Woman Machine-Gunner in a State of Grace 1954

Hans Bellmer made this, Woman Machine-Gunner in a State of Grace, with ink and paper and who knows what else, but you can tell he’s thinking through something. I can imagine Bellmer shifting things around, erasing and reworking. There are these thin gray washes surrounding the lines which make me think about how much he labored. It’s very Bauhaus with the mechanistic forms, but it’s not really Bauhaus at all, is it? It’s too sensual. Like the circles indicating the breasts. He takes the language of engineering, the language of functionality, and then transforms it into something very strange. What does this mean to see a woman rendered as a set of soft curves, crossed by geometric lines? What were people thinking about at the time? I feel like Bellmer must have been talking to Picabia, or Duchamp, maybe even Hannah Hoch. That’s what art is, an ongoing conversation, people borrowing and adding and rethinking what came before.