Sans titre

Author: Marijke Peyser

Hans Bellmer started work on the scientific and philosophical essay ‘Petite anatomie de l’inconscient physique ou anatomie de l’image’ in 1941.^[1] In it he examined two main subjects: duplication and androgyny. Around 1946 his then partner, the Bulgarian poet Nora Mitrani, encouraged him to make anagrams – a word game that would play a major role in Bellmer’s theoretical dissertation and in his art.^[2] Bellmer applied the principle of the anagram, the rearrangement of the letters of an existing word to make another word, to the human body. The artist maintained that ‘the body is like a sentence that invites you to dissect it, so that its actual parts become reunited through an infinite series of anagrams’.^[3]

In November 1953, during the exclusive preview of his exhibition in Rudolf Springer’s gallery in Berlin, Bellmer met the writer and artist Unica Zürn. Bellmer is said to have exclaimed ‘Here is the doll!’ From then on Bellmer shared his life with Zürn, who at that time was already the mother of two children.^[4] Zürn became his ‘living doll’ and features tied up in some of Bellmer’s photographs and as the model for his erotic drawings.^[5] The meeting with Zürn in 1953 gave a new boost to the association with the anagram. Zürn also saw the body as a structure that could be subjected to a new arrangement.^[6] In 1954 Bellmer worked on the German translation of his still unpublished essay. Zürn helped him devise equivalent German forms of his anagrams. She swiftly proved so adept at this that Bellmer urged Springer to prepare an exhibition of her drawings and anagrams. Zürn’s Hexentexte. Zeichnungen und Anagrammen was published in the summer of 1954, with an afterword by Bellmer and an original illustration by him.^[7]

The drawing in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection shows how the process of ‘destruction’ and ‘transformation’ led to disturbing body shapes. In fact this was already the case in the early 1930s, when Bellmer was working on his dolls (see La poupée, L'idole and La poupée). It is likely that this drawing is part of a series of works on paper that Bellmer made at the suggestion of the art dealer Daniel Cordier in 1958 and 1959.^[8]