"The Itinerary of a Glove," an essay by Daniel Barbiero

Berlin, 1881

The scene is a roller skating rink not long before the turn of the last century. A woman’s glove is lying on the ground; a young man with a dark beard and striped pants bends down to pick it up. He takes it home with him and from there, things begin to get strange. The glove undergoes a series of hallucinatory adventures as it grows and shrinks in size; is fished out of an agitated sea; rides a triumphal chariot pulled by two horses; sits on a rock by the seaside; occupies a table in the center of an otherwise empty stage; is abducted by a strange, bat-like flying creature; and finally comes to rest beneath a rosebush with a Cupid sitting nearby.

 What I’ve just described is German graphic artist Max Klinger’s well-known work Paraphrase on the Finding of a Glove, a cycle of ten prints first published in 1881. It is a curious work whose dreamlike logic and apparent symbolism inevitably invite speculation about its underlying meaning. The glove clearly plays some kind of symbolic role, but what that role is, exactly, is obscure. To begin with, we’re given no hint as to whose glove it is. We never see who dropped it. When it first appears it’s already on the ground and about to be retrieved by the man in the striped pants. A lone woman directly ahead of him and a woman accompanied by two men a short distant farther ahead of him can be seen skating away from it; it may have belonged to either one of them. Or, to neither. We just don’t know. And it seems not to matter to the man in the striped pants – generally identified with the artist himself -- who simply makes off with it rather than attempting to return it to its owner.

 As becomes apparent as the print cycle unfolds, the focus of his interest is firmly fixed on the glove, which has become an object of obsession and the focus of desire in its own right. The peculiar role the glove plays in the man’s affective economy comes out most dramatically in three of the scenes – of the glove in the chariot, the glove by the seashore, and the glove onstage. The glove is triumphant in the first, receives a cascade of roses in tribute while occupying an altar-like rock under two oil lamps in the second, and is literally placed on a pedestal in the third. The glove is nothing short of venerated; it is a fetish object with presumably erotic implications, as the Cupid in the final print seems to imply. Before Krafft-Ebing or Freud had formulated their theories of the fetish Klinger in this series, it seems, had anticipated them. 

Ultimately the meaning of Klinger's glove may, like the identity of the glove's owner, remain unknown. But as a thought-provoking symbol, it travels far. 

 

Paris, 1914 (Montparnasse)

From Klinger’s print series, the glove makes its way to Giorgio de Chirico. In doing so it undergoes a change in what it might signify. Although not nearly as ubiquitous in his metaphysical paintings as the arcades, statues, and half-hidden locomotives that populate them, the motif of the glove does appear in at least three. The best known is probably 1914’s Le chant d’amour (Love Song), whose central image is a large, red rubber glove, its palm facing the viewer, tacked by the wrist and hanging downward from the wall it shares with a plaster model of the head of the Apollo Belvedere. Similarly another painting, Les projets de la jeune fille (The Amusements of a Young Girl) of 1915 or 1916, prominently features a brown leather glove at its center. Like the rubber glove of Love Song, this glove is tacked up by its wrist and hangs down, but with its back rather than the palm facing the viewer.

The most striking of the glove paintings, though, is L’énigme de la fatalité (The Enigma of Fatality). Painted in 1914 during de Chirico’s first stay in Paris, the picture has the shape of an isosceles triangle, which immediately sets it apart from his more conventionally shaped rectangular paintings. The painting contains a number of objects familiar from de Chirico’s iconography of the period. To begin with, there are three partially overlapping, darkly shadowed arcaded structures, two oriented vertically and one running horizontally across the lower quarter of the canvas. The narrow space between the two vertical structures defines the center of the painting and contains a tall, red brick chimney reaching almost to the vertex of the triangle. The shadowed arcades and brick chimney often turn up in de Chirico’s paintings of 1913 and 1914. What is different here is the glove, placed off center and to the viewer’s right. It is red and has a ribbed cuff; its fingers are outstretched and point downward, the tips touching a flat, black and white checkerboard-patterned surface beneath it. Unlike the gloves in Love Song and The Amusements of a Young Girl, which de Chirico clearly depicted as real gloves of rubber and leather respectively, the ontological status of the glove in The Enigma of Fatality – what kind of thing it is – is surprisingly ambiguous. Its appearance is flat and almost schematic, to the point where it could be meant to depict a real glove in a stylized manner, or it could be meant to allude to an image of a glove as might be seen on, for example, a sign.

