In the eyes of his critics, Hans Bellmer was an uptight doll-pornographer with a pronounced tendency towards neurotic disorders; his admirers saw him as a creator of surreal sculptures gifted with an abysmal fantasy. It was not until the 1960s that the long-ostracised artist could present his work to the wider audience.
(...) Continue readingHans Bellmer – An overshadowed childhood and an unloved profession
Hans Bellmer was born on 13 March 1902 in Kattowitz. His tyrannical and strict father overshadowed and had a formative experience on his childhood and dealt his loving mother also a hard hand. Hans shared the fear and hate with his brother Fritz, seeking refuge in a secret garden which was decorated with all kinds of toys and various memorials. Here the tormented children found a comforting fantasy world which would have a lasting influence on the artist Hans Bellmer. Initially, however, an artistic career did not come into question – under pressure from the father, Bellmer instead had to work in coal mining and in a steel mill after graduating from school. in the year 1923, he was sent to Berlin to the Technical School, but the young man was more interested in politics, studying Karl Marx and taking part in discussions with the young Dada artists. Through these discussions, Hans Bellmer met George Grosz, John Heartfield and Rudolf Schlichter.
Steps into a new life as an artist; protest against Hitler
It was his friend George Grosz who finally bolstered Hans Bellmer to break off the unloved and negligently attended engineering course and instead to start an apprenticeship in typography at Malik Publishers. With eagerness and zeal, he created book illustrations and designed covers, among others for Salomo Friedlaender’s The Railroad Accident or the Anti-friend which the German philosopher and writer had published under the pseudonym Mynona in 1925. Following a stay of many months in Paris where he pursued fruitful contact with Dadaists and Surrealists, Bellmer opened his own studio for commercial drawings in Berlin-Karlshorst. In 1928, he married Margarete Schnell. In 1933, Bellmer closed his studio in protest against Hitler’s seizure of power because he no longer wanted to practice art for the purpose of making a profit. He wanted to be active not for money, but only for art, in this dark time, a time which reminded him of his childhood, overshadowed by constraints. An art that should be far away from the ideas of the National Socialist powers.
Scandalous erotic puppet show
Since the early 1930s, Hans Bellmer had dedicated himself to his erotic dolls, which would form the predominant theme of his art until his death. Inspired by Olympia, the beguiling mechanical siren of the unscrupulously ingenious inventor Spalanzani from Offenbach’s opera The Tales of Hoffmann, Bellmann began to create a grotesque cabinet of dolls in which the bodies were joined together in a macabre dance of eroticism and torment. Following the death of his wife, Bellmer emigrated to Paris in 1938 where he was interned in the Les Milles camp and made friends with Max Ernst, with whom he created the collaborative work Schöpfungen, die Geschöpfe der Einbildungskraft (Creations, the Creatures of the Imagination). In 1953, he met the writer Unica Zürn, who suffered from depression and schizophrenia and who offered Hans Bellmer’s eclipsed, abysmal artist’s soul the kindred spirit he longed for. The artists developed a close connection, withdrew ever more into themselves, forbade themselves any friendship group and avoided contact with the outside world. In 1970, Zürn committed suicide by falling out of the window of their Paris apartment. Bellmer remained behind – alone with his dolls.
Hans Bellmer died lonely and deserted in Paris on 24 February 1975.
Hans Bellmer - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz: