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| Cover of 1958 edition of House of Incest |
By Sandra Rehme
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandra-rehme-38399358
For the University College London
PhD History of Art
Excerpts:
An interdisciplinary analysis of Nin’s practical application of her idea of a synthesis of the arts with a main focus on her involvement with artists and composers in the America of the 1950s and 60s.
Chapter One starts with Nin’s collaboration with Val Telberg, discussing "analogies and points of friction in Telberg’s visual translation of the texture of Nin’s language and the themes in the novel on two levels: poetics and gender."
Chapter One: “Spiritual X-Rays” – Val Telberg’s Photomontages for Anaïs Nin’s House of Incest (1958)
Nin found her ideal candidate in photographer Val Telberg who she commissioned in 1954 to design the entire book. When it was published in 1958, it included ten photomontages by Telberg: nine inside the book and one on the front cover.
Like Nin... Telberg saw himself as labouring against realism. In his photomontages, he created richly textured dream-scenarios through the over-layering of multiple negatives similar to superimposition in film, which often featured the human figure, body parts and street scenes. The technique of manipulating photographs goes back to the nineteenth century, but the term ‘photomontage’ was coined by the Berlin Dadaists after WWI.7 The ‘invention’ of the technique as art practice, however, is claimed by both Berlin Dadaists and Russian constructivists who began experimenting with the method of collageing photographic elements in the same year, 1919. Benjamin Buchloh argues that the question who introduced the technique into the “transformation of the modernist paradigm” is unimportant. What is of importance, he writes, is the “inherent potential and consequences of the reintroduction of (photographic) iconic imagery at precisely the moment when mimetic representation had seemingly been dismantled and definitely abandoned.”8 Artists like Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch and Kurt Schwitters began creating montages out of cut-up photographs with a collage-like appearance to critique power structures. Their composite images were made to resembled propaganda posters and often included satirical slogans. In the late 1920s and 1930s, European surrealists began using montage techniques to create dreamscapes and explore the “marvellous transformations of objects”, but in their work the montage-process was often hidden. Max Ernst’s photomontages of the late 1920s were still largely based on a collage-approach, whereby photographs were cut out from various sources and combined in different ways. In the 1930s, however, photographers like Raoul Ubac, Brassaï and Man Ray began developing different techniques to manipulate the negative itself through solarisation, superimposition and petrification. New ‘realities’ were now created in the dark-room and not through a process of cutting and pasting. We will see that Telberg drew on similar strategies as these surrealist photographers, but his use of the art practice in America of the 1950s also differed from that of his predecessors. He also referenced other art practices to represent what he described as “what goes on unseen in one’s mind”. Before Nin commissioned Telberg to design her book, he had acted as technical advisor to Hugo during the making of his ‘poetry film’ Bells of Atlantis (1952) which was based on the prologue to House of Incest. He later also helped Hugo with the superimposition effects for his film Jazz of Lights (1954).12 In the early 1950s, the American poetry film revival was at its peak when filmmakers like Hugo explored the close relationship between the way poetic language and film were structured – a subject I will explore in my next chapter on Bells of Atlantis. Telberg’s work drew heavily on strategies adapted from film and he also shared the belief in the enhancing cross-fertilisation between poetry and image. He was not only familiar with the relationship between poetry and film, but had experimented with the juxtaposition of poetry and photomontage. Telberg used strategies like symbolism, condensation and juxtaposition to create what can be called a poetic visual language. This may also explain why Telberg got most attention not from other photographers, but poets and film-makers. He was friends with Greenwich Village poets like Frank O’Hara, Kenneth Koch and John Ashberry, and had been previously hired to produce cover designs for volumes of poetry including Louise Varèse’s translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1945). He had also experimented with poetry himself. For an exhibition at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center in 1949 he composed poetic phrases to create greater coherence among
the 100 prints on show.
Telberg started working on Nin’s book in 1954. Nin gave him free reign not only over the choice of images he was to contribute, but over the entire design of the book, including the front cover and sectioning of the text. She wrote to Telberg: “In my letter I told you to design the book as you pleased, to enhance and suit the photographs”. In preparation for the project, Nin only advised him to read her writing, which he must have been familiar with already through his work on Bells of Atlantis. She still remained a strong presence during the development processt hough, as Telberg cleared every creative decision he made with her first. He sent Nin different variations of photomontages for each chapter and asked for her opinion. She sometimes commented directly on the back of the prints and sent them back to him with an accompanying letter [Fig. 1.13]. Most of her comments, however, were relatively brief. We can see from these remarks and the letters she wrote to Telberg that she did not intervene heavily in any artistic decision, but only stated whether she liked or disliked a particular image Telberg had sent her.
The final selection process took place in 1957 and the book was published the following year. Nin was pleased with the result. She wrote to Telberg in 1957/8: “I truly feel you have done it, captured the book’s intent without illustration. Beautiful work – subtle textures and suggestiveness.” This suggests that Telberg made use of the creative freedom Nin granted him, which is even more pronounced in another letter. There, Nin explained that the images were “poetic in their own right – in their own language”.21 Both comments suggest that Telberg’s pictures were not mere illustrations of the narrative content of the novel, but somehow visualised its intention. Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary defines an illustration as “a picture or diagram that helps make something clear”.22 According to this definition, book illustrations are determined by a co-dependency between text and image, whereby the emphasis, however lies on the text. But Nin’s comments imply that Telberg’s visual language somehow differed from the text, was even independent of it. It is important to note that originally, Nin had thought about using existing photomontages from Telberg’s Colorado Springs exhibition for her book, which had no direct relation to her writing, but then abandoned the idea in favour of newly commissioned work.
See also: Paul Heron, ‘Anaïs Nin’s Artistic Associations: Val Telberg’, The Anais Nin Blog, posted 9th, February 2010, http://anaisninblog.skybluepress.com/2010/02/anais-nin%E2%80%99s-artisticassociations-val-telberg/. or: http://anaisninblog.skybluepress.com/?s=telberg
Link to full dissertation here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jgdbr5ebz5uxuit/Sandra%20Rehme_Thesis_%28edited%20version%29.pdf?dl=0
There is very little written material available on Val Telberg and his collaboration with Nin. In 1994,
Jim Richard Wilson curated the exhibition ‘Val Telberg & Anaïs Nin: House of Incest’ first shown at
the Opalka Gallery of The Sage Colleges in Albany, which featured Telberg’s photo montages
alongside the correspondence between Telberg and Nin during their collaboration for the 1958 edition
of House of Incest . Most of Telberg’s photomontages for the book and other material documenting
their collaboration are kept in the Opalka Gallery archive. Although the book only used ten photomontages by Telberg, he produced over 100 studies for the project. See ‘Val Telberg & Anaïs Nin: House of Incest’, Ackland Art Museum exhibition brochure 1997. For more information of the life and work of Val Telberg see Van Deren Coke, Introduction to Val Telberg (San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1983); Cynthia Wayne, Dreams, Lies, and Exaggerations: Photomontage in America (The Art Gallery, University of Maryland at College Park, MD., 1991); Val Telberg, ‘ Art and the Subconscious: The Multi-Negative Photography of Vladimir Telberg-von-Teleheim’ , American Artist (Jan. 1949). Van Deren Coke and Diane C. Du Pont, Photography: A Facet of Modernism (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1986); Doreen Tiernan, ‘A Batch of Dreams – The Collaborative Art of Anaïs Nin and Val Telberg’, in Opalka Gallery brochure for the exhibition Val Telberg and Anais Nin: House of Incest (1994).