Were de Chirico’s gloves inspired by Klinger’s work? We know that de Chirico discovered and was taken by Klinger’s work around 1908, when he was studying art at the Munich Academy. In his memoirs, his friend and fellow student Dimitrios Pikionis recalled that he and de Chirico spent hours with Klinger’s etchings in the print room of the Munich Pinakothek, where it is likely that they saw the glove series. And we also have evidence that de Chirico knew the glove series, since he wrote about at length in a long appreciation of Klinger’s work which was published in the journal Il Convegno in May 1921, shortly after Klinger’s death. In the article, de Chirico described it as an autobiographical, “wonderful tale of marvellously lyrical fantasy” in which Klinger makes the glove into a “strange symbol of mysterious and disturbing love.” In de Chirico’s telling, the glove has been on the bedside table throughout its apparent metamorphoses and wanderings; these latter were “all nothing but a nasty dream.” (Quoted in Carrà, pp. 133-134).

Given the above, it’s reasonable to assume that Klinger’s print series was a source for the glove motif in de Chirico’s metaphysical works. But there may have been other sources as well. As Paolo Baldacci points out in his study of de Chirico’s metaphysical period, the glove in The Enigma of Fatality may be meant as an allusion to a storefront sign that de Chirico encountered in Paris. He wrote about it in 1918, a few years after he’d seen it. What he described was a scene in which

The great glove of painted zinc with terrible gold nails swung back and forth over the shop door to the sad exhalations of urban afternoons, and indicated to me, with its index finger pointing down toward the slabs of the sidewalk, the hermetic signs of a new melancholia.” (Quoted in Baldacci, p. 26)

De Chirico appears to revisit this same incident in a poem in the Eluard Manuscript, which includes the lines, “The squall has passed, shaking the great red hand/with golden nails” (Hebdomeros, p. 202). Baldacci suggests that this sign was the source for the glove in The Enigma of Fatality, whose checkerboard surface he sees as representing the sidewalk the sign’s index finger pointed toward. Baldacci further suggests that another possible model for the image was described by de Chirico’s brother Alberto Savinio in a recollection recounted in his memoir-novel Infanzio di Nivasio Dolcemare:

At the end of the Via Stadio, one encounters an enormous Red Hand, its cuff above and the fingers pointing toward the sidewalk. The Red Hand is the sign of the Biruni Sisters, glovers by trade, but under exceptional circumstances it miraculously raises itself, contracts four of its digits, and points with its stiff index finger in the direction of danger...everyone knows that the Biruni Sisters are in fact three sirens in disguise...Those who know say that there is hidden within the sign itself an immodest symbol...(Savinio, p. 82.)

The inspiration for the glove in L’énigme de la fatalité, then – in addition to the possibility that the glove from the Klinger cycle played a contributing role -- more likely than not included one or both of these two signs, in which case the glove in the painting counts as a glove twice removed: the representation of a representation of a glove, but a glove nevertheless.

