A guest curation by Editions Graphiques, London.
The imagery of Hans Bellmer is unmistakeable. The line is clear, relentless, unhesitating: the subject ambiguous, suggestive, allusive. Georges Bataille, two of whose books have been illustrated by Bellmer, has defined eroticism as “that which separates man from beast”. Bellmer’s eroticism is thus an adjunct of his intellect, a notional as well as a physical extemporisation of the fact that sex, like drawing, painting, sculpting or writing, is a creative art.
Although he has exhibited with the Surrealists, Bellmer has clearly rejected their belief in the creative aspects of automatism and the unconscious in favour of very precise and personal recurring images, which he has attempted to define in his book, The Anatomy of the Image (1957). Starting from a basis of universal reversibility, in which there is a reciprocity, or false identity, between leg and arm, genitals and armpits, eye and hand, nose and toe, he moves to affinity of oppositions between breasts and buttocks, or mouth and sex. To him, a hand, unexpectedly emerging from a trouser leg in place of a foot is on a different, and more powerful level of reality. An object identical to itself remains unreal.
Bellmer carries this correspondence further, taking as a starting point. Bataille’s words in his The Story of the Eye: “In my early days of medita- tion, I was as usual entering a state of torpor when I felt myself becoming an erect phallus . . . This idea of being-my body, my head-a huge erect penis was so mad that I wanted to burst into laughter.” Wondering about. the extent to which the image of the desired woman (or man) is pre- determined by the “image” (or fantasy) of the man (or woman) who desires, Bellmer starts from a single detail from which he elaborates the whole: “the woman’s finger, her hand, arm, leg are the man’s sex-the man’s sex is a leg gloved in tights from which emerges a puffy thigh… The woman’s sex can also determine its whole image, the vagina being located between her own thumb and forefinger, in her hands, between her joined feet, in the folds of her arms, in her armpits, being her ear, her smile, the tear from her closed eye.”
Born in 1902, Bellmer became a commercial artist in Berlin. He was also creating his extraordinary dolls. Disjointed arms, legs, hands carefully scattered, as though exploded; limbs connected by ball and socket. joints at odd, unexpected intervals; dolls with an excess of torso or legs. or arms, the limbs sometimes displaying their inner mechanisms; arms and legs and bodies twisted in the gestures of frozen agony. And always, the terrifying aspect that made them so immediate and alive, the heads: roughly textured white plaster out of which emerged the hair and clear, pain filled eyes. The head, emaciated, appeared not modeled, but imprisoned in its plaster casing. As each new doll was created, Bellmer carefully photographed it, later publishing two slim volumes of these images. In 1934, Bellmer sent some photographs of his dolls to the French Surrealist magazine MINOTAURE, which published two pages. of them.
The Nazi regime in Germany classed his work as degenerate. Unable to work freely, his decision to leave Germany was hastened by his wife’s death, and in 1936 he went to Paris, joining the Surrealists in their activities. At the outbreak of war, he was imprisoned in France as an enemy alien, along with Max Ernst, being freed after the defeat of France. While Ernst succeeded in reaching the United States, Bellmer lived the rest of the war in the South of France making a precarious living by painting portraits. Since the end of the war, Bellmer has become acknowledged as one of the great independent artists of our time. The exploration of the decorative possibilities of sado-masochism is inherent in all of Bellmer’s works. The doll is the perpetual victim, the object of the viewer’s sympathy and commiseration which, somehow by its very nature and existence transforms those lofty sentiments into a curious excitement and a need to hurt further. Bellmer himself recalls a photograph of a woman whose thighs, breasts, shoulders were so tightly bound with wire that the random bulges of flesh “multiplied hitherto unseen lips and breasts in inadmissible places”. This multiplica- tion of features in Bellmer’s drawings is often allied with a subtraction of others, and thus the creation of his “cephalopods”, creatures with multiple legs and one head, or mysterious octopus-like creatures made. up of fingers alone.
Bellmer is primarily a great graphic artist. His sureness of line is at its best in his prints, in which he mixes drypoint, engraving, etching and aqua- tint, sometimes with a heliogravure base. He has illustrated two books by Georges Bataille, “The Story of the Eye” and “Madame Edwarda” and the Marquis de Sade has inspired two series, the ten plates of “A Sade” (1961) and the extraordinary “Little Treaty of Morals” (1968). He has worked mainly in black and white, only occasionally using colour to great effect, though he often uses very dark brown paper. In his drawings he sometimes uses white gouache for emphasis.
