Untitled (The Cube) 1945

This is an ink drawing by Hans Bellmer, called “The Cube.” It has no date but I can just imagine him making it, carefully applying those tiny dots with a fine nib, plotting the figure within the grid of this impossible box. There is a dark quality to Bellmer’s work; he spent years making life-sized dolls with interchangeable limbs. He was interested in the body as a fragmented and malleable thing. It’s a disturbing idea, but here, the body seems at peace, curled up inside this containing form. Her feet, those odd, stylized feet, are tenderly drawn. You can see how the line is very precise, but then it dissolves into this haze of dots. Bellmer has an amazing way of seeing - he’s very much his own universe. He was certainly having a conversation with Surrealism. There’s an echo of Picasso in this piece, but even more so, he is looking at his predecessors and making something new. All artists borrow and steal and misread and misunderstand, and isn't that great? Because through that process of engagement, they make their own thing.