Untitled (Variations around La Poupée) 1934

This drawing, "Variations around La Poupée" by Hans Bellmer, feels like it came into being through an act of obsessive exploration with graphite. You know, the kind of work that just keeps building up, one mark at a time, each one searching for the right form or feeling. I can imagine Bellmer hunched over this drawing, muttering to himself, pushing the graphite deeper into the paper, smudging and erasing, trying to find the right balance between the figure and the kind of brick-like wall behind it. The texture is built up with these obsessive and repetitive marks that remind me of de Kooning’s searching lines. Look at the way the forms are pieced together—fragmented, almost violently reassembled. The cross-hatching, the anatomical distortions, all working together to create this very strange and unsettling vibe. It is a bit like a collage, a technique employed by many other artists like Picasso and Braque, but using pencil marks. You can see Bellmer working out the planes and volumes of the body in space. It's like he's saying, "let's see what happens if I push this a little further."