Gradiva
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Gradiva (Latin, "The one who walks") is a bas-relief of a robed woman. This Italian sculpture was the basis for the 1903 novel Gradiva: A Pompeiian Fancy by German writer Wilhelm Jensen, which in turn became the basis for Sigmund Freud's famous 1907 study Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva ("Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens Gradiva").
Allusions/references from other works
Sigmund Freud famously analysed Hanhold's dreams ("Der Wahn und die Träume in W. Jensens Gradiva", 1907), a unique example of his psychoanalysing a fictional character. Freud interpreted Hanhold's fetish as being a substitution for unresolved feelings for his childhood playmate, Zoe Bertgang.
Freud owned a copy of this relief, which can be found on the wall of his study (the room where he died) in 20 Maresfield Gardens, London—now the Freud Museum. The relief is believed to have been taken from an original held in the Vatican Museum (rather than Naples, where Jensen fictionally places it).
Salvador Dalí used the name Gradiva as a nickname for his wife, Gala Dalí. He used the figure of Gradiva in a number of his paintings, including Gradiva encuentra las ruinas de Antropomorphos (Gradiva finds the ruins of Antropomorphos). The figure Gradiva was used in other Surrealist paintings as well. Gradiva (Metamorphosis of Gradiva), 1939, by Andre Masson explores the sexual iconography of the character.
In 1937 the Surrealist wirter Andre Breton opened an art gallery on the Left Bank, 31 rue de Seine, christening it with the title: Gradiva. Marcel Duchamp designed it, giving its door the form of a double cast shadow.
In 2006, the late (deceased 2008) French writer and moviemaker Alain Robbe-Grillet released a feature film entitled "C'est Gradiva Qui Vous Appelle", which was roughly based on the earlier Gradiva novel, although updated to modern times (at least, no earlier than the 1970s, based on vehicles and appliances seen in the film). It begins with an English art historian named John Locke who is doing research in Morocco on the paintings and drawings that French artist Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) produced when he spent time in that country (back then, a French colony) more than a century before. Locke spots a beautiful, mysterious blonde girl (Gradiva, of course) in flowing robes dashing through the back alleys of Marrakech, and becomes consumed with the need to track her down. Like most of Robbe-Grillet's cinematic output, this film is highly surrealistic and also involves a surprisingly explicit amount of "sex slave" nudity and S&M, although it is a serious film and not just softcore fluff.
References
- Wilhelm Jensen's Gradiva (1903)
- Sigmund Freud's Delusion and Dream in Jensen's Gradiva (1907)
See also
