A bronze teddy bear, the classic teddy bear, lying on the ground with a blade driven through its heart. It is the artwork that is dividing public opinion in Versilia, but its meaning goes far beyond visual provocation. In that wounded body is a portrait of a cultural void: the absence of affective objects capable of ferrying childhood toward emotional autonomy.
This article, drawn from an accurate reflection by Versilia Art Critic Giacomo Castagnini, who sketches its true identity, builds on a lecture by scholar Donna Varga to explore the fate of the transitional object-the teddy bear, the cover, the affective talisman-in our digital and performative society. Through true stories and collective symbols, from Roosevelt to Winnie the Pooh to the Poor Teddy sculpture in Repose, a disturbing paradox emerges: a hyperconnected culture that has lost the ability to console.
The starting point for this article is a lecture given in 2009 by Donna Varga, professor of Childhood Studies at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax: “Teddy Bear Culture: Childhood Innocence and the Desire for Adult Redemption.” Varga is a scholar who focuses on pedagogy, childhood culture and symbolic narratives in media and everyday objects. Her talk analyzed how the Teddy Bear, from a simple toy, has over time become a powerful vehicle for affective and nostalgic projections, revealing the need for redemption and consolation.
Cosa resta oggi del Teddy Bear? Chi l’ha ucciso davvero?
Here is Castagnini’s timely and accurate critical thinking that nicely delineates the photograph and the perimeter in which exactly Teddy Bears stands.
“Before recounting the controversy, which has been inflaming the local and national media for days where many are questioning whether this is really art, whether such a traumatizing depiction should be placed right at the highway exit, etc., it is useful to take a step back and observe how, in twentieth-century Western culture, two bears have become the protagonists of two fundamental symbolic narratives. On the one hand, the Teddy Bear, which grew out of an incident in 1902 in Mississippi, where President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) had traveled to arbitrate a boundary dispute between Louisiana and Mississippi and, taking advantage of the trip, participated in a hunting trip organized by local hunters. Leading it was Holt Collier (1848-1936), a former African American slave and veteran of the Confederate Civil War (1861-1865), where he fought in the Confederate ranks as a servant and guide in a South still deeply marked by racial subordination. After the war, his hunting skills earned him respect and notoriety in a world that had not yet fully recognized the dignity of former slaves. In this enforced silence, there is the whole paradox of Collier: invisible creator of one of the most powerful childhood mythologies of the twentieth century.
Collier was intimately familiar with the pitfalls, hidden trails and wilderness of the Mississippi Delta swamps. He who had more bear kills to his credit than any other hunter of his time, surpassing even the legends of Daniel Boone (1734-1820) and Davy Crockett (1786-1836), heroes of the American myth for whom the prestigious “Boone and Crockett Club,” founded by Roosevelt himself to promote a hunting ethic, was named. It was he who chased and exhausted the bear after positioning Roosevelt at a strategic point where he knew the animal would likely pass. Succeeding, in fact, the bear did pass through that very post, but he discovered to his frustration that the president was gone, back at base camp. Collier, determined not to lose his prey, continued the chase alone and caught up with it, managed to bog it down and then stun it with the butt of his rifle.
The animal was tied to a tree and offered to Roosevelt for the final shot. Roosevelt, true to the code of ethics of the Boone and Crockett Club, refused to shoot the animal in that condition and ordered that it be finished off with a knife, according to a practice considered more honorable. However, the man in charge of carrying out the order was clumsy, prolonging the bear’s agony. It was Collier himself who finally ended the animal’s suffering. This affair reveals a broader tension between the concrete, embodied competence of those who know and experience nature – like Collier – and the symbolic authority of the white power represented by Roosevelt, who with a single gesture (abandoning his post) thwarts the invisible direction of the other. What follows-the birth of the Teddy Bear-will be built not around the mastery of the African American hunter, but around the public compassion of the president. Thus, the hand guiding the bear into the ambush disappears from collective memory, while the legend of the man who did not shoot was carved. The gesture was transformed by cartoonist Clifford Berryman (1869-1949) into a famous cartoon published in the Washington Post on November 16, 1902, titled “Drawing the Line in Mississippi,” where the bear became a tender cub, tied to a tree, with Roosevelt refusing to shoot him. The scene, in its graphic simplicity, constructed a heroic and compassionate narrative, masking the brutality of the actual event under a veneer of morality. The cartoon had an immediate public resonance: it was reproduced, discussed, reinterpreted, turning Roosevelt’s gesture into a national symbol. Newspapers made a legend of it, and the birth of the “Teddy Bear” was only the first commercial consequence of a process of collective mythmaking. From there was born the “Teddy Bear,” first a toy and then the affective archetype of American childhood. But beneath the synthetic fur, there remained an ambiguous gesture: an act of violence transfigured into compassion.
