Bellmer initiated his career as an artist by making an artificial doll, inspired by the story of Coppelia in Max Reinhardt's production of The Tales of Hoffman. He went on to construct jointed and articulated dolls in the forms of adolescent girls and photographed them in a variety of postures. He joined the Surrealist movement in Paris after these photographs were published in the Surrealists' publication Le Minotaure. He was enthusiastically received by Breton and Eluard. In 1938, after the death of his wife, Bellmer took up permanent residence in Paris. About this period, he started to execute a series of composite images in his drawings and paintings, which took as their starting point the theme of dolls. Multiple imagery was characteristic of Surrealism at this time but Bellmer's personal concept was to clarify the nature of his hybrids to reveal through a tangle of bodies and limbs the real anatomy of desire. "He dissected what he called the 'physical unconscious', the images which a man can create for himself of his own body or of that of a woman he desires. He composed hybrid women, most frequently by giving concrete form to various attitudes in one image. "If, instead of selecting only three or four moments of a movement (as is done, for instance, in manuals of gymnastics), all these movements are added integrally and in the form of an object, the result is a visual synthesis of the curves and surfaces along which each point of the body moves", Bellmer wrote in his Anatomie de l'image (1957)." (S. Alexandrian, Surrealist Art, London, 1991, p. 118.)

The present painting was executed in 1950. Bellmer was fascinated by the movement of hands and he made numerous drawings of this motif throughout his life and there is a drawing of the identical image in reverse illustrated in P. Webb, Hans Bellmer, London, 1985, p. 211, entitled Hands, a pencil drawing heightened with white gouache, executed in 1954.

Bellmer also published the subject, in reverse, as a lithograph titled Les Mains Articulées in 1954 in an edition of 59 (André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Hans Bellmer, oeuvre gravé, Paris, 1969, no. 29, illustrated).