Hans Bellmer
November 22nd - January 17th
1500 S Western Ave. Suite 403
Chicago, 60608

André Breton published his first Manifesto of Surrealism a hundred years ago, in October 1924. Through adapted techniques, the surrealists accessed the poetic powers of the unconscious and the transformative energies of erotic desire, with the aim of revolutionizing life at all levels—individual and everyday as well as collective and political. The surrealists investigated modes of writing and art-making that transgressed the boundaries perpetuating oppressive, ideological structures. Through these creative acts of insubordination, they sought to renew human thought, reasserting the sovereignty of passion and imagination.

Working individually and in collaboration, artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) and writer Georges Bataille (1897-1962) produced some of the most enduringly searing and transgressive works of erotic art from the surrealist milieu. Bataille penned his pornographic novel Story of the Eye (Histoire de l'oeil) under the pseudonym Lord Auch in 1928, amidst post-war French reconstruction and political unease; a later version of Histoire de l’oeil, published in Paris in 1951, was censured and banned by the Criminal Court of the Seine due to its explicit depictions of sex and violence. In 1933, with Hitler rising to power, Hans Bellmer completed his first poupée, a ball-jointed doll in the form of an adolescent girl whose articulated body afforded infinite recombinatory possibilities corresponding to the artist’s polymorphously perverse desires. 

Grunts Rare Books is pleased to announce the exhibition Hans Bellmer, featuring a copy of the 1947 edition of Georges Bataille’s Histoire de l'oeil, with illustrations by Hans Bellmer, the 63rd in an edition of 199. Also included in the exhibition is a selection of Hans Bellmer’s drawings and gouaches reproduced in 3 Tableaux, 7 Dessins, 1 Texte DOCUMENTS SURRÉALISTES. This latter publication is a signed copy (46 of 60), with an introduction by André Breton. Additionally, Grunts will provide nine volumes of Cahiers G.L.M., a Surrealist edition published by French poet, translator, and typographer Guy Lévis Mano between 1936 and 1939. Of note, Bellmer’s ‘Naissance de la poupée (Birth of a doll)’ writing and a suite of his drawings— ‘Tour menthe poivrée à la louange des petites filles goulues (Peppermint tower in praise of greedy little girls),’ ‘Pink or green (Rose ou verte),’ ‘Tatouage mobile (Mobile tattoo),’ and ‘Pays sage (Wise country)’—are included in the May 1936 volume. The complete set, on view in the bookstore, features illustrations and photographs by Bellmer, Andre Masson, Man Ray, Jean Mario Prassinos, Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, and others, in addition to an infamous seventh issue devoted to dreams assembled under Breton in 1937.

Another Surrealist publication featured, also edited by Breton, is the postwar journal Même, the fourth edition cover of which features a photograph taken by Hans Bellmer of his partner Unica Zürn bound in rope. Published from October 1956 to spring 1959 by book-dealer Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Le Surréalisme, même was emblematic of the period; with it, Breton sought to give new momentum to Surrealist activity by bringing together proprietors of different origins and generations into five detailed editions, four of which are present at Grunts. Among the many contributors to Même were Marcel Duchamp, Leonora Carrington, Man Ray, E.L.T. Mesens, Jindrich Styrský, Jean-Claude Silbermann and Meret Oppenheim. Notably, Pauvert also published the first edition of Story of the Eye to be issued under Bataille’s name as well as early editions of Marquis de Sade’s and Kenneth Anger’s first printing of Hollywood Babylon (1959).

To supplement the selected primary materials, Grunts also humbly presents the following contextual devices: reissued correspondence between Bellmer and Zürn (1994), an exhaustive catalog raisonné of Bellmer’s drawings (1967), a inner-cover illustration for Albert Camus’ story titled Betwixt and Between (1956), illustrations for Mynona (the German word for ‘anonymous’ spelled backward) a.ka. Salomo Friedlaender’s Das Eisenbahnglück oder Der Anti-Freud (The Railway Accident or the Anti-Freud (1988), an exhibition catalog from Bellmer’s presentation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1975), and a special edition of the French publication Obliques dedicated to Bellmer (1975)—the latter two of which were produced the year of the artist’s death.

