ArtCurious

Episode 60: True Crime/Fine Art: Man Ray and the Black Dahlia Connection

File Name: Jenifer Dasal/Art Curious – Episode #60: True Crime/Fine Art: Man Ray and the Black Dahlia connection

File Details: 34:00:04

Number of Speakers: 1 (Narrator)

Beginning of Transcript

Jennifer Dasal: The Art Curious podcast is sponsored by Anchor Light, for more information about all of Anchor Light’s artistic and creative endeavors, please visit AnchorlightRolley.com.

Like many of the episodes this season, this episode contains adult content. So please take care when listening.

If you’ve been following the Art Curious Podcast through our current season, they you probably can glean some knowledge about my own interests in the genre of true crime. After all, it’s been so hot for these past few years and it doesn’t seem like it’s slowing down at all. So yes, I am one of the many, many people out there who likes to dig occasionally into true crime stories. Yes, I listen to some of the podcasts and yes, I’ve been to some of those podcast’s live shows and I have read a lot of true crime books and have seen the requisite true crime documentaries. As morally ambiguous it can be to enjoy tales like this for pure entertainment, I do find them intriguing. It’s easy to be fascinated with the dark side of human nature. Especially when your everyday life is stable and safe. Sometimes, for those who are lucky, true crime can be fun.

In addition to consuming those previously mentioned delivery systems for true crime stories I have also been a fan of the occasional fictionalized film or TV portrayal too. And earlier this year 2019, I was particularly excited when TNT premiered their limited run series called, “I Am the Night” starring Chris Pine and directed by Patty Jenkins. It portrayed a woman’s search for information about her family and her heritage, which dovetailed with the search for one of the most elusive killers of the 20^th century. The murderer of Elizabeth Short, know to us today under the moniker ‘The Black Dahlia’. This murder is one of the most gruesome in California history, perhaps even in US history. And it has never been solved. Even today, the case remains open and stalled. More than seventy years later. This was enough to get me curious about watching the TV show itself. But when news articles began popping up connecting the real-life figures in the mini-series with the mid-century Los Angeles art scene, replete with collectors and internationally acclaimed big-name artists…well, I was surprised. Because a case has been made that the Black Dahlia’s death is an awful, gory, bodily translation of some surrealist visual art off of the canvas and into the real world.

Some people think that visual art is dry, boring…lifeless. But those paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs can be weirder, crazier, or more fun than you can imagine. In season 6 we have been uncovering the dastardly deeds of several of art history’s famed artists. Including the involvement or their participation in murder most foul. For our season finale today, a story that I’ve been so excited to share with you for nearly a year. Did Man Ray and the Surrealist inadvertently, or perhaps directly influence the Black Dahlia murder. This is the Art Curious Podcast, exploring the unexpected, the slightly odd and the strangely wonderful in art history. I’m Jennifer Dasal.

As with any discussion of a major story in the true crime sphere, there exists a truckload of information about the Black Dahlia. More information than can be possibly shared in today’s podcast. But just know that should you want more background upon the victim Elisabeth Short, the ongoing police investigation, the dark noir world of the 1940’s in Los Angeles and the range of suspects outside our range today. Rest assured that there is no lack of information and resources out there, and I would personally recommend the podcast, ‘Root of Evil’ for lots more detail here. For our purposes today however, I’m going to give you the basics of the crime, the top suspect and that suspect’s relationship to the visual arts. But first, lets discuss the finding of the corpse of the Black Dahlia.

On January 15^th 1947 Betty Bersinger was taking a walk with her toddler daughter through the Leimert Park neighborhood of South Los Angeles. An area that at the time was still only loosely developed and populated. On the side of the road and in an abandoned lot Bersinger and her daughter approached what appeared at first glance to be a fashion mannequin that had been disassembled or abandoned. As the two got closer, Bersinger realized quite quickly and quite horrifically that it wasn’t a mannequin at all. But a woman that had been cut cleanly in half, drained of blood and positioned with her body halves obviously separated and with her limbs splayed. Arms above her head. The woman’s face had been mutilated, cut from ear to ear in what appeared to be a ghastly smile. This corpse wasn’t just thrown on the side of the road, she had been purposely prepared and posed for a specific effect. Soon after the discovery of the mutilated body, police confirmed the identity of the victim as Elisabeth Short. A waitress who moved to California from the East Coast with hopes of becoming an actress. Short’s lustrous dark hair combined with her purported love of the Veronica Lake and Adam Lad filmed, ‘The Blue Dahlia’ may have inspired Short’s friends to bestow her with the now immortal nickname. Today, many might shrug their shoulders if you mention the name Elisabeth Short. But say The Black Dahlia and an image is immediately conjured.

