“A Shine on the Nose”: Sexual Metaphors in Surrealism

Abstract

Abstract This essay explores a curious phenomenon in the work of several European surrealist artists, notably Hans Bellmer and René Magritte, from the late 1920s through the 1950s: In images of the body, a penis may appear in place of a nose; breasts, testicles, or buttocks stand in for the eyes of a face, a vaginal opening for the nostrils, an anus for the mouth. Alternatively, disembodied arms and legs or an elongated neck take on a phallic character, or the entire body becomes an erect penis. Aside from the shock value of these disconcerting substitutions, for which the Surrealists surely strove, what are we to make of them? Psychoanalytic accounts of fetishism point to castration anxiety as one explanatory factor in the creation of such metaphors—Freud's paradigmatic fetishist cathected a “shine on the nose” in place of the missing phallus, as described in the analyst's now-classic essay of 1927. Moreover, the aggression underlying an artist's disfiguring a face by adding genitalia is discussed in light of a general theory of caricature formulated by another contemporary of the Surrealists, Ernst Kris (“The Psychology of Caricature,” 1936.) In light of a postwar social reality that included wounded bodies and widespread devastation, Surrealism can be said to reflect the experience of actual disfigurement and death. Additionally, however, biographical information on individual artists suggest possible intrapsychic sources for the hostility behind these sexualized representations.