Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety
While most critics have focused on the artist’s work of the’30s, especially the infamous dolls and the photographs he made indoors and out, Taylor extends her discussion to the sexually explicit photographs, drawings, paintings and prints he produced throughout the decades after that. The book includes 121 black-and-white images, some of them published here for the first time, as well as several appendices containing significant texts by Bellmer previously unavailable in English.
Sexual ambiguity and fetishism are quite obvious in Bellmer’s drawings, where female characters, spread-eagled, sprout a penis coming out of their vagina. In another drawing called "Undressing," the penis reenters her body. In several essays, we are confronted with repressed anxieties of the Oedipal son, pedophilia and fetishism. In her introduction called "Hans Bellmer, A Guilty Pursuit," Taylor states, "My story thus begins and ends with his family drama, and I hope to show how the erotomania, sadomasochistic enactments and repetitious sexual researches Bellmer performs in his art replay elemental scenarios that are also the concern of psychoanalysis."
A gouache drawing from 1935 points out Bellmer’s obsession with castration,and his increasing codification of a symbolic vocabulary for the fears and resistances generated by the fantasy of sex. Ultimately consumed by desire, he reverts to the doll as substitute and coaxes little girls from the orphanage near his parents’ home to model for paintings and drawings; he also experiments with pedophilic erotic photography.
On a most obvious level, Bellmer’s doll was a substitute for his cousin, the proscribed object of his desire, in a literal way that Oskar Kokoschka’s doll had been intended as a simulacrum of his former mistress. Kokoschka commissioned his mannequin from a doll maker in Berlin in 1918. While waiting for it, he referred to it as his "Beloved Fetish." His letters to Hermine Moos, the doll maker, were published in 1925 under the title "Der Fetisch." Bellmer read these letters and was fascinated to hear about another artist’s close relationship with his doll.
Bellmer made his dolls’ artificial status quite obvious; he was fascinated by the mechanical qualities of the fetishist object and glorifying the smell of wet glue and plaster. One of the doll photographs Bellmer published in 1934 shows a lacy fabric background, detached legs in high-heeled shoes nestled in white underwear, from which a rose emerges.
Bellmer’s doll games evolved into sadomasochism and the creation of surreal sculptures resulting from the sinister manipulations of mannequin parts, including dolls with three breasts, two vaginas and four legs. Recycling the head and hand from the first doll, Bellmer produced four round stylized breasts, three pelvises and a spherical belly. Accessories for this doll included a velvet choker, two wigs � one blonde, one brunette � long stockings and two pairs of Mary Janes. The violent nature of the settings is quite striking, but the the doll’s tormenter is absent. The doll is seen hanging from the ceiling, broken in part down the stairs, tied up to a tree and, in one case, a scene in which a potential perpetrator appears as an overcoated man lurking behind a tree, spying on an unguarded, naked, innocent doll.
"Bellmer’s images also have a quality of nightmare," suggests the author, "with its eerie shadows, disheveled bedclothes, vague domesticity, an aura of voyeurism" in other words, a troubled fantasy.
In his photographs of the ’40s, two female models, their heads and trunks obscured and bodies intertwined, form a single four-legged creature with three visible hands, whose many limbs seem to emanate from the central focal point of an invaded vagina. The two women huddle against a dresser in a corner of the room, inserting two fingers into each other’s vagina, and the two bodies meld into a headless, fetishized whole. In another photo, he combines his female nude with a bicycle placed indoors against a black background.
Photographing the nude cyclist from behind, she is bent over the bike, creating a baroque anal eroticism, with an emphasis on the genitals. The doll’s upside-down face, expressionless, is reduced to a background detail, while her brightly lit buttocks, thighs and genitals are aggressively positioned in front.
These photos were the perfect subjects for a series of drawings in which the body and the bike intermingle. At the same time, Histoire de l1oeil was published in Paris in 1947, with Bellmer’s six engravings, but Bellmer’s name appears nowhere on the book. From a letter dated November 1946, the artist stressed the necessity for secrecy about his newest endeavor: "I have devoted my work exclusively to the work of De Sade. This is an important project for me, but with great risks, taking into account the surveyance with which the State in these days keep watch on such creation."
Two other black-and-white photographs should be mentioned, one in which female genitalia is covered with drips of white liquid and placed in front of a dinner plate. In the other, two female hands masturbate female genitalia. Placing a dish in front of the spread thighs of a model whose body is dripping with milky white seminal fluid, Bellmer suggests that this was a saucer of milk for the cat. Milk is for the pussy, so do you dare to sit in a saucer? As the model proceeds with the dare, the artist observes "for the first time, her pink and dark (rose et noir) flesh cooling in the white milk." Here he seems to quote Charles Baudelaire’s Lola de Valance (1866): "The unexpected charm of a pink and black jewel."
In 1953, Bellmer met Unica Zurn while visiting his mother in Berlin, and like Mitrani before her, Unica became Bellmer’s sometime model. The bondage photographs that resulted are of a different order. It is Zurn’s naked torso or legs bound tightly with string, transforming her body into a series of folds and bulging mounds of flesh. In one image, she reclines on a plaid blanket seen from behind without head or limbs, reduced to a pale lump of trussed meat, with necrophiliac overtones and the caption, "Keep in a Cool Place."
These tied and inert bodies are in context "self-stimulation by means of erotic fantasies or enactments wherein the sexual object possesses no independent volition." Just about this time, Bellmer’s lover began to show signs of the mental illness that eventually led to her suicide. He repeated the bondage theme in several drawings of bodies hanging on columns or suspended on ropes. But later, these evident cruel images were denied and explained as altered landscape of flesh. Alain Jouffroy identifies Bellmer’s work in all media as "keys to a total understanding of eroticism."
This book is a well written and an important research of a controversial surrealist artist.