On the other side is Winnie-the-Pooh, which originates from a real, everyday act of love. In 1914, young Canadian military veterinarian Harry Colebourn (1887-1947), enlisted in the Royal Canadian Army Veterinary Corps, was on his way to the European front. During a stop at the train station in White River, Ontario, he noticed a black bear cub for sale by a poacher. He bought it for $20-the equivalent of about 370 euros today-and named it “Winnie” after the Canadian city of Winnipeg, where Colebourn lived and worked. Winnie became the unofficial mascot of the 2nd Canadian Infantry Brigade, following Colebourn on his travels to England. When the brigade was sent to the front in France, Colebourn entrusted the bear to the London Zoo, believing it was the safest place to protect him during the war. It was here that Winnie soon became the favorite attraction of London children, and among them was little Christopher Robin Milne. Little Christopher became attached to the bear, who later inspired his father A.A. Milne (1882-1956) in creating the fictional universe of Pooh. A timeless, poetic world inhabited by imaginary animals representing emotional nuances of childhood.
Both bears represent a transition: from nature to culture, from the wild to the symbolic, from reality to fairy tale. But while the Teddy Bear is born from a public event and becomes privatized (becomes a toy), Winnie is born from a private act and becomes universalized (becomes a tale). There there is redemption of violence, here custody and tenderness.Today, at the exit of the A12 (Versilia) there is a teddy bear lying on the ground. The soft, bronze body no longer suggests tenderness, but violence. A blade pierces its chest at the level of the heart. It is the new monumental sculpture by American artist Rachel Lee Hovnanian, installed in the town of Pietrasanta with the provocative title, “Poor Teddy in Repose.” And it is already a controversy. The artist’s intent is declared: to denounce the death of the fetish object of childhood, the stuffed animal, abandoned and forgotten under beds, sacrificed on the altar of a new digital religion made of screens, apps and blue lights. Children no longer sleep with a teddy bear, they fall asleep clutching a digital device. But beyond the visual impact and ethical narrative the artist proposes, Hovnanian’s work raises a much deeper question, one that deserves to be observed in light of psychoanalytic theories. Specifically, through the concept of the “transitional object” formulated by Donald Winnicott in 1951 (Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena – A Study of the First Not-Me Possession).According to Winnicott, the transitional object is that first object that the child elects as a bridge between maternal symbiosis and ego autonomy – often a blankie, a stuffed animal, or indeed a teddy bear. It is not simply a toy. It is a talisman: it absorbs the mother’s smell, it holds back tears, it is the subject of love and anger, but it never retaliates. It serves to build a neutral zone between the inner and outer worlds. “It is not the object itself that has meaning, but the role it takes on as the child invests it with affection.”
The work “Poor Teddy in Repose” then not only denounces the obsolescence of the plush toy, but is a requiem for the affective imagination. The blade in the chest is a symbol of cultural rupture. Something is broken. Post-digital society has progressively replaced transitional objects with cold, nonaffective mediating tools.
Today, the child no longer clutches an object that he or she has chosen, loved, affectively invested in, but an object that is assigned to him or her, often by educational proxy or to surrogate a presence. These are the transitional objects 2.0, devices born to entertain but incapable of containing. The smartphone, totalizing and ubiquitous, captures the gaze but returns no affective projection: it has no smell, it does not age, it bears no traces of the person who held it. It cannot be loved, only used. The tablet disguised as a plush toy, with its baby-proof covers, attempts to emulate the warmth of the traditional plush toy, but it remains a machine, a simulacrum. Interactive avatars, from tamagotchi to digital puppets, respond to commands, but they are not chosen – they are products, not chosen. Voice assistants – Alexa, Siri – converse but do not console, do not welcome, do not give back. Interaction is functional and never affective. And finally, social-toys: emoji, likes and reels. Liquid relationships, shared, but never intimate. The child does not take refuge in them – he exposes himself to them. I think in this dimension intimacy is not built but dissolves in performance. These objects do not transition. They do not ferry the being to emotional autonomy. They do not build shelters. They are cold, replicable and always upgradeable.
The Poor Teddy sculpture in Repose then forces us to look at a trauma that is not just of the child, but of the adult: we no longer know how to console, because we no longer know how to symbolize. We have traded care for connection, presence for notification.
Perhaps that is why the work impacts us, disquiets us. Because it talks about us. Of the adult who no longer has his or her teddy bear, and because of that cannot recognize the pain of those who have lost him or her. Then that blade in the chest is not just an artistic gesture. It is a diagnosis!
A world that no longer guards its transitional objects is a world that has stopped growing.
How can we disagree?
The article Teddy Bear, the bear that divides public opinion comes from TheNewyorker.
