Peek-A-Boo. . . We See You!

In this bronze figurine, a shy bathing belle peeks out of her beach cabana, demurely clutching the curtains closed so that all we see is her sweetly-smiling face and dainty slippered feet.  But press down on the button atop her tent. . . .

and you are treated to a whole other side of her personality. Pulling out the button on the left side of the changing hut restores her modesty by flipping the bare beauty back to her original position. 

 

This erotic mechanical bronze is 6.25 inches tall. The lower back base of cabana incised with stylized urn contains a "B" and “Nam Greb Austria.” The "B" in the urn is the mark of the Viennese foundry of Franz Xaver Bergmann, which produced detailed bronze sculptures from the 1860s until 1936. Among the miniature animals, comic subjects, and Middle Eastern scenes, the foundry produced erotic bronzes, typically featuring a nude woman or a pair of naked lovers secreted within a seemingly innocuous subject, only to be revealed by a push of a button or lifting a up a piece of metal drapery. Often the erotic subjects are marked "Nam Greb," the reverse of Bergmann's name (less one "n"). Bergmann's son subsequently reopened the foundry, but the molds and remaining stock were sold at his death in 1954 to Karl Fuhrmann and Company. Currently, there are high-quality (and expensive) reproductions from Bergmann's molds, typically the miniature cold-painted animals, being cast in Austria, but as far as I can tell, not of the more complicated mechanical bronzes. There are also cheaper and poorer quality copies of some of the erotic Bergmann models coming out of Europe, China, or India. These pieces have poor modeling and blurred details, may be garishly gold-painted or patinated, and the female figurines' figures often have been slimmed down (but their breasts enlarged) to cater to modern tastes.  Many of these bronzes, whether recast from an original mold of carelessly copied, carry the Bergmann or Nam Grab marks.