signed- pencil on paper 16×10 cm
Provenance and literature
Provenance: John Richardson, New York
About the artist
Hans Bellmer (Katowice, March 13, 1902 – Paris, February 24, 1975) was a French photographer, sculptor, graphic artist, painter, and author of German origin. On the advice of his teacher George Grosz, he left the Technical University in 1925. He visited Paris, where he came into contact with Dadaists and Surrealists, and subsequently worked as a graphic designer creating advertisements to support himself.
From the 1930s until his death, Bellmer devoted himself exclusively to erotic depictions of the female body. Whether in drawings, sculptures, photographs, or prints—the focus was always on the eroticized image of an often-violated female body. Due to the constant repetition of this theme, he was attributed with all manner of neurotic disorders, ranging from fetishism and voyeurism to sadomasochism and pedophilia, while others labeled his work exclusively as surrealism and “anarchistic erotic stagings.”