The painting’s triangular format, which is unusual if not unique among de Chirico’s body of work, is notable and of apparent significance as well. Why he would’ve chosen this shape may be hinted at in a passage from his article “Metaphysical Aesthetic,” published in Valori Plastici in April-May 1919. There, he claimed that

Symbols of a superior reality are often to be seen in geometric forms. For example, the triangle has served from antiquity...as a mystical and magical symbol, and it certainly often awakens a sense of uneasiness and even of fear in the onlooker, even if he is ignorant of this tradition. (Quoted in Carrà, p. 91)

Putting all of this together, we might say that with The Engima of Fatality de Chirico has taken the glove motif, refigured it and transformed it from Klinger’s “strange symbol of mysterious and disturbing love” – which is to say an erotically charged fetish object – into a symbol capable of provoking that peculiar mood of premonition and unease he described as “metaphysical.” While de Chirico’s definition of the metaphysical was unsystematic and could take many forms, in essence what he meant by it was an interpretive stance taken toward the world, an existential attitude in terms of which the world is understood to contain a series of enigmatic signs to be read and deciphered. In the context of de Chirico’s body of work at the time of the metaphysical paintings, the glove loses its quality as a fetish and hence its function as an object of misdirected desire and becomes instead an object of a different order, albeit one that is disquieting after its own fashion. It is a form of disquiet that André Breton articulated with his observation, in 1941’s “Artistic Genesis and Perspectives of Surrealism,” that with de Chirico “the object was retained only as a function of its symbolic, enigmatic” meaning (SP, p. 63). Like a fetish object, a disquieting object has a symbolic meaning, but it is one that may reach beyond erotic desire and hence can give the object the appearance of an omen or portent capable of revealing something of profound concern to the viewer. As such, de Chirico’s glove prefigures Breton’s idea of the Surrealist object. And so the glove passes from de Chirico to Breton.

 

Interlude: Paris, 1926 (Rue de Seine)

Breton acquired The Engima of Fatality from Paul Guillaume, de Chirico’s dealer, around 1926. It was also in 1926 that he met the young woman he would write about in Nadja, the semi-autobiographical novel he named after her. Nadja intrigued Breton because of her seeming clairvoyance and the way she apparently embodied the Surrealist ideal of inhabiting a world that didn’t follow the laws of waking reality. One anecdote he relates about her brings her into contact with the glove.

On the evening of October 10, Breton and Nadja go walking after finishing dinner at the Restaurant Delaborde. As they turn the corner of the Rue de Seine, Nadja tells Breton to follow a line she saw drawn across the sky by a hand. Looking up, Breton sees a poster containing “a red hand with its index finger pointing, advertising something or other.” Nadja jumps up to touch it and tells Breton that it’s “the hand of fire, it’s all you, you know, it’s you.” She predicts that he will write a novel about her and asks him to do so under a Latin or Arabic pseudonym. In what he takes to be another one of those uncanny coincidences Nadja is prone to precipitating, he later discovers that many Arabic houses have on their door the “hand of Fatima” – a red hand (Nadja, p. 100). Some time later Nadja visits Breton at his apartment and startles him by seeming to recognize artworks and objects she could not have seen before, and telling elaborate stories about them that turn out to be true. When she sees de Chirico’s painting of the red glove she “recognizes” it as “the famous hand of fire” (Nadja, pp. 122 & 129). The glove has become a retrospective portent – a sign pointing backward to “confirm” Nadja’s association of Breton with the red hand.

 

Paris, 1924 (15 Rue de Grenelle)

After Breton bought de Chirico’s painting he renamed it L’angoissant voyage—The Anguished Journey. What about the painting could’ve suggested anguish to him? Perhaps it was the general mood of the painting. Breton was an early advocate of de Chirico’s art on the basis of the unsettling atmospherics inherent in the metaphysical pictures, which Breton in Surrealism and Painting described as depicting “the most disquieting aspects of external appearances” (SP, p. 16). But perhaps it was the image of the glove specifically that Breton associated with anguish. For, not long before the time that he obtained the painting, he’d experienced his own disturbing encounter with a glove. This happened one day in December 1924, while he was in attendance at the Bureau of Surrealist Research on 15 Rue de Grenelle and was visited by woman with whom he was infatuated. In Nadja, he recalled

