the movement through invoking feminine ideals from themselves, as Woodman has, women Surrealists achieved the Marvelous. Essentially, while the movement itself excludes women by objectifying them, Surrealism also gave inspiration to women artists who subverted the tropes.

Returning to the glove motif, artists Elsa Schiaparelli and Meret Oppenheimer created various Surrealist gloves, from a belt—a fashion accessory, with folded hands as the buckle—to gloves with fur and wooden fingers. Oppenheimer even made gloves and screen printed thin red veins on them, turning them inside out, challenging the very purpose of gloves that we have defined at the beginning of this essay as to cover, to protect, to mask, and to hide. Through subversion, they have defied the sexual notions of the glove as a symbol of erotic pursuit. And thus, women became (reluctant) Surrealists: Frida Kahlo reportedly despised the Surrealist label, and the majority of women associated with Surrealism did not identify with it.¹⁴ Lee Miller, Leonora Carrington, Françoise Gilot—all respected artists on their own, yet their lives are forever tied to being a Muse. I am left with thoughts on how Francesca Woodman would have refuted or accepted the label, as well as reflection on a Leonarra Carrington quote: “I didn't have time to be anybody's muse.” So didn’t Woodman, constantly moving, assuming the role as both her own Muse and Seeker of the Marvelous.

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