The same thing happened in the late 1940’s. Because of the absolutely horrific manner in which Short’s post-mortem body was displayed, because of her alluring nickname and because a killer was not immediately identified; the story of Elisabeth Short’s murder became big news, fast. Los Angeles Police received dozens of tips regarding possible leads and theories as to the identity of the murderer. With sixty individuals coming forward to confess to the crimes during the first few months of the initial investigation, none panned out. And interestingly, there have now been over five hundred purported confessions of the Black Dahlia killer. But all have been ID’d as false confessions. Go figure. But by mid-1947, the case had already started going cold. And as one of the lead detectives, Sergeant Finis Brown noted, “No lead had any conclusions, once we find something it seemed to disappear before our eyes.”. Two years later, a Grand Jury convened to discuss the LAPD’s failure at solving several high-profile murders including the Black Dahlia case. This revisiting to the Dahlia case and the probable embarrassment that it’s still unsolved status bestowed upon the LAPD lead investigators to renewed efforts at identifying the killer. They narrowed down a large list of suspects down to a total of twenty-five, none of whom were ever charged with a crime. On that original list, was a Los Angeles born physician and art collector who’s interest in surrealism and his connection to several surrealists makes him of particular interest to us today. His name was George Hill Hodel Jr.

George Hodel grew up in Los Angeles and by all accounts had a particularly charmed upbringing as the only son of a wealthy and connected family. Hodel was a child prodigy, with an IQ in the genius range and wunderkind on the piano. So much so that the famed Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff even made a visit to the Hodel home in order to hear the young George perform. During his teen years, George Hodel became interested in the visual arts, aspiring early on to be a photographer. And several of his artsy, blurry self-portraits do still exist out there. Eventually though, Hodel opted to move into medicine instead. But he still kept the art world close to his heart. And in a sick way, may have even created an ultimate surrealist nod himself. A terrible crime completed as a potential reference to his close friend, the artist Man Ray. Born Emanuel Radnitsky in Philadelphia in August 1890 to a family of Russian Jewish Immigrants, Man Ray was one of the most prolific artists involved in both the Dada and Surrealist art movements of the early twentieth century. Man Ray began his life as an artist at a very young age, and was so set in his aim to become a working artist that he even turned down a lucrative scholarship to an architectural college in order to pursue his dream of becoming a painter. Ray first worked as a commercial designer and illustrator in high school and practiced in what was a pretty traditional very 19^th century artistic style, all realistic and figurative. In 1930 though, he attended an art exhibition that blew his socks off and changed his life. He saw the 1930 armory show, the first large scale modern art exhibition in the United States. And one that introduced several art superstars to the American public. Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky, Mary Cassatt, Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse, Edward Hopper, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. I could go on you guys - this was one epic exhibition. Even Claude Monet and his old pal Vincent Van Goh were part of the show, and Man Ray was giddy. He was especially taken by cubism and futurism and their dreams of presenting the new ideas of space and movement in art, speed and mechanics especially interested him. But if there was one artist that especially thrilled him at the armory show it was Marcel Duchamp. Listeners, I am sure that by now many of you are familiar with the name Marcel Duchamp. We’ve talked about him a few times on this podcast including most recently in our episode on his or maybe his controversial fountain urinal sculpture, part of last year’s series on shock art. We also touched on him again in a bonus episode that followed up on our fountain tale with a consideration of the theory that fountain was actually created and or inspired by Duchamp’s friend and Colleague the Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven. Please do go back and listen to those episodes if you are new to the show and catch up on the fascinating debate on this influential and again controversial artist.

At the Armory show, Duchamp exhibited one of his most debated works ever. A painting titled, ‘Nude descending a staircase No.2’. A work from 1912 that didn’t fare too well in France upon original exhibition and wasn’t too positively received at the armory either, as people struggled to find a nude at all. Was Duchamp showing it an automation descending a staircase? Was it a disavowal of traditional art historical representations of the nude and the human figure? Was it even art? Duchamp’s so-called nude was a scandal and Man Ray loved it. He quickly became friends with Duchamp and began working in similar artistic modes as the French artists, becoming one of the foremost proponents of Dada and Surrealism in the United States during the first two decades of the twentieth century. After moving to Paris and immersing himself in the arts especially working as a photographer Man Ray escaped the dawning horrors of World War II by returning to the US, this time settling in Los Angeles. And it was there that he became friendly with arts collector and surrealist supporter George Hodel.

