Opposites Are One in the “Art” of Andrew Brink

The apparent oppositional concepts of desire and avoidance are analyzed by Andrew Brink, a literary scholar of creativity, who has added an informative psychobiographical text to his scholarly achievements. He explores the genesis of creative activity in the art and life of Pablo Picasso, Hans Bellmer, Balthus, and Joseph Cornell. Each is analyzed from the attachment theory elaborated by the studies of John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth.

Page 41

In this review of Andrew Brink, Desire and Avoidance in Art: Pablo Picasso, Hans Bellmer, Balthus, and Joseph Cornell: Psychobiographical Studies with Attachment Theory (New York: Peter Lang, 2007. ISBN 978-0-8204-9721-1, hardcover, vii, 211 pages, $ 68.95), I will probe his approach.

Attachment theory is based on observation of infant behavioral development and the realization that much learning interaction is remarkably similar to that of animals, or evolutionary biology. There is also dissimilarity, as much animal behavior is repeated generationally and is ultimately beneficial for survival. However, there are a number of different levels of interaction among mothers and infants, not ail beneficial. Reactive behaviors are based upon the mother’s degree of empathy and availability. Earliest

Page 90

survival strategies are so encoded in the infant that they determine adult behaviors. Attachment styles, based on observation of infants when a mother leaves them unattended, are noted. The majority of infants, sixty-six percent, are termed secure, as they protest the departing mother but greet the returning mother with pleasure. Twelve percent despair at the departure, are insecure, and show resistance and anger to the returning mother. Twenty percent are dismissive, avoidant, or clinging. In addition, a fourth subgroup, only two percent, in reaction to the ambivalent or unresponsive mother, is disorganized or more inconsistent in their reunion styles.

Adult interviews of memories of mothers support this earliest imprint. The capacity for recall ranges from coherent, reflecting the secure attachment, to dismissive or agitated. The fourth, smallest subgroup, is disorganized, repetitive, and controlling. This is an attempt to retrieve and reconstruct, or to pull together, unresolved painful feelings to alternating acceptance and rejection by the first caretaker.

The avoidant, or disorganized person, Brink maintains, may find mood regulation, and a degree of internal repair, in creative activity. However, fearful of rebuff, they develop an impenetrable personal style. Eye contact, the gaze of the artist towards the created object, becomes a restorative extension of self. The creative object becomes a substitute for the original deficient interaction. It is the conduit for adult creative action. However, it requires the audience, or substitute mother, for ultimate fulfillment.

There may be a shift from external reliance on others to a (false) positive self-model, a narcissistic image, to minimize distress. There is a consequent avoidant shift from mutually gratifying personal relationships to objects. The “transitional objects” of childhood become the artists’ created visual symbols, their salvation. Professor Brink notes that in secure attachments, a search for attunement, or closeness and responsiveness, is the origin of the aesthetic experience.

The four inventive, dysfunctional artists in Desire and Avoidance are those for whom original attunement was elusive or absent. In defense against the resultant anxiety, the defenses are never fully satisfactory, and are, therefore, obsessively repeated.

Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) was a Spanish artist of unparalleled impact in the twentieth century. His narcissistic and obsessional personality organization originated with his mother, often sick, who idealized and “aggrandized” her son. Married to a man seventeen years older, she bore two daughters after Picasso. The first was born the third day in hiding during an earthquake in Barcelona. Picasso, only three, experienced the double spasms of earth and mother. The second daughter, born when Picasso was nine, died at eight years of age.

Picasso’s choice of the seven women in his art and life was consistent with his ambivalent, intense, and avoidant style. They were vulnerable, subservient, sometimes sickly, unstable, and so adoring that they willingly sacrificed themselves to his portrayals from “burning romantic idealization to destructive gynophobia.” When Picasso was aggressive, angry, or coercive, which perhaps triggered his inventiveness, his females were depicted as prostitutes, sliced into cubist portions, slashed in primary livid colors in sadomasochistic, erotic portrayals. “‘Every time I collect wives (women) I should bum the last one. That way I would be rid of them…. Maybe that would bring back my youth. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.’” In fact, it was often the women who were destroyed. Of the seven major conquests, by whom he had three children, two women and a grandson, committed suicide.

