Anatomia dell'immagine

by Hans Bellmer, Ottavio Fatica (Translator)

Molto si parla, e si è parlato, del corpo negli ultimi decenni. Ma era rimasto sinora destinato a una circolazione esoterica questo breve, eversivo, trattato di Hans Bellmer, il pittore che, insieme a Max Ernst, seppe immettere nel surrealismo una carica demoniaca che traeva le sue origini dal primo Romanticismo tedesco. Fin dagli anni Trenta, quando inventò la sua perversa Bambola – figura con la quale avrebbe intrattenuto un lungo, scandaloso rapporto di convivenza –, Bellmer fu un teorico e uno sperimentatore estremo del corpo, che rovesciava come molteplici guanti nei suoi quadri e disegni erotici, insieme algebrici e roventi. La presenza anatomica del sesso e l’«inconscio fisico» che abita in ogni corpo, i rudimenti di una metafisica del voyeur, la capacità delle membra di trasformarsi in una serie di doppi allucinatori: sono temi e tracce di questo scritto, che a sua volta si sdoppia, con perfetta consequenzialità, in una serie di magistrali disegni, quasi a mostrarci la violenta scossa a tutta la nostra percezione che le teorie subdolamente esposte dall’autore comportano. Anatomia dell’immagine è apparso per la prima volta nel 1957.

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Photography

95 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Hans Bellmer was an artist best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer.

Reviews

[Helga · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an unsettling but intriguing philosophical essay exploring the conscious and the unconscious; the object of one’s desire and the image of that object; the acceptable and the forbidden and the contradiction between the interior and the exterior and the ways to destroy that contradiction.

Like in surrealist paintings, Bellmer dissects the body and rearranges the body parts, demonstrating the changeability of perception, the reality and the imaginary.

[Yves S · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Cela voudrait-il dire que rien n'est croyable de tout ce qui a été concerté par l'individu? Car sa volonté est suspecte, parce qu'intentionelle, la géométrie et l'algèbre sont suspectes, parce que balances d'épicier, l'instinct raisonable et l'utilité sont méprisables parce que profondément inutiles; même l'inconscient, parce que cave de provisions du conscient. - Ce qui n'est pas confirmé par le hasard n'a aucune validité. "

[Paul Cowdell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The coruscating Bellmer, who defies recuperation to this day, wrote with the same unforgiving clarity as he drew, painted, photographed, made dolls. You need to read this, but you'll probably feel it wasn't written for you. It probably wasn't.

[Gulliver's Bad Trip · Rating 5 out of 5]

I remembered hearing about Bellmer through Ballard's commentary on his novel Attrocity Exhibition and, if I'm not mistaken, in something by Baudrillard as well. Ballard's novels are the most self-evident artistic accomplishments of Bellmer's 'theory' on the Unconsciousness. In other words, he shows the irrational taking over external reality or, on the contrary, a irrational reality taking over consciouness. Dialetics and its synthesis gives way to virtual, total hyperrealization.

[Charles-Étienne Groleau · Rating 4 out of 5]

Petite anatomie d’une jambe qui devient un bras qui devient un phallus qui devient un vagin qui devient une main qui devient un œil qui devient un orteil qui devient une oreiller qui devient une poche de sable qui devient le marchand de sable qui devient un rêve qui devient le réel qui devient une combinaison qui devient un troisième ensemble qui devient j’ai mal à la tête

[Fai Ahmed · Rating 5 out of 5]

“A practice in which each individual may decipher the reality of the imaginary but where again documentation is restricted to subjective proofs. The living, three-dimensional object suggests, without undergoing, its metamorphosis. This is something that is beyond the reach of photography.”

[discorotto]

Review here: https://corridoiolaterale.wordpress.c...

[Pietro Calò · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arricchito da undici disegni originali dell'autore, e da un saggio del curatore Ottavio Fatica, questo agile tipino Adelphi introduce l'opera e le ossessioni di Hans Bellmer, l'artista che fece vergognare l'onesto e mediamente borghese padre allorquando, aiutato dal fratello che la teneva per le gambe, Hans trapanava la sua prima bambola senziente cui stava per aprirle, letteralmente, le narici.
inizia così una carriera di arte visionaria e patologica, come quella dei molto ammirati George Grosz e Otto Dix, e che molto fu apprezzata già dai suoi esordi, Man Ray, fino ai raffinatissimi registi di animazione giapponesi che, nei loro studi del "character design" vi hanno trovato grande ispirazione.

[Elisa Spaccasassi · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Pensare è un’attività sessuale spostata. […] Nell’anatomia della percezione amorosa l’occhio torna bambino, gusta un frutto e se ne sente gustato, tocca l’acqua e se ne sente toccato, come capita a chi sogna, che crede di essere lui stesso trasformato; gli oggetti erotici sensibili risultano indistinti dagli oggetti del pensiero, mentre il mondo delle immagini arde nell’eros contemplante di chi lo vive: e una volta che l’immagine del sesso si è insinuata sotto quella dell’occhio, niente impedirà alla sessualità (all’ amore), travestita da facoltà visiva, di mantenere le sue mirabili promesse. […] Fare sesso con gli occhi sarà come fare il pensiero nella bocca”.

[EIJANDOLUM · Rating 3 out of 5]

“‘Éperdu’ is an adjective that describes the emotional state of one desperately in love, or who is experiencing an emotion so intense he is temporarily beside himself. […] Hans Bellmer is one of those – like Sade, Fourier, Lautréamont, Jarry, Roussel – whose perspective is that of the heart beating against the void. These are the rare individuals who make the alarming sound of that heartbeat, the compass that guides their lifelong investigations, whereas the vast majority appears to prefer finding a constant level of noise that will drown out any disturbing presence.”

[Mirko Czentovic · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I don't know if it is, objectively, as good as it was for me, but I found it really really beautiful in its prose and sharp in its thinking. The way that pain kind of surrounds and stalks everything. The way that desire undoes the body. The way that chance comes into play as the external (the famous Mallarmé: a throw of dice will never abolish chance). It was all very pleasant to read. I'll be thinking about this book for a while.

[Giuseppe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Preziosissimo

[Tarlapan Laura Roman]

Not my piece of cake, but definitely an interesting read about human duality and superposition and fragmentation of thoughts and feelings and human body.

[Swann · Rating 3 out of 5]

trop de psychanalyse ; pauvre Unica

[El Rato Pequeño · Rating 1 out of 5]

I certainly enjoy Bellmer as a visual artist, but this short collection of his indigestibly obtuse essays has left me far more confused than enlightened. Perhaps it's a sign of my lack of intelligence, perhaps it's a translation flaw, maybe I still have some growing up to do, but if this book is anything to go by, then his conception of reality correlates with mine like a concrete wall correlates with a flying tomato. A shame, because a few ideas in the second chapter are indeed artistically intriguing, e.g. probably the most literal objectification of the abstract female body (don't let the feminists find out!), remodelled via strings or a box into an entirely new constellation of erotic shapes, folds of fatty skin jutting out like novel buttocks and breasts...

[Nathalie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bellmer was an incredible draftsman and sculptor. During the Nazi period, he took strange and slightly seedy photos of mannequins that he made.

In this book he writes of the psychosexual forces that guided his artistic works.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book that explains his thinking