Coming up after a quick break, it’s time to parse the creepy similarities between several surrealist tropes and the death of Elisabeth Short. Stay with us.

Welcome back to Artcurious. In May 1999, George Hodel died in San Francisco at the age of 91 after living for half his life in the Philippines where he moved in 1950 after a series of events dogged him. First was the death of his secretary, Ruth Spaulding in 1945. Spaulding was thought to have died as a result of a drug overdose but Hodel was suspected of being involved, though he was never charged. Four years later in 1949 Hodel’s own daughter, Tamar accused him of incestual sexual abuse. Noting that such abuse ended in a pregnancy which Tamar was then forced to terminate through a dangerous back alley abortion. George Hodel was tried but acquitted of his crime, after this he moved away. Far, far away to the Philippines. And right between the death of Spalding and the incest trial was the murder of Elisabeth Short, The Black Dahlia.

After Hodel’s 1999 death, one of his sons - Steve Hodel was tasked with mulling through his father’s possessions. Among his father’s papers he discovered photographs of an unidentified woman with glossy dark hair and a mysterious, glamorous air. Steve Hodel was an LAPD homicide detective and he was immediately taken by the photo because the woman in the picture reminded him of something or to be precise, of someone. Someone mysterious and still a curiosity and a legend within the LAPD, The Black Dahlia, Elisabeth Short. Steve Hodel found further things among his father’s possessions that intrigued him, documents attesting to his father’s strange sexual proclivities, his penchant for violence, and most interestingly his interest in art. Included in George Hodel’s documents were a number of photographs of George Hodel, his wife Dorothy and his children. All taken by a big-name artist, Man Ray. George Hodel even owned works of art by Man Ray. This discovery was the beginning of a huge moment for Steve Hodel as he began to unravel a tangled web that linked George Hodel to the LA art world especially through his friendship and familiarity with Man Ray. Four years after his father’s death, Steve published ‘Black Dahlia Avenger, a genius for murder’ which skyrocketed to bestseller status on the New York Time’s list and a case that he has continued to add to over the past sixteen year and through a further four books. Delineated the myriad connections between his father and the killer of The Black Dahlia. He has also even further declared that George Hodel may have been the infamous zodiac killer, but that one seems extraordinarily impossible. The connection to the Dahlia though, that one seems to make a little more sense at least.

The Hodel’s theory about his father’s guilt is predicated on many things, not the least of which being that his father was one of the original shortlisted suspects of the crime. Someone who’s home was even bugged by the LAPD because of their suspicions. A huge key to Steve Hodel’s argument is the striking similarities between the appearance and pose of Elisabeth Short’s body and the way that women most frequently are visualized in surrealist art. Steve Hodel then writes that Man Ray and George Hodel became acquainted in Los Angeles after Man Ray relocated to the city in the 1940’s with the two men drawn together by their shared interests in the tenets of surrealism. Which like Dada, it’s predecessor - sought to dismantle rationality in favor of seeking a different kind of truth through accessing the sub-conscious mind. The poet Andre Breton established a circle of surrealist aesthetes, writers and intellectuals in France in the 1920’s and the philosophy quickly spread around the world. Ending up in and inspiring people in the US as well. The dream world and the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud were key to the surrealists, who hoped to open doors to their subconsciousness via assemblage, automatic writing and strange and uncanny imagery and word combinations.

One of the most popular surrealist modes originated as a parlor game wherein two or more individuals both draw on a folded sheet of paper where the previous artist contributions are concealed. So, when drawing a body for example, one artist might sketch a head, a second would be responsible for creating the torso and a third might draw the legs. What is created then is a bizarre mishmash of shapes, styles, ideas and even symbols and subject matter. A Frankenstein’s monster of a figure. Breton alongside fellow surrealist Duchamp, painter Yves Tanguy and poet Jacques Prevert pioneered this concept. And one of the things that pops up repeatedly in this called the exquisite corpse imagery - as well as many other surrealist works of art - is an undercurrent of violence, especially violence towards women. Which also frequently had a sexual tinge. So, think about the exquisite corpse, in creating a drawing that is meant to represent an actual figure. Or more specifically the so-called corpse, who’s name was given to this method of artistic production. The figure is sectioned, sliced, divided. Often times drawn nude by the surrealists, and almost always is a female figure, sound familiar? It sure did to Steve Hodel and the more that he looked at surrealist art, especially the work of Man Ray and Man Ray’s good friend Marcel Duchamp the more Steve began to feel confident in his thesis, that the Black Dahlia murder was surrealist art made reality. As Steve Hodel recounted to Doctor Phill and his eponymous TV show in March 2019, “This is Dad’s surrealist masterpiece, I talk about his scalpel being his paintbrush and her body was the canvas. It was that twisted.”. Elisabeth Short became, in both a literal and metaphorical sense, an exquisite corpse.

