Art History Hans Bellmer
ESSAY QUESTION
Hans Bellmer
Discuss the way in which Bellmer’s work can be seen as a paradoxical, namely as both a virulent contemporary critique of a National-Socialist body politic, and a personal escape to a lost adolescent world of fantasy, in the face of that very body politic and its repressions.
“The body is like a phrase that invites us to disjoint it.” – Hans Bellmer.[1]
In December 1934, in the Surrealist journal Minotaure, a two-page article introduced to French readers the provocative and erotic fantasies of the German-born artist, draftsman, illustrator and essayist, Hans Bellmer.
Deformed images of the body (especially of the female figure) were not uncommon in twentieth-century art. However, the Parisan Surrealist works of the late 1920s through early 1940s, which, with their violent dismantling and erotically charged distortion of the human form surpassed others in their level of distinctiveness. As such, the Surrealist fascination with the automaton, especially with the element of disturb as produced by their irresolute animate/inanimate status, laid the path for the enthusiastic reception in France for Hans Bellmer’s mutated, often mutilated dolls. Working in similar idea of the Surrealist to see Woman (refer to A. Annex) “as an object of desire is conditioned by the desiring man, so that she is ultimately a series of phallic projections, progressing from the detail of the woman to the ensemble, such that the woman’s finger, hand, arm, or leg could be the sex organ of the man”[2] His works of art thus found immediate acceptance in France – the overwhelmingly male heterosexist Surrealist avant-garde.
In the article, photographs (refer to B. Annex) Bellmer had taken of a life-sized, self constructed mannequin are grouped around the title “Poupée (Doll): Variations on the Montage of an Articulated Minor.” The doll here is of Bellmer’s own assemblage, made of wood, flax fiber, plaster and glue, captured in its stages of construction in
Hans Bellmer
Discuss the way in which Bellmer’s work can be seen as a paradoxical, namely as both a virulent contemporary critique of a National-Socialist body politic, and a personal escape to a lost adolescent world of fantasy, in the face of that very body politic and its repressions.
“The body is like a phrase that invites us to disjoint it.” – Hans Bellmer.[1]
In December 1934, in the Surrealist journal Minotaure, a two-page article introduced to French readers the provocative and erotic fantasies of the German-born artist, draftsman, illustrator and essayist, Hans Bellmer.
Deformed images of the body (especially of the female figure) were not uncommon in twentieth-century art. However, the Parisan Surrealist works of the late 1920s through early 1940s, which, with their violent dismantling and erotically charged distortion of the human form surpassed others in their level of distinctiveness. As such, the Surrealist fascination with the automaton, especially with the element of disturb as produced by their irresolute animate/inanimate status, laid the path for the enthusiastic reception in France for Hans Bellmer’s mutated, often mutilated dolls. Working in similar idea of the Surrealist to see Woman (refer to A. Annex) “as an object of desire is conditioned by the desiring man, so that she is ultimately a series of phallic projections, progressing from the detail of the woman to the ensemble, such that the woman’s finger, hand, arm, or leg could be the sex organ of the man”[2] His works of art thus found immediate acceptance in France – the overwhelmingly male heterosexist Surrealist avant-garde.
In the article, photographs (refer to B. Annex) Bellmer had taken of a life-sized, self constructed mannequin are grouped around the title “Poupée (Doll): Variations on the Montage of an Articulated Minor.” The doll here is of Bellmer’s own assemblage, made of wood, flax fiber, plaster and glue, captured in its stages of construction in