Untitled

German-born surrealist Hans Bellmer made his initial contact with the Paris surrealist movement in the 1930s, with a series of hand-colored photographs of a hand-made, life-sized, female doll posed in various positions. Bellmer’s parallel and intersecting practices of both art and pornography have been read both in psychoanalytical terms, referring back to the author’s own anxieties and obsessions, and in a wider context of Nazi distortions and manipulations of femininity.

In this untitled artist’s proof, Bellmer’s female bodies are visible only through their accessories: a bow and dense pleats evocative of the drapery of fabric. These supplemental signifiers of femininity, alongside a butterfly in the upper right-hand corner of the picture, seem to transform further down the page into architectural details: bricks, wood slats, and decorative symmetries drafted over guidelines. Emerging from a focus on what lies behind closed doors and beneath clothing, Bellmer turns his attention here to external surfaces.