In his books, Steve Hodel relies mostly on circumstantial evidence to support his arguments, but his web of art historical connections is truly attention grabbing and that is what we are focusing on here today. These artistic connections were taken to the next level by art museum designer Mark Nelson and the Arts and Culture journalist Sarah Hudson Baylis in their 2006 book, ‘Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder’. In this book the authors analyze the Dahlia’s case from a purely visual and art historical perspective, here they relay that many surrealist signifiers and visual vocabulary circled around the misogyny and sexual violence against women. In Man Ray’s artworks from the 1940’s for example, women’s faces are usually scratched out, photographs of nude women too are altered so as to make their forms appear bisected or with strange amputations. Often times in Man Ray’s images and in other works of art including those by Man Ray’s own art dealer William Copley there exists scenes of naked women in unsettling locations or positions. Sometimes lorded over by a very threatening man who would of course be fully dressed in comparison and sometimes these women appeared with their eyes closed, a frequent trope in surrealist imagery that evokes a fascination with dream worlds or an interior life a la Sigmund Freud. But also hints at a dark obsession with death, of snuffing the light out of someone’s eyes. Threat and control are huge touchstones in each of these images and all of these; Steve Hodel, Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Baylis argue are present in the actual killing of Elisabeth Short. It’s like George Hodel came in and took all of these elements and translated one into a single form merging them together in one artsy, fame grabbing crime.

Steve Hodel and the Exquisite Corpse authors drew further connections between the adopted surrealist mascot, the minotaur as a potential model for the body placement of Short post-death. Like other surrealists of the day Man Ray loved the minotaur as an artistic subject and referenced it frequently in his works. The Minotaur, a figure stemming from Greek mythology was a curious beast who was part man part bull and who devoured young people including and especially young maidens who were sacrificed for it’s sustenance. In the eyes of the surrealists, the minotaur was meant to symbolize the darkest desires of mankind; man is beast, man is animal, man is killing machine fueled by bloodlust. The minotaur makes appearances or is referenced in numerous works by Andre Masson, Max Ernst, Georgio De Chirico and even Pablo Picasso just to name a few scant examples. But the minotaur connection to the Black Dahlia seems strongest and most direct when compared to the works of Man Ray. Take a recently re-discovered print by Man Ray, a 1969 lithograph titled Les Invendables which roughly translates to something too damaged to be marketable. In the image, a nude torso of a woman her pendulous breasts hanging down. Splayed with her hands up and over her head, her face is marred out with red ink and her lower body is delineated in the same color as it appears to bleed down into four legs, into the sturdy form of the minotaur. On his blog, Steve Hodel superimposes the widely available crime scene photographs of Elisabeth Short over the Man Ray Minotaur image and while it is not a perfect match, it is enough to make your hair stand on the back of your neck. Was Man Ray illustrating his interest in the Dahlia murder and hinting at a possible connection to the perpetrator? Was the death of this young damaged maiden a sacrifice made to satiate a man’s deepest darkest desire? An even more compelling argument involves a strange photograph/installation by Marcel Du Champ to the Black Dahlia. One year after Duchamp’s death in 1968, a work called ‘Etants donnes’ was presented at the Philadelphia Museum of art, a piece that Duchamp had toiled over for twenty years, beginning around the time of the Dahlia murder and that he requested would not be revealed until after his death. Installed as a peephole tableau in a wooden door and now located at the Philadelphia museum of art, this work, Duchamp’s last project big project and created at a time when he had supposedly given up on creating art entirely. Presents viewers with a scene of a nude woman lying spread legged in a landscape, her genitals blatantly revealed to the viewer and her head as blatantly hidden. Here too, the similarity in the body positioning of the Dahlia is notable at the very least. To Hodel and others, it appears to be an ‘identical’ match and show’s a knowledge if not acceptance of Hodel’s purported surrealist masterpiece. As such, not only was Hodel inspired by surrealism, but surrealists were in turn inspired by Hodel’s one-supmanship at their own game and they possibly acknowledged it in their own works.

