Peg-Top
- Artist: Hans Bellmer
- Date: c.1937–52
- Medium: Oil paint on canvas
- Dimensions: support: 648 x 648 mm
- Museum: Tate Modern
- Collection record: Tate Modern website
Listen to the free audio guide
About this artwork
This is the “Peg‑Top” by Hans Bellmer. The canvas presents a ghost‑like figure in shades of grey against a smoky backdrop, its single bony hand clutching a spinning top. What starts as a plan for a sculpture that never materialised becomes an oil‑on‑canvas exploration of fetishism and the body. Bellmer, a Polish‑born German artist who fled Nazi Germany in 1938 to join the French Surrealists, used the peg‑top as a symbol of a woman spinning the heads and hearts of men—an idea that recurs throughout his work. Created between 1937 and 1952, the piece sits in the International Surrealism room, a quiet reminder of the tension between the visible and the invisible that Bellmer was fascinated by. Its haunting, almost skeletal form invites viewers to consider how objects can become living, erotic symbols.
See it in person
Peg-Top is in the collection of Tate Modern on Bankside, London — free to enter. Point your phone at any artwork there and audioguide.london plays a free audio guide in six languages — no app download needed.
