Hans Bellmer

Alexander Iolas Gallery, New York

Mr. and Mrs. E.A. Bergman, Chicago (acquired by 1961)

William N. Copley, New York (acquired by 1962)

Sotheby Parke-Bernet, New York, 5-6 November 1979, lot 41 (consigned by the above)

Private Collection, Switzerland (acquired at the above sale) 

Acquired by 1981 by the present owner

Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Art, Hans Bellmer Drawings and Sculpture, 1975 (dated 1950)

New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, 1999, vol. I, no. 14, p. 62, illustrated in color (dated 1950)

Peter Webb and Robert Short, Hans Bellmer, London, 1985, p. 214 (dated 1952)

Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety, Cambridge, 2000, p. 163, illustrated; p. 165 (dated circa 1942)

Peter Webb and Robert Short, Death, Desire and the Doll: The Life and Art of Hans Bellmer, Paris, 2006, p. 117

At once enticing and unsettling, Mains et bras is a superlative example of Hans Bellmer’s subversive artistry. Whilst the ideologies of Dada and Surrealism were subversive by their very nature, Bellmer pushed the boundaries arguably further than any other artist of his time—to the great admiration of Surrealist leader André Breton. Exquisitely painted in gossamer hues, the present work is among the finest of the artist’s oeuvre.

At first glance, Mains et bras appears to depict a delicate, elongated female figure defined by soft curves and flowing lines. Upon closer examination of the intricate arrangement of bodily features, one can discern a semi-nude torso from which limbs extend both upwards and downwards. The woman’s head and feet are thus transformed into arms and hands, creating a figure that is simultaneously enigmatic and fantastical. Rendered with remarkable detail with a fine brush, these features retain an unreal quality, appearing elegantly feminine while also anatomical and doll-like.

The fluid lines and exquisite details of Mains et bras can be traced back to Bellmer’s early career as a draftsman in the field of advertising. It wasn’t until the early 1930s that he started producing his famous doll sculptures, which also served as a subject for a series of photographs. According to the artist’s biographer Peter Webb, it was a combination of seeing a performance of Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, in which a man falls in love with a mechanical doll, and receiving a box of his childhood toys, that ignited Bellmer’s interest in constructing his first doll sculptures. Uniting the erotic with the grotesque, these fetishistic objects depict female nudes whose dismembered body parts were put together in unexpected ways that are whimsical as well as unsettling. Coinciding with the Nazis’ rise to power, Bellmer’s mutilated dolls have often been interpreted as an act of rebellion against their doctrine of a perfect body.

During a visit to Paris in 1935, Bellmer met a number of artists and intellectuals including Paul Éluard and André Breton. Bellmer’s work was eventually proclaimed ‘degenerate’ by the Nazis, and in 1938 he was forced to flee Germany and settled in Paris, where he soon became involved with the Surrealists. Immediately after the outbreak of Second World War he was imprisoned by the French authorities as an ‘enemy alien’ and, alongside his fellow German artist Max Ernst, spent the early months of the war at the camp Les Milles in Provence. After the war, Bellmer continued living in Paris until his death in 1970.

By the time he created Mains et bras, Bellmer had moved away from making dolls, and turned his focus to drawings, paintings, prints and photographs, often of an erotic nature. With its striking melding of body parts, the present composition reflects the way Bellmer adapted the sexualized nature of his earlier works to his new drawings.

Bellmer’s depiction of ball-joints is particularly notable within the composition of Mains et bras, a design element inspired by the sixteenth-century wooden dolls he admired in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum (now Bode Museum) in Berlin. Bellmer was fascinated by the articulated nature of the dolls and incorporated movable joints into his own works, allowing his dolls to be manipulated and reconfigured for his photographic compositions.

In Mains et bras, Bellmer’s construction of the body from disjointed parts to form a unified—though unsettling—figure, reflects the influence of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, whose fantastical portraits were characterised by double imagery and also proved a notable source of inspiration for Dalí’s “paranoiac-critical method.” In the present composition, Bellmer substitutes Arcimboldo’s fruit and vegetable components, a vision of natural abundance, for an uncanny mélange of body parts.

Writing about the present work and its companion piece Jambes et pieds, Sue Taylor has observed: “Two unusual grisaille paintings from the 1940s [sic.], Hands and Arms and Legs and Feet [...] treat the entire feminine body in a phallic manner. Both paintings include passages of diaphanous drapery, in pleats or veils that allude to labial folds, and both forms, composed of doubled limbs placed end to end, are bony and ball-jointed. Here are striking examples of the equation ‘body = phallus’ recorded, according to an early review by the psychoanalyst Bertram Lewin, ‘in the fields of dream psychology, psychopathology, psychosexuality, ethnology, and the arts.’ Bellmer was quite conscious of the penis-like nature of his fetishistic distortions, which express in entirely antinaturalistic anatomies the same equation Magritte made in his Femme cachée (1929)” (Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety, Cambridge, 2000, p. 165).

The exceptional quality of the present work is matched by an illustrious provenance. Having passed through the hands of the famed Surrealist dealer Alexander Iolas, it was acquired by Chicago collectors Lindy and Edwin A. Bergman. A prominent businessman and art collector, Edwin Bergman was a co-founder of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The couple assembled one of the most significant collections of Surrealist art, now housed at the Art Institute of Chicago, whilst their contemporary artworks were donated to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. The Bergmans owned a companion piece to Mains et bras - an untitled drawing showing a complex web of body parts that evade definitive interpretation while at the same time closely resembling the hands in the present work.

Subsequently, Mains et bras was acquired by William N. Copley, arguably the most prominent American collector of Surrealism. Copley was a friend and patron of many Surrealist artists including Magritte, Man Ray and Duchamp, and was an artist in his own right. While his eponymous Copley Galleries in Beverly Hills was a short-lived venture—opening in 1948 and closing down the following year—it staged six now-legendary exhibitions of Magritte, Tanguy, Matta, Cornell, Man Ray and Ernst. A part of Copley’s private collection, including Mains et bras, was sold at a two-day auction held at Sotheby Parke Bernet in New York in November 1979.