...the jocular proposition once made in my presence to a lady, asking that she present to the “Centrale Surréaliste” one of the remarkable sky-blue gloves she was carrying on a visit to us at this “Centrale,” my sudden fear when I saw she was about to consent, and my supplication that she do nothing of the kind. I don’t know what there can have been, at the moment, so terribly, so marvelously, decisive for me in the thought of that glove leaving that hand forever. (Nadja, pp. 55-56)

The woman in question was Lise Meyer, neé Anne-Marie Hirtz (later known as the writer Lise Deharme); the person making the proposition was Louis Aragon, who along with Breton was staffing the Centrale that day. Meyer counterproposed that she leave instead a bronze sculpture she owned. It was a life-sized, realistically modeled glove, also a woman’s glove, with the wrist folded down and the fingers lying flat. It was a piece Breton was soon to see during his frequent visits to her home, where she often hosted figures from the Parisian avant-garde. It was, as he recorded in Nadja,

a glove I can never resist picking up, always astonished at its weight and interested, apparently, only in calculating its precise weight against which the other glove would not have weighed at all. (Nadja, p. 56)

The glove, whether in its original incarnation or in the guise of its bronze double, clearly carried a compelling significance for him. Further evidence of the object’s meaning is brought out in a poem he wrote for Meyer at the time, but which was published only posthumously. Consistent with his long-held belief in the portentous meaning of chance events, in the poem he characterizes the encounter with the glove as something at once fortuitous and providential, announcing, “I shall pick up my glove/The glove heaven has sent me” (quoted in RM, p. 205).

It would be tempting to see the bronze glove simply as a fetish object for Breton, but I don’t think this would be quite its entire meaning. True, desire for Meyer played a strong part in giving it the power it had for him, and in fact he was to identify her with it, describing her as “the lady of the glove” (Nadja, p. 56). But its significance seems to have come through a roundabout route. The bronze glove’s meaning may have derived from its function as a substitute – not directly for Meyer, who in any event was to remain unobtainable for Breton, but for the original sky-blue glove that so disquieted Breton at the Centrale Surréaliste in the first place. It seems to have functioned as a symbolic replacement for the original sky-blue glove – the “other glove” of the passage from Nadja – whose absence is dramatically signaled in the startling difference between the weight of a glove made of ordinary material, which is what Breton expected to feel when picking up its bronze simulacrum, and the much heavier weight that he actually did feel in lifting the simulacrum.

(Interestingly, the bronze glove recalls a similarly deceptive work created by none other than Marcel Duchamp in 1921, a work that Breton was well familiar with. The work was Why Not Sneeze, Rose Selavy?, a sculpture consisting of a birdcage filled with white marble cubes cut to mimic sugar cubes. Like the bronze glove, Duchamp’s “sugar cubes” played a game of deception based on misleading appearance. In a 1922 lecture, Breton recalls

Marcel Duchamp showing friends a birdcage that, as far as they could see, contained no birds but instead was half-filled with sugar cubes, and asking them to lift the cage, which they were astonished to find so heavy. (Lost Steps, p. 116)

Would Breton’s familiarity with Duchamp’s simulated sugar cubes not have prepared him for the identical “trick” the glove played on him? And if not, would the difference lie in the affective investment made in the bronze glove, an investment that would entail his willingness to be deceived, and one absent from Duchamp’s work?)

To be sure, the glove does play a role in Breton’s symbolic economy as far as his frustrated desire for Meyer goes, but it seems to me to reach beyond a simple function as an erotically charged fetish object and to emblematize a larger, more broadly considered kind of symbolic object of which the fetish object is one manifestation.