Hans Bellmer (1902-1975), a Polish-German, first studied engineering. He turned this fascination with machines to the construction and dismembering of large headless life-size dolls, which were then photographed in eroticized poses. The agonies of bodily dismembering had been part of the art scene in the German tradition of the crucified Christ, as in Grunewald, or the actual staking of parts of dismembered bodies on tree branches, as in Goya’s etchings of “Disasters of War,” which were based on actual scenes of Napoleonic French invasion atrocities.

In one of Bellmer’s works, separate body parts are left hanging on a wall. In another, two bodies are separated at the waist, recombined with legs facing opposite directions, surveyed at the buttocks by an upright torso. Brink reconstructs Bellmer’s life according to attachment theories. Although Bellmer’s demeanor was reserved and correct, his fantasy private life was surrealistic and perverse. The “correct” exterior was learned from his father, a tyrannical military officer, often absent, hated and feared by his

Page 91

two sons. They were left with a puritanical mother to whom his brother and he became “like adorable little girls.”

He often drew girls from a local orphanage, suggesting their availability as fantasy objects without protection. Suspected of being half Jewish, he married four times, the second to a French woman, whom he used to leave German occupied areas. His third wife theorized that Bellmer needed to create an imaginary evil as a curative device to cure the evil he was suffering. His fourth and most disturbed wife, who later committed suicide, was photographed as a headless and bound female image. Brink suggests this was seen as an attempt to control and bind the mother, to restrict her freedom while cherishing her as a caretaker.

Attachment to a feminizing mother would permanently create an identity crisis in a sexually active male. He might perversely identify with this aspect of himself, while attempting to liberate/ destroy it. Bellmer’s sadistic constructs and photographs violated female intactness. His images appear the most personally perverse and dysfunctional of the four artists’.

Balthus (1908-2001), a French painter, is best known for his many later, realistic paintings of adolescent girls caught in equivocal private moments of abandonment. Nude, or seminude, with legs seductively apart, they appear mutually engaged in the voyeuristic setting. A particularly distressing image is that of a seminude girl lying limp over the lap of her disheveled music teacher. The lesbian instructor plays her student’s arched body like a guitar, pulling the head back with finger on the inner thigh. Balthus’ artistic role models were, surprisingly, the remote, but objective artists, Piero della Francesca and Nicolas Poussin.

Balthus’s mother thought him marvelous. She spoke of her two sons as “her pleasure and her playmates.” The pedophiliac mother was domineering and suffocating, while the father remained remote. Balthus witnessed his mother’s indulgence in drugs and affairs, notably with the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Brink speculates that Balthus feared he would not remain separate from his mother, that a merger would nullify his masculinity. Perhaps, too, in an attempt to convert his responsive desire for her and restore her pureness, he employs these “pre-beings, sacred perfect beauties.”

Joseph Cornell (1903-1972), an American artist, is known for his enigmatic boxes. His childhood family experiences were disruptive and restrictive. The mother was alternately adoring and critical. The father was often traveling, leaving the mother alone with their four children, and when he died of leukemia, the family’s financial situation changed dramatically from affluent to modest. Joseph’s attendance at a private school was terminated because of panic attacks and anxiety. Thereafter he was virtually housebound, a devoted caretaker of his brother who suffered from muscular dystrophy. Joseph’s recurrent depression, sexual obsession, and lack of intimate female relationship was alleviated by careful attention to and appreciation of nature recorded in extensive journal writing. He found solace, too, in a reliance on self-abnegating Christian Science.

A compulsive collector of photos and discarded objects, he immersed himself in his basement workroom. There he combined disparate memorabilia with photos of movie stars, Victorian ballerinas, and opera divas. From sexual fantasies, isolation, and emotional poverty, he created an art recapturing the past. However, the partial figures appear not vivified but trapped. The alternation of adoration and distancing from his mother, the loss of his father and beloved grandparents, spurred him to develop fantasy populations. These became circumscribed constructions ordered in the multiple subdivisions of wooden boxes. He captured inanimate objects and idealized images like dead butterflies on pins.

Andrew Brink’s carefully researched and illuminating studies remind us that there is no such thing as a fully isolated work of art. These artists are the products of “Mothering gone wrong.” Our fragmented world responds to these images as they reflect our disturbed and disturbing group fantasies and issues.

Page 92