Detail

At first sight, this looks like a woman in lascivious dress on a chair, but a closer look shows that it is a surreal and grotesque assembly of artificial legs. Pictures like “La Bouche,” the mouth, made Hans Bellmer famous. Bellmer was born in 1902 in what today is the town of Katowice in Poland. In the 1930s he began to take an interest in dolls in his art. Overtly contradicting the Nazi cult of the body, in 1933 he built his first doll made of parts of a shop-window mannequin, wax, wood, gypsum, and glue, and with glass eyes and a wig. This was a “non-Arian companion,” as Bellmer put it, and along with further dolls this became the main motif of his work. For Bellmer, the doll becomes a substitute for a real body and a surface on which to project erotic desire and the breaking of taboos. Bellmer arranged and staged dolls and bodily fragments in various ways. He bandaged them and tied them up; he gave them fetishistic items of clothing like knee-length stockings and shoes; and he placed them before different backdrops. Working up to his death, Bellmer colored photographs, drew, and made prints of these often very disturbing enactments with their distortion, doubling up, and fragmentation of the female body. Dolls were an important motif especially in surrealism. In the circle of André Breton, Hans Bellmer’s photographs were seen positively as “anarchist-erotic enactments” and published in the surrealist magazine “Minotaure.” Critical voices, on the other hand, saw this obsession with one theme as a sign that Bellmer was neurotic and suffered from fetishism, voyeurism, or sado-masochism.