I have to admit that researching this, reading Steve Hodel’s theories. And pouring over Mark Nelson and Sarah Baylis’ images was fun. Just from that true crime enjoyment perspective that I discussed at the beginning of this episode, and the connection between visual art and one of the most notorious crimes of the twentieth century is totally intriguing. But all of it leads me to a big question and it’s one I admit that I personally don’t have a really good answer for. The question is this - WHY? Say that George Hodel was indeed a homicidal maniac and that he really is the Black Dahlia killer, the reason why he would kill is one thing but the reasoning for turning Elisabeth Short into a surrealist symbol or reference is another entirely. Why would Hodel do this? Steve Hodel posits that George Hodel himself an artist want to be so loved the works of the surrealist that he too wanted to be a part of their mixed up world and as someone with a medical background and murderous intent he simply used Elisabeth Short’s own body and life as his medium instead of a camera or a paintbrush. Baylis and Nelson further note that the collaborative nature of Dada and surrealism wherein artists frequently winked at each other via their works of art, hinting and referencing each other’s visuals, themes and personal preoccupations makes sense. George Hodel, they say winkingly referenced surrealism in his crime and that Man Ray and others winked back by referring to the Dahlia murder in their own pieces.

But if Hodel did kill the Dahlia and artists like Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp knew of Hodel’s crimes, why didn’t they alert the authorities to their knowledge? And why would they themselves keep hinting at the Dahlia through their own works of art more than twenty years after the crime itself, as Duchamp supposedly did with his ‘Etants Donnes’. And that question, the why; its just the beginning. We can follow up with more interrogation by asking is misogyny is enough to endite the surrealists alongside Hodel here. And is the curiosity and interest in the darker side of humanity and a willingness to illustrate it a damning thing? In this way, it reminds me of the kind of questions that were posited in a documentary series now considered to be classic within the true crime genre itself. The paradise lost series about the West Memphis Three where three teenagers were fingered for the early 1990 murders of three Arkansas children because in part because the teen’s penchant for wearing black and listening to heavy metal. Did the teenagers engage in murder as part of a satanic ritual fueled or symbolized by the kind of music they liked or the clothes that they wore? Same thing goes for yet another of the most gruesome crimes of the 20^th century, the 1969 killings of Sharon Tate, Jace Seabring and others by Charles Manson’s drugged out family. In Manson’s adoption of the phrase, ‘Helter Skelter’ to denote a racially motivated uprising against the Hollywood elite The Beatles, who’s own 1968 White Album included a song titled Helter Skelter were thrown into the spotlight for supposedly inspiring the family’s senseless, gory killings. Did the surrealists here thus inspire the death of Elisabeth Short? Ultimately the visual stylings of surrealism and the theoretical comparison to the Black Dahlia murder leave us with more questions and more avenues for research than actual evidence or true links. Even as renewed interests in the Black Dahlia murder reach new heights with the mini-series, ‘I am the night’ and its corresponding podcast root of evil and with Steve Hodel continually publishing and publicizing his theories, Los Angeles law enforcement still considers the Black Dahlia case to be closed and it is unlikely that any connections to art history (interesting though they may be) are going to cause it to be reopened.

That being said, you never know. In art history, as in true crime, stranger things have happened.

Thank you for listening to the Art Curious Podcast. This episode was written, produced and narrated by me, Jenifer Dasal with a with additional research help by Jose Mallen. Our theme music is by Alex Davis at AlexDavismusic.com. Our logo is by Dave Rainey at Daveraineydesign.com, and social media help is by Emily Crockett and Caroline Haller. Our production and editorial services are provided by Kaboonki. Video. Content. Ideas. Learn more at Kaboonki.com. Additionally, editing help is by Hannah Roberts. The ArtCurious Podcast is sponsored primarily by Anchorlight. Anchorlight is a creative space, founded with the intent of fostering artists, designers, and craftspeople at varying stages of their development. Home to artist studios, residency opportunities, and exhibition space Anchorlight encourages mentorship and the cross-pollination of skills among creatives in the Triangle. Please visit anchorlightraleigh.com

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Check back in a few months as we continue to explore the unexpected, the slightly odd, and the strangely wonderful in art history.