The double life of Irène Zurkinden

Only my Swiss friend had heard of her. “Irène Zurkinden?” she repeated back at me, “yeah, portraits and Paris, right?” Wrong. Or rather, only partially correct. And if you’d asked many members of the white trousered, crisp shirted, designer loafered crowd spilling onto the street outside Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger on a sweltering day in June, they would probably have said the same thing. Zurkinden’s hometown crowd turned out in droves to see the first institutional exhibition in Basel devoted to her work in four decades, and they probably thought they knew the artist’s work pretty well. But inside was evidence of a different Irène Zurkinden.

An inky phallus prances through a desert landscape in knee-high boots towards a trio of vulvas on supermodel-long legs. Nearby, a row of shoes transforms into a row of butts and then into a row of featureless heads. In the next room, an oil painting of a ballet studio is almost Leonora Carrington-esque in its off-kilter perspective and subject matter. Two figures – one voluptuous smudgy black, outlined by a scraping of paint from canvas, the other pale and topless – stand en pointe, their legs bent like flamingos, facing each other. In the back corner of the room, a dress-maker’s mannequin with an hourglass figure floats upside down, its feet on the ceiling. To the right, a gilded frame surrounds a black void – a mirror? Another room? Empty space? In the void there is an outlined ghost of a nude. It’s as though Henri Toulouse-Lautrec’s Woman before a Mirror has twisted away from her own reflection to look back at us and smile, knowing we are staring at her arse.

These works, and many others from private and public collections as well as from the artist’s estate, are on show at ‘Irène Zurkinden: Love, Life’. Despite the title sounding like two thirds of a pixilated printed canvas you might find in a made-for-Airbnb apartment, this show has serious ambitions. “We’re trying to show her three roles that she held,” curator Rebecca Eigen told me. “She was a mother to two children from a partner that she never married, a painter, and then also an artist.” The Paris rooftops and commissioned portraits? Those are evidence of Zurkinden’s painter persona, a brush for hire supporting herself and her children. The surrealism, darkness, and erotic humour? That’s the artist playing by her own rules.

Zurkinden grew up going to the ballet with her mother. As a young adult, she trained as a fashion illustrator, drawing the designs of the great Parisian couturiers. It was during this time that she met Meret Oppenheim, the surrealist artist best known for her fur-clad teacup. In 1929, Zurkinden went to Paris for the first time; in 1932, she took Oppenheim with her. By the end of the decade Oppenheim had joined the antifascist Gruppe 33 – its only female member at that point; in 1942, Zurkinden also joined. By then, she had met the jazz musician Kurt Fenster, son of an Afro-Brazilian circus artist and a Rhinelander from Düsseldorf, with whom she had two sons. In another inky sketch, Untitled (Self Portrait with Kurt), Zurkinden draws her side profile on the right of the canvas, her far leg bent, her near arm framing her tilted head. Facing her, his back to the viewer, is Kurt, his far arm mirroring the angle of Zurkinden’s, his near hand holding his erect penis. Although the lines are static, smooth dark trails across an expanse of paper, the couple look like they are dancing. Zurkinden’s eyes stare into the middle distance. Her nipples point towards her lover.

Zurkinden painted herself often, and a cluster of self-portraits hang together in the second room. In my favourite, she is pregnant, naked except for a red floral headscarf. She holds a long, thin paintbrush in her left hand, crotch height, so that it perfectly bisects the space between the curve of her ballooning belly and the soft slope of her thigh. A thatch of hair peeks out above two startling blue eyes looking straight out at the viewer. ‘This is me. I have nothing to hide,’ she seems to say. Zurkinden has used very little paint in this work, dabbing splotches of colour onto cardboard with such sensitivity that I found, looking at it, at her, I was holding my breath. On the wall opposite, the earliest of three portraits of Oppenheim shows a very different paint application: more, more, more. Thick lines of red and pink jostle against swoops of brown and fields of mauve. The raw canvas is only visible at the very edge.

Every essay in the lavish KBH.G catalogue (free to all visitors) describes Oppenheim and Zurkinden as ‘good friends’ but I’d heard differently. An undated sketch of Oppenheim sleeping on her bent arm is loving and precise – each line confidently placed as though Zurkinden knew the contours of her subject’s body so well that guesswork or hesitancy was unnecessary. The sketch of Oppenheim is reproduced in the catalogue – it didn’t make the cut for the show. Elsa Himmer, assistant curator, told me this show was an attempt to “pull Zurkinden out of the shadows, pull her out of a footnote”. Perhaps I’m looking for lesbianism where there isn’t any, perhaps the Swiss bourgeoisie can only handle so much, or perhaps trying to label Zurkinden’s romantic and erotic proclivities is as futile as trying to pinpoint her artistic ones.

Before I arrived in Switzerland, before I’d seen any of Zurkinden’s work in person, I’d assumed that KBH.G were taking advantage of this current moment when fascism creeps, trips, and sprints towards mainstream to showcase Zurkinden as an antifascist artist. I found something much more interesting. Eigen told me: “I think what you see more in her work is the intensity of how she wanted to explore how she saw the world.” So, freedom. Standing in the middle of the gallery, surrounded by paintings of tangled couples like sea nymphs, washing on a line like bunting, ballerinas at barre, clowns, children, and – yes – Irène herself, I realised I had a vast advantage over many of the opening night guests. I didn’t know the Zurkinden who had likely painted their grandparents, who painted the beautiful bits of Basel and Paris. The Zurkinden revealed in the sketchbooks which prompted the foundation’s director to put on this show is the same to me as the Zurkinden revealed in her surprising and often humorous paintings – from the spunky bar maid to the upskirt-view of three Cancan dancers.

Alongside true-to-size reproductions of several of Zurkinden’s sketchbooks, the catalogue features seven responses from contemporary artists (including Tracy Emin, who submitted a photograph of some blue scribbles in her own sketchbook). Their contributions, Eigen hopes, will help “tie Zurkinden into the here and now”. But on the eve of Art Basel, the “here and now”, what I saw in Zurkinden’s work was the way she used her popular and – let’s face it – slightly dull paintings to support herself, her children, and the artwork she was truly interested in. She was a woman trying to do it all – what could be more modern than that?