Games of the Doll

The distressed female dolls fabricateed and photographed in the 1930 by means of the Surrealist Hans Bellmer have missing little of their capacity to shock

A strange female doll sits precariously upon the edge of a stained porcelain sink. Its material substance consists of a head resting atop a base formed by means of multiple breasts. Its eyes have make revolveed back into its head, and the lips are slightly parted. The shadow of the faucet creates an ominous phallic image, conveying an air of foreboding. A fragment of an indecipherable furcover percept is visible in the upper left corner of the image, hinting at an animal sacrifice, while the doll itself prompts some sort of magical or religious fetish. The figure appears both guarded and guarding, vulnerable and notwithstanding strong.

This 1935 photograph, La Poupee by means of Hans Bellmer (1902-1975), was part of an extraordinary cluster of the artist's works newly on view at New York's Ubu Gallery(1) Featuring approximately 50 of Bellmer's drawings and photographs of the sum of two units female dolls that he made during the 1930 the exhibit also included eight never-before-exhibited sketchbook compos between 1936 and '39 as well as six hand-colored contact prints from Bellmer's maquette for the 1938 volume Les Jeux de la poupee (The Games of the Doll).(2) Another novel Manhattan exhibition, at Nolan/Eckman Gallery, not absented 32 Bellmer drawings from the 1930 end the 1960s. And a large selection of Bellmer's works was featured in the Guggenheim's summer present to view of Surrealist art from the collection of Neshui Ertegun and Daniel Filipacchi. Together, these exhibitions demonstrated that Bellmer's art retains a power to fascinate and confuse the viewer.

What is greatest in quantity disturbing about Bellmer's doll images is also what is potentially greatest in quantity liberating: their bold approach to the representation of sexuality. When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933 Bellmer, who had been earning his living as an advertising draftsman, gave up all activity that he musing might even remotely contribute to the regime's well-being.(3) It was at this time that he began to bring out a body of work that constituted an idiosyncratic answer to the authoritarianism of the Nazi state, which he associated, upon a more personal level, with the domineering behavior of his father.

He began in 1933 to fabricate his first doll, a figure of an adolescent girl approximately 4 1/2 feet tall, made of papier-mache and plaster mold above an armature of wood and metal. Its movable head and limbs were attached to a stiff torso, and the entire material part could be disassembled and reassembled like a machine. This doll became the basis for above 30 different photographs which link Bellmer's fantasies of young girls with the themes of nostalgia, death, aggression and melancholia. In conversation with a friend, the art critic Constantin Jelenski, Bellmer make notesed "If the origin of my work is scandalous, it is because for me the world is a scandal."(4) The construction of the doll, the artist wrote was "the counteractive the compensation for a certain impossibility of living."(5)

According to his cousin Ursula Naguschewski, Bellmer worked in thorough seclusion in Germany, where his photographs were unknown.(6) In 1934 as Naguschewski was leaving for Paris to close attention at the Sorbonne, Bellmer gave her a number of doll photographs to display to the Surrealist leader Andre Breton.(7) These images created a stir among the Surrealists and were immediately published in their periodical Minotaure. In 1935 Bellmer himself visited Paris and met the Surrealist writers Paul Eluard and Henri Parisot. on the other hand he returned to Berlin, where his wife, Margarete, was ill with tuberculosis. Although ardently anti-Nazi, he remained in Germany to care for her. (Shortly after her death in 1938 Bellmer mov to Paris. As a German alien, he was arrested when World War II began and imprisoned at the Camp de Milles in Aix-en-Provence. After the war, Bellmer get backed to Paris, where he lived for the ease of his life.)

In 1935 Bellmer builded his second doll. It was made without of glue and tissue paper, shaped with tools and painted to bear likeness [i]or[/i] resemblance to flesh. More flexible than the first doll, it consisted of various appendages that could be pivoted around a central ball joint. Bellmer made above 100 photographs of this next to the first doll. He often shows the doll with more than individual pair of legs, or with no head or torso; it was at short intervals adorned with wigs, patent-leather schoolgirl's shoe white sock and other fragments of clothing. It is variously seen in a timber-landed landscape, on a staircase inside a abode in a kitchen, in a bed, or in an attic or a hayloft. Sometimes Bellmer placed the doll inside a space with a partially opened door, as if to imply that it was a place of mystery or perhaps the show of a crime.

This humor is heightened by the dramatic lighting of many of the interiors, which recall discharges from German Expressionist films. Creating similar a narrative context for the doll was extremely important for Bellmer, providing him with a means to exhibit his fantasies and to create an atmosphere of suspense. He also experimented with many slight variations of posture accoutrements, color tinting and settings. In fact, different versions of the same photograph are hand-colored in a variety of colors creating a remarkable range of effects