Désarticulation sur fond rayé

Author: Esmee Postma

If the Surrealists are characterized by their fascination for the subconscious, Bellmer’s approach to art is concerned with the physical subconscious. In the early nineteen-thirties, his fixation on the female body and investigation into the nature of sexual desires resulted in two life-sized dolls with detachable limbs, which meant they could be arranged in disturbing poses. Bellmer maintained that we ‘see’ not just with our eyes, but with our stomach, touch, hearing and central nervous system.^[1] In 1957 he published a long-awaited essay in which he expounded this theory.^[2]

In that year he spent the summer with his lover, the German artist Unica Zürn, in a holiday home just outside Paris. It was there that he picked up the Rolleiflex he had borrowed from André Breton’s wife Élisa, and shot three rolls of film full of pictures of Zürn’s body, bound with tight cords.^[3] The metamorphosis of the body by means of ‘Verschnüring’ was a subject he had been working on in drawings since 1946. But from the start of this series of photographs there was a shift in his work: from then on, in addition to the dolls, Zürn’s body became the model for his scenes. One photo of her constricted back and lower body, entitled Tenir au frais (keep cool), was on the cover of the magazine Le surréalisme, même that Breton published.

Désarticulation sur fond rayé, the painting he made a year later, is dominated by an enigmatic yet unmistakably physical shape. An undulating torso merges into a repetition of round shapes that are reminiscent of breasts and a pair of undefined limbs that end in a skeletal hand. In random places there are ball-joints like tree knots, from which new limbs can sprout, while the joints in the usual places are missing. The body is disjointed, but not to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable. Here, Bellmer presents the human form as less unambiguous than we usually think.^[4] The pink and white striped pattern frequently recurs in Bellmer’s paintings, usually in the form of legs in striped stockings. This specific motif came from pornographic photographs that he collected, but Bellmer frequently used the combination of a geometric background with organic shapes.[5]

From 1958 onwards Bellmer was represented by the Parisian gallery owner Daniel Cordier. He encouraged Bellmer to make a series of larger paintings and drawings on the grounds that they would sell better. This painting is one of this group of works.^[6] Oil paintings probably numbering no more than thirty in total are the smallest category in Bellmer’s oeuvre. Nonetheless, as is evident from photographs of his studios in Karlsruhe and Berlin taken in the nineteen-thirties, in which his lost paintings can be seen, he was active as a painter throughout his career.^[7]