LONDON - One of the most accomplished draughtsmen of the 20th century, Hans Bellmer was born in 1902 and worked in Berlin until 1938.  He defied the Fascist state in which he lived by withdrawing from any socially useful activity developing a life-long project that became a powerful tool for social critique and a violent attack on stereotypes and the promotion of an idealized Aryan race. 

In 1933, coinciding with the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich, Bellmer created his first doll – a life-size wooden and metal skeleton clad with plaster, which he repeatedly photographed in fragmented poses and haunting scenarios.  He moved to Paris in 1938, where he immediately befriended the Surrealists including Paul Eluard, Yves Tanguy, Hans Arp and Max Ernst, sharing their fascination with childhood, play, psychoanalysis, Eros and death.  These offered an opposition to a complacent, bourgeois, judgmental approach to the world.

Described as an anatomist, an engineer, even a geographer or cartographer of the body, until his death in 1975 Bellmer produced sculptures, photographs, books and etchings in addition to theoretical and poetic writings; and an outpouring of drawings in an obsessive quest for a monstrous dictionary dedicated to the ambivalence of the body.  He pushed the boundaries of bodily representation, as Hieronymus Bosch and Giuseppe Arcimboldo had done earlier, to create an epic myth around the anatomy of the image.  Bellmer’s numerous drawings developed from naturalistic portraits to images of tangled limbs that dissolve into near-biomorphic abstractions, fusing male and female forms to create ambiguous, fluid organisms.  Hypnotic in its dazzling technique, Bellmer’s intricate depictions of often violent sexual fantasies calls into question the relation between individual pleasure and received ideas, indulgence and responsibility.

If the origin of my work is a scandal, it is because, for me, the world is a scandal.. . Hans Bellmer

Organized by the Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris. Curated by Agnès de la Beaumelle and Alain Sayag.  On exhibition 20 September until 19 November, 2006.

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