Lot Essay
Hans Bellmer moved to Paris from Berlin after the death of his first wife Margarete in 1938. He was warmly welcomed by his friends Paul Eluard and André Breton who introduced him to Max Ernst, Man Ray, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp and Yves Tanguy. On his arrival in France he was working mainly on his Doll constructions (see note to lot 34) but the encouragement he received from other artists and the sense of security that he gained from working within a group led him to develop and extend his creativity. His works of 1938 and 1939 portray women whose bodies, especially their heads, are composed of an amalgamation of various and accumulative parts of the female body.
These composite images were, no doubt, influenced by the sixteenth century Italian artist Guiseppe Archimboldo who, rather than using human anatomy to compose heads, reverted to organic matter such as fruit, vegetables and other crops. Many of the surrealists were fascinated by Archimboldo but the use of multiple imagery was manipulated by Bellmer in a very different way to that of his contemporaries. While Dalí and Max Ernst's figures evoke a world of nightmarish horror, Bellmer's tangle of bodies and limbs convey the anatomy of desire.
Bellmer reached the peak of this succession of intensely detailed and detailed disturbing images in 1939. Peter Welsh (op. cit.) writes: "The series of composite images culminates in two oil paintings entitled 'Mille Filles' dated from 1939. Both use delicate shades of pink with added touches of yellow, green and blue, to portray a three- quarter-length figure of a girl against a plain black background. Number one is shown in profile to the right ... Number two is shown in three-quarter-face to the right, and is the most completely metamorphized creature in the series. Her hair is a veritable tower of girls' faces, torsos and limbs, a Fuselian fetish drawn with the flourish of Beardsley, and the face is part of the same complex design. This part of the image is supported by another armature. Her body is composed of folds of flesh recalling the second Doll, and is held in position by two attenuated hands, while a row of pleats hangs like a necklace across the shoulders".
These composite images were, no doubt, influenced by the sixteenth century Italian artist Guiseppe Archimboldo who, rather than using human anatomy to compose heads, reverted to organic matter such as fruit, vegetables and other crops. Many of the surrealists were fascinated by Archimboldo but the use of multiple imagery was manipulated by Bellmer in a very different way to that of his contemporaries. While Dalí and Max Ernst's figures evoke a world of nightmarish horror, Bellmer's tangle of bodies and limbs convey the anatomy of desire.
Bellmer reached the peak of this succession of intensely detailed and detailed disturbing images in 1939. Peter Welsh (op. cit.) writes: "The series of composite images culminates in two oil paintings entitled 'Mille Filles' dated from 1939. Both use delicate shades of pink with added touches of yellow, green and blue, to portray a three- quarter-length figure of a girl against a plain black background. Number one is shown in profile to the right ... Number two is shown in three-quarter-face to the right, and is the most completely metamorphized creature in the series. Her hair is a veritable tower of girls' faces, torsos and limbs, a Fuselian fetish drawn with the flourish of Beardsley, and the face is part of the same complex design. This part of the image is supported by another armature. Her body is composed of folds of flesh recalling the second Doll, and is held in position by two attenuated hands, while a row of pleats hangs like a necklace across the shoulders".