Bellmer, Hans

Bellmer, Hans (1902–1975). German-French graphic artist, painter, sculptor, photographer, and writer, all of whose work is explicitly erotic. He was born in Kattowitz, Germany (now Katowice, Poland). In 1922–4 he studied engineering in Berlin (compelled by his tyrannical father), but he gave up the course after becoming friendly with Dix and Grosz and began working as a typographer and bookbinder, then as a draughtsman in an advertising agency. In 1933 he constructed an articulated plaster figure of a young girl, inspired partly by an infatuation with his 15–year-old cousin Ursula and partly by memories of secret sexual encounters of his adolescence. He photographed his creation in various attitudes and states of dismemberment (sometimes partly clothed) and published a collection of the photographs as Die Puppe (‘The Doll') in Karlsruhe in 1934; a French edition, La Poupée, was published in Paris in 1936. Bellmer sent samples of the photographs to André Breton in Paris, and the Surrealists were highly excited by these striking images of ‘vice and enchantment'. In 1938, in danger of arrest by the Nazis, Bellmer fled to Paris to join the Surrealists. He was interred at the beginning of the war (with Max Ernst), then lived in the South of France, 1942–6, before returning to Paris. He then ‘began a long series of drawings and etchings which further developed the violent eroticism of his dolls … these are often ambiguous superimposed images conjuring up visions of far-from-innocent little girls taking part in advanced sexual exercises, or strange anatomical inventions made up of of sexual apertures and throbbing organs. These exciting, honest, and totally unprurient creations are always executed in a marvellously refined and elegant technique, culminating in the large and highly complex two-colour etchings entitled Petit Traité de la Morale (1968), which illustrate the sexual dreams of young girls and at the same time the sexual fantasies of their author. These ten prints constitute one of the finest expressions of erotocism in twentieth-century art, and they show the uniqueness of Bellmer's erotic art in that they are non-naturalistic, graphic transcriptions of mental images relating to erotic desire’ ( Peter Webb, The Erotic Arts, 1975). Bellmer also produced paintings and sculpture in a similar vein. His work was not well known until a large retrospective in 1971–2 at the Centre National d'Art Contemporain, Paris.