10/17/2025
October 19th: In Memory of Unica Zürn and Ruth Henry
Unica Zürn (1916–1970) was a German author and artist, long revered in cult circles for her hallucinatory, semi-autobiographical novels. She was also highly-regarded for her anagrammatic writings and more recently for her “automatic” drawings, a re-evaluation spearheaded by Ubu Gallery. Although definitely not an outsider, she shared two of the three principal characteristics of outsiders: untrained as an artist and suffering from psychosis. This later trait was vividly expressed by her jumping from the window of the apartment of her companion, Hans Bellmer, on October 19, 1970.
Ruth Henry (1925–2007), her translator from German into French and perhaps her closest friend, died on October 19, 2007, coincidentally the same day 37 years later. Ruth Henry was deeply steeped in the Surrealist milieu, both as a translator and as the wife of the Surrealist artist, Maurice Henry. She was friends with major Surrealist figures, including Max Ernst, Man Ray, Meret Oppenheim and Marcel Duchamp. Among other significant projects, she translated André Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto” and Simone de Beauvoir’s “The Coming of Age” from French to German, and was an accomplished author in her own right.
https://www.ubugallery.com/
