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Lot Essay
A photograph of this work is in the archives of the Galerie André-François Petit.
The present work is one of a rare series of early paintings of cephalopods that Bellmer painted during the height of his involvement with the Paris Surrealists at the end of the 1930s. Depicting the erotic essence of the female form in an anagrammatic way that transforms woman into a sensual fleshy and oyster-like creature (hence Bellmer's reference to cephalopods), the painting dates from a highly important period of transition for the artist. In 1938 Bellmer had moved to Paris. His wife Marguerite had recently succumbed to her long battle with tuberculosis, and, having grown increasingly disgusted with the Nazi regime and having completed the work on his doll that had preoccupied and sustained him in Germany since 1933, Bellmer needed and found a new beginning.
In Paris, Bellmer met and became friends with many of the Surealists who previously had only known him through his work with the doll - his auto-erotic sculpture that had formed a centrepiece of the two major International Surrealist exhibitions. At the same time Bellmer began, for the first time, to translate his experiments with the doll into the two dimensional field of painting. Using the idea of the female body as an anagram of erotic desire that he had developed in the doll, in his "Cephalopods", Bellmer concentrated on the opportunity for ambiguous and simultaneous understanding that two-dimensional illusionistic representation allows in order to create powerful images of strange fetish-like morphed female creatures. "The starting-point of desire, with respect to the intensity of its images, is not in a perceptible whole but in the detail," Bellmer wrote. "The essential point to retain from the monstrous dictionary of analogies/antagonisms which constitute the dictionary of the image is that a given detail such as a leg is perceptible, accessible to memory and available, in short is real, only if desire does not take it fatally for a leg. An object that is identical with itself is without reality" (H. Bellmer, L'Anatomie de l'image, Paris, 1957, p. 38).
In Bellmer's "Cephalopods", legs become arms and breasts double as buttocks in an ambiguous play of form that conjures a sense of auto-eroticism and of the fantasy figure being a self-sufficient independent creature devoted to sexual gratification. In the present work Bellmer also incorporates a favoured visual device of an eyeball peering through a vulva-like opening which here forms the woman's eyelids. The motif of the eye in the vagina has its origin in Georges Bataille's book of 1928 L'Histoire de l'oeil (The Story of the Eye) which Bellmer later illustrated in 1947. Bellmer was a great admirer of Bataille's work and sought, like him, to penetrate an understanding of life (and death) through an investigation of the erotic. The cephalopod paintings mark both a new beginning and the continuation of his experiments with the doll. Set against a net-like background the poised and somewhat predatory-looking creature in Céphalopode anticipates Bellmer's later depictions of that archetypal femme-fatale, the "spider-woman".
The present work is one of a rare series of early paintings of cephalopods that Bellmer painted during the height of his involvement with the Paris Surrealists at the end of the 1930s. Depicting the erotic essence of the female form in an anagrammatic way that transforms woman into a sensual fleshy and oyster-like creature (hence Bellmer's reference to cephalopods), the painting dates from a highly important period of transition for the artist. In 1938 Bellmer had moved to Paris. His wife Marguerite had recently succumbed to her long battle with tuberculosis, and, having grown increasingly disgusted with the Nazi regime and having completed the work on his doll that had preoccupied and sustained him in Germany since 1933, Bellmer needed and found a new beginning.
In Paris, Bellmer met and became friends with many of the Surealists who previously had only known him through his work with the doll - his auto-erotic sculpture that had formed a centrepiece of the two major International Surrealist exhibitions. At the same time Bellmer began, for the first time, to translate his experiments with the doll into the two dimensional field of painting. Using the idea of the female body as an anagram of erotic desire that he had developed in the doll, in his "Cephalopods", Bellmer concentrated on the opportunity for ambiguous and simultaneous understanding that two-dimensional illusionistic representation allows in order to create powerful images of strange fetish-like morphed female creatures. "The starting-point of desire, with respect to the intensity of its images, is not in a perceptible whole but in the detail," Bellmer wrote. "The essential point to retain from the monstrous dictionary of analogies/antagonisms which constitute the dictionary of the image is that a given detail such as a leg is perceptible, accessible to memory and available, in short is real, only if desire does not take it fatally for a leg. An object that is identical with itself is without reality" (H. Bellmer, L'Anatomie de l'image, Paris, 1957, p. 38).
In Bellmer's "Cephalopods", legs become arms and breasts double as buttocks in an ambiguous play of form that conjures a sense of auto-eroticism and of the fantasy figure being a self-sufficient independent creature devoted to sexual gratification. In the present work Bellmer also incorporates a favoured visual device of an eyeball peering through a vulva-like opening which here forms the woman's eyelids. The motif of the eye in the vagina has its origin in Georges Bataille's book of 1928 L'Histoire de l'oeil (The Story of the Eye) which Bellmer later illustrated in 1947. Bellmer was a great admirer of Bataille's work and sought, like him, to penetrate an understanding of life (and death) through an investigation of the erotic. The cephalopod paintings mark both a new beginning and the continuation of his experiments with the doll. Set against a net-like background the poised and somewhat predatory-looking creature in Céphalopode anticipates Bellmer's later depictions of that archetypal femme-fatale, the "spider-woman".