Katowice 1902 - Paris 1975

Son of an authoritarian engineer, young Hans was forced to follow a course in coal mining and to enroll at a technical university in Berlin (1923). His passionate interest in drawing soon freed him, and Georg Grosz, the Expressionist artist and caricaturist then associated with Dada, taught him his profession. Bellmer worked as a typographer before becoming a publicity artist. In 1927 he married Margarete, who helped him make his famous Dolls in Berlin-Karlhorst. Perhaps as a protest against Nazism, he abandoned his publicity agency in 1933, withdrew into private life and devoted himself to his 'dolls'. The first of these was made from pieces of toys found in a childhood box and was tantamount to a sadistic fantasy in which an easily available, unprotesting young girl is subjected to the worst excesses. The toy is an infant martyr and queen of desire; it gazes salaciously from between two silhouetted breasts. This Lolita conveys a certain cynicism in the very freedom she gives the imagination to take the possibilities of eroticism to infinite limits. She is both tempting and innocent in her temptation; a child-woman rather different from the one Breton dreamed of in Arcane 17; even Bellmer was disturbed by the postures he could make her adopt. There were two successive series of dolls. The first was produced in 1933 to 1935 and appeared in photographic form under the title, 'Variations on the construction of an articulated child', in Minotaure No. 6–to the great fascination of the Surrealists. The second series, produced in 1937-8, was illustrated by a series of poems from Eluard, 'Jeux vagues de la poupée', published in the journal Messages in 1939 and reprinted in 1949 in Jeux de la poupée. In 1937 Bellmer produced his Machine-gun in a State of Grace, an 'objet provocateur', or provocative object.

In 1938 Margarete died and Bellmer left Berlin for Paris. He was interned in 1939 and, as a German citizen, sent to the internment camp at Les Milles (where Max Ernst was to follow him), then released. At Castres in 1941 he threw his passport down a drain and took refuge at Toulouse, where his first exhibition in France was held in 1943, the year in which he met Jo‘ Bousquet. He married for a second time and eventually had two daughters. But he was soon separated from his wife. During the Occupation he worked on a special formal theme based on the architectural qualities of bricks and suggesting the wartime cellars where bodies often lay. In 1946 Bellmer returned to Paris and took part in the Surrealist exhibition organized at the Maeght Gallery the following year. It was at this time that he met Nora Migrani, whose premature death interrupted the book on him she was working at, Rose au coeur violet. Bellmer was a friend of Paul Eluard, Michaux, Tzara and Georges Bataille, whose Histoire de l'oeil (1944) and Madame Edwarda (1965) he illustrated. He produced some excellent pencil portraits of a classical quality. Bellmer's pictures are sometimes colour drawings, such as 1000 Girls (1939-41), but he also produced some decalcomania-gouaches (The Two Friends), some collage-drawings (For Margarete), and a number of engravings. Boots and Undress are colour lithographs (1951).

A new period in Bellmer's life began in 1953. He met Unica Zürn on a trip to West Berlin and they lived together in Paris in the Rue Mouffetard from 1955. Zürn's precise features appeared in several of his works from then on. Bellmer introduced her to drawing. Unfortunately she was a schizophrenic. Several recurring attacks forced her into clinics and reduced their life to near-tragedy. Photographed by Bellmer in the nude and in chains, Unica Zürn appears on the cover of No. 4 of Surréalisme même (1957). In 1970 she jumped out of a window and killed herself.

Erotic experimentation in art was taken to an extreme by some Surrealists after the Second World War and it is true, if we accept the premiss that 'poetry is made in bed', that everyday life and the life of poetry ought to fuse together in the marvelous universe of art. Bellmer was closer to Artaud than to Breton in revealing the cruelty of the erotic forces in life. In his work a tragic Surrealism is contrasted with the magical, sentimental, ironic and fantastic forms introduced into Surrealism by Brauner, Delvaux, Magritte and Dali. Bellmer was a draughtsman and engraver with a sharp line who managed, as in his dolls, to express the exasperation of physical passion without ever falling into the traps of narrative or complaisance. On looking at the series of engravings To Sade (1961), The Bat (etching, 1968), Death's Head and Girl (heightened pencil, 1963) or Little Girl on Black Sofa (charcoal, 1960), one realizes how the tragedy of death is an integral part of the world of desire; for death becomes visible by means of the Surrealist device of 'transparency' in the human anatomy. Bellmer tried to explain his obsession with what was underneath the skin–symbolically associated with interest in what was underneath the clothesŠin several texts; among them, Petit Anatomie de l'inconscient physique ou anatomie de l'image (1957). He added the physical unconscious to the affective unconscious mind of Freud. In every desirable body, he argued, in every one that is unconscious of its mortality, ultimately it is death that fascinates sadistic, anal and oral penetration which recur in the engravings of 1966-8, together with texts from Sade. High stools are mixed up with fluid limbs, which always end in high-heeled shoes, the erogenous zones of the body are exhibited in tumescence (The Top), and extreme fetishist acts are arrested by the convolutions of their own excess.

This graphic orgy at first kept Bellmer the property of a few specialized patrons but brought him fame after 1958 with the William and Noma Copley Foundation prize. The Surrealist exhibitions (1947 and 1959-60), a few one-man exhibitions (Paris, 1963, 1967 and 1971; Munich, 1967), and several books on his work, placed Bellmer in the front rank of those who knew how to rescue modern eroticism from Puritan vulgarity and from rejection in order to integrate it in a tragic vision of human existence.

*Text taken from: Passeron, René, Phaidon Encyclopedia of Surrealism; Phaidon Press Limited, Oxford, 1978, pp. 120-124.