In its manner of standing for Meyer, the bronze glove would seem to have been a second-order symbol – a substitute, to be sure, but a substitute for a substitute. Its explicit or first-order substitution was for the actual glove, which itself was the symbolic substitute for the woman who wore it; by the kind of overdetermination often at work in symbolic substitution, the bronze glove at a deeper level stood for her as well. At this deeper, secondary level the bronze glove, whose very real and very heavy presence dramatizes the absence of the sky-blue glove, symbolically evokes the unobtainability of its original owner – an unobtainability whose objective correlate is by virtue of this second-order symbolization now none other than the bronze glove. So far, so good. But does this make the bronze glove just another fetish item, understood as an object with a specifically erotic charge like the glove in Klinger’s print series? Or was it something else, or perhaps better, something more? In fact it seems to have been an example of the kind of object Breton theorized a dozen years later in “Crisis of the Object.”

 

The Glove and the “Crisis of the Object”

The most succinct summary of Breton’s thinking in “Crisis of the Object” is Steven Harris’: “an object is made a thing-for-us through what Breton calls the ‘crisis of the object,’ which involves a subjectivization of the object in the course of the objectification of subjective thought.” (Harris, p. 152). In other words, the “crisis of the object” as Breton hypothesized it entailed what we might think of as a process of emotional transubstantiation through which an otherwise indifferent thing is transformed into a locus of personal significance by way of what Breton, quoting Paul Eluard, characterized as the “physics of poetry” (SP, p. 279). Such an object consequently occupies a middle ground between the purely external and the purely internal, being neither merely a thing perceived nor the pure product of the imagination, but instead representing the point of convergence of perception and imagination. Such an object, whose essential meaning is constituted by the poetic imagination rather than the rational faculty, becomes the carrier of what Breton described as “latent possibilities” (SP, p. 279, emphasis in the original). As a result, its ordinary meaning – what Breton called its “conventional value” – is overtaken by its “dramatic value,” which is to say its affective significance for the person in relation to whom it has been poetically transformed.

What Breton was aiming for with his notion of the poetically constituted crisis object was a kind of Hegelian synthesis by which the subjective, in the guise of the poetic imagination, would be objectified by virtue of its having been projected onto a physical thing and the objective, in the guise of the thing, would be subjectivized by virtue of its having acquired a personally significant meaning through the projection onto it of the poetic imagination. What the “crisis of the object” represented, in other words, was the event of a dialectical reconciliation of the external and internal worlds. It was a reconciliation Breton felt was needed in order to square surrealist theory with dialectical materialism, which at the time was an overriding intellectual problem for him. In practical terms this meant that he had to come up with a mechanism by which the subjective could find objective expression. Objects in the material world, upon which the subjective force of the imagination could project itself and which could thus be permeated or colored by personal meaning or significance, would provide the material correlates Breton needed to objectify subjective thought. At the same time subjective thought, in projecting itself onto the object and integrating the object into its structures of meaning, would subjectivize the object. Through the imaginatively charged object the mind moves out into the world, and the world into the mind.

Breton’s attempt to explain the affective force of an object in these dialectical terms seems for the most part simply to have been his way of justifying or rationalizing a pre-existing inclination to see the inner and outer worlds meeting in a surreality in which the apparent contradiction between them would be reconciled. In the early to mid 1930s, this inclination was articulated in terms that were, at the time, politically expedient. But the underlying idea – that imagination projects itself onto things in the world and by doing so instills a deeply personal, non-rational significance in them – holds even when freed of the perceived necessity of explaining its workings in the language of dialectical materialism. And it is all that is really needed to explain the salience of the bronze glove and its apparent place within Breton’s affective economy.

In fact, Breton’s idea of the imaginatively transformed object finds its paradigmatic expression precisely in the figure of the bronze glove. If the glove derived its meaning from an erotic charge, and thus served as a fetish symbol for Meyer, it did so by virtue of the more general mechanism of the crisis object with its “poetic physics” of imaginative projection and transubstantiation. The fetish object in effect constitutes a subset of the crisis object, a subset defined by the specific type of imaginative content it holds.