Hans Bellmer is on view at Grunts Rare Books, 1500 S Western Ave, suite 403, from November 22, 2024 – January 17, 2025. The gallery is open to visitors on Saturdays and Sundays, 1:00-4:00pm. An opening reception will be held on Friday, November 22, 6:00-9:00 pm. Concurrent with the opening is a reading in celebration of the release of ISSUE 0: EROTICISM by the surrealist publication Veilance, from Veilance Press. Among the readers are Issue 0’s featured writer, pseudonymous Daniel H. Hoffmann, who will read excerpts from Bedtime Stories, and Eden Jolie and Els Deitz; co-founders and editors at Veilance Press. The publication highlights the surrealist techniques of dream interpretation, automatic writing, and most essentially, the written anatomy of eroticism.

Grunts Rare Books would like to extend immeasurable gratitude to Marco Witzig, Megan Capps and Nick Schutzenhofer, and Sam Gentner for making this exhibition possible.

Grunts will issue an English language version of Bataille’s ‘Story of the Eye’ with Bellmer’s 1947 illustrations next month, December 2024, parallel to Grunts Rare Books’ debut book club inaugurated by the same title.

Text courtesy J. Biles, E. Jolie, and T. Payton.

Grunts Rare Books is pleased to announce our second gallery exhibition, NARC.

NARC is a two person exhibition of new works by Chicago-based artists Justin Beachler and Sam Dybeck considering trust, wellness, media literacy, sensationalism, and the pseudo-intellectual.

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The narc-etype is appealing—an attitude of relating to the world through a prism of rarefied insight: a truthteller. To narc is a basic human instinct; survival before indifference depends on the narc’s ability to collect information and manipulate it into understanding.

Without certainty in a grand narrative, the counterculture of the American 60s and 70s sought transcendence in alternative systems. The hippie dream caught on, and the sheer quantity of new spiritualities—infused with Eastern philosophy, mysticism, and personal enlightenment—created a vacuum for intellectual authority. For a generation bereft of coherent leadership, a figure of pseudo-spiritual enlightenment who
offered the illusion of insight and direction became increasingly necessary.

Gurus of the time—Timothy Leary and Charles Manson among them—offered visions affirming the immediate need for cultural transformation, each achieved through varying degrees of mystical discipline and psychedelic mediation. Paranoia, always an undercurrent, emerged as the dominant principle, fed by insights into the mind-control experiments federal intelligence agencies performed on civilians seeking free love and psychedelics. These revelations, alongside murmurs of COINTELPRO infiltrations into radical movements, exposed counterculture's defenselessness to manipulation even as it protested it.

The desire to simulate escape from the mundane and tragic decade, by imagining oneself at the center of a different grand and hidden truth—proved timeless, as seductive then as it is now. Paranoia delivered today’s Great Dissociation, and among so many facts to choose, the narc, a figure who stands apart from the masses—insulated by their proprietary interest in information—has never been more prominent.

Today, the narc is an anonymous figure with any number of followers operating in gaps of collective uncertainty. By signaling to depth without requiring it, the work of a contemporary narc acknowledges distance and conspiracy to no resolution, engaging at face with the contradictions of the moment and moving forward with them. The narc waves a flag. In doing so, the narc is a flexible observer and active participant in the construction of meaning, a filter through which chaos can be read clearly.

Far from a solipsistic pursuit, the narc’s engagement with truth stresses the constructedness of knowledge by suggesting a different narc could have built it otherwise. The narc’s popularity is in their brazen ability to snitch. Meaning here is a manipulable and participatory structure, and the narc makes islands with it.

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Justin Beachler (b. 1981, Springfield, MO) is an artist currently living and working in Chicago, Illinois. Beachler attended the Kansas City Art Institute from 2001 to 2003 and graduated with a BA in art history from UMKC in 2012. Recent exhibitions include Weatherproof and LVL3 in Chicago, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park Kansas, Granite City Art and Design District in Granite City Illinois, Haw Contemporary in Kansas City Missouri and numerous other spaces in Missouri. Beachler's work is in the collection of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park

Sam Dybeck (b. 1998 in Seattle, WA) is an artist, curator, and print production worker living in Chicago. In 2020 he obtained a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) in Photography and Experimental Media from California State University Fullerton. Additionally, Dybeck co-directs Weatherproof in Chicago with Milo Christie. Dybeck's works have been exhibited in Chicago, Los Angeles, St. Paul, and Kansas City.