Conceived in 1938, La Toupie represents a period of significant change in Hans Bellmer’s life. A fervent opponent of the reigning Nazi regime, Bellmer and his radical work had increasingly come under scrutiny since Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933. Although a 1935 trip to Paris introduced Bellmer to like-minded Surrealists including Paul Éluard, he was unwilling to abandon his beloved wife Margarete, who had long suffered the effects of Tuberculosis and remained in Berlin. However, with Margarete’s death in 1938 and the subsequent judgement of his work as “degenerate,” Bellmer summarily departed Berlin for Paris and joined André Breton’s Surrealist circle.

As early as 1933, Bellmer had produced a series of lifelike dolls which would remain at the core of his artistic output. Assemblages of plaster, wood and metal rods and often crowned with a woman’s wig, these distorted figures were posed in various tableaux vivants which were subsequently photographed. Steeped in Freudian theory, Bellmer often saw his art as a subject for displaced fetish and desire, and his dolls occupied a space at once human, artificial and inherently sexual.

Bellmer’s desire to “maximize the articulation” of his dolls meant a newfound focus on the mechanics of movement, and it was these principles which animate objects such as La Toupie. The work combines the biomorphic and the mechanic to create a work neither human nor object. Indeed, in the early 1930s Bellmer’s mother had returned a selection of his childhood toys—among which was a small spinning top, or une toupie in French —that made appearances in his work throughout the decade. In making the female body a literal object for the viewer, Bellmer pushed the concept of the male sexual gaze to the point of the grotesque.

Although aesthetically derived from ancient depictions of the Ephesian Artemis, La Toupie was equally inspired by Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs of the mid-1930s. These consisted of colored disks spun on a turntable to create the impression of animation, which Man Ray and Duchamp captured for their short film Anémic Cinéma. Able to gently turn on its base, La Toupie occupies a similar space between the erotic and the mechanic, aligning the movement of the body with the functionality of a machine.

The present form was cast in two editions, one larger and one smaller, commissioned by Galerie André-François Petit in Paris.