In effect, the three iterations of the glove represent variations on the imaginatively charged crisis object. Looking back, we can see that the itinerary of the glove traces a path along which the glove as an object – the glove as a thing with a function and more-or-less fixed place within the world of the everyday things we value for their uses – finds itself negated by imagination at every turn. The glove picked up in the skating rink is transformed by its finder’s obsession into something other than a glove, as it becomes an object-substitute for an unreachable object of desire; the glove-shaped sign’s mundane function as indicator of a place of business is negated in a series of disquieting moods and memories (or mythologically overdetermined pseudo-memories); and finally, the bronze glove undergoes an imaginative negation after which there is nothing left of it beyond what affective weight it can carry, its trompe-la-main heaviness dissolved in the acid bath of erotic impasse.

Breton predicted all of this when, in the Second Manifesto of Surrealism he declared that for Surrealism it was necessary to take the object and “lure [it] into less benign contradictions” whereby a rose is

successively the rose that comes from the garden, the one that has an unusual place in a dream, the one impossible to remove from the ‘optical bouquet,’ the one that can completely change its properties by passing into automatic writing, the one that retains only those qualities that the painter has deigned to keep in a Surrealist painting, and, finally, the one, completely different from itself, which returns to the garden. (MoS, p. 141)

If the rose can return to the garden after undergoing those imaginative negations in meaning, can the meaning of the poetically transformed object undergo whatever further change is needed in order to square itself with a change in the affective economy of the person whose imagination transformed it in the first place? Given the premise, nothing prevents an answer in the affirmative.

 

Paris, ca. 1927-2003 (Rue Fontaine)

The bronze glove eventually made its way into Breton’s possession. Meyer loaned it to him to be photographed for the publication of Nadja, after which she let him keep it. It stayed in his Rue Fontaine studio until after his death, and when finally in 2003 the studio was closed and its contents dispersed by auction, it was given by his daughter Aube Elléouët to the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques-Doucet in Paris. Since 2015 it has been held by the Centre Pompidou.

The glove’s long cohabitation with Breton suggests the possibility that over time, it lost the erotically derived associations that it originally had for Breton—that the affective charge projected onto it by his desire for its former owner eventually and gradually diminished in a manner analogous to radioactive decay. (How long exactly is the half-life of an object’s affective charge is a fascinating question in itself.) At some point over the years, after the bronze glove had taken its place among the background furniture of his daily life, he must’ve stopped picking it up to be surprised by its weight. There must’ve come a point where the glove was just another curio in his collection of curios – perhaps just a nostalgic reminder of a time of emotional agitation now long in the past. And at that point, having traced a route from fetish object to disquieting object to crisis object to souvenir, the glove reaches the end of its itinerary.

 

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References:

Paolo Baldacci, De Chirico: The Metaphysical Period, tr. Jeffrey Jennings (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1997). Internal cites to Baldacci.

André Breton, The Lost Steps, tr. Mark Polizzotii (Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1996). Internal cite to Lost Steps.

___________, Manifestoes of Surrealism, tr. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor, MI: U of Michigan Press, 1972). Internal cite to MoS.

___________, Nadja, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1960). Internal cites to Nadja.

___________, Surrealism and Painting, tr. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper & Row Icon Editions, 1972). Internal cites to SP.

Massimo Carrà et al., Metaphysical Art, tr. Caroline Tisdall (New York: Praeger, 1971). Internal cites to Carrà.

Giorgio de Chirico, Hebdomeros: A Novel by Giorgio de Chirico, Hebdomeros (Cambridge MA: Exact Change, 1992). Internal cites to Hebdomeros.

Steven Harris, Surrealist Art and Thought in the 1930s: Art, Politics, and the Psyche (Cambridge: Cambridge U Press, 2004). Internal cite to Harris.

Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton, revised and updated edition (Boston: Black Widow Press, 2009). Internal cites to RM.

Alberto Savinio, Infanzia di Nivasio Dolcemare (Torino: Einaudi, 1941). Internal cite to Savinio. Translation is my own.