Hans Bellmer (March 13, 1902 - February 23,
1975) was a German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent
female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and
photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer.
Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part
of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he'd been
working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He initiated
his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring
that he would make no work that would support the new German state.
Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls were
directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent
in Germany. Bellmer was influenced in his choice of art form by
reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch,
1925).
Bellmer's doll project is also said to have been
catalysed by a series of events in his personal life, including
meeting a beautiful teenage cousin in 1932 (and perhaps other
unattainable beauties), attending a performance of Jacques
Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (in which a man falls tragically in
love with an automaton), and receiving a box of his old toys. After
these events, he began to actually construct his first dolls. In his
works, Bellmer explicitly sexualized the doll as a young girl. The
dolls incorporated the principle of "ball joint" , which
was inspired by a pair of sixteenth-century articulated wooden dolls
in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum.
He visited Paris in 1935 and made contacts there,
such as Paul Éluard, but returned to Berlin because his wife
Margarete was dying of tuberculosis.
Bellmer's 1934 anonymous book, The Doll (Die
Puppe), produced and published privately in Germany, contains 10
black-and-white photographs of Bellmer's first doll arranged in a
series of "tableaux vivants" (living pictures). The book
was not credited to him, as he worked in isolation, and his
photographs remained almost unknown in Germany. Yet Bellmer's work
was eventually declared "degenerate" by the Nazi Party, and
he was forced to flee Germany to France in 1938. Bellmer's work was
welcomed in the Parisian art culture of the time, especially the
Surrealists around André Breton, because of the references to female
beauty and the sexualization of the youthful form. His photographs
were published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure, 5 December
1934 under the title "Poupée, variations sur le montage d'une
mineure articulée" (The Doll, Variations on the Assemblage of
an Articulated Minor).
He aided the French Resistance during the war by
making fake passports. He was imprisoned in the Camp des Milles
prison at Aix-en-Provence, a brickworks camp for German nationals,
from September 1939 until the end of the Phoney War in May 1940.
After the war, Bellmer lived the rest of his life in
Paris. Bellmer gave up doll-making and spent the following decades
creating erotic drawings, etchings, sexually explicit photographs,
paintings, and prints of pubescent girls. In 1954, he met Unica Zürn,
who became his companion (until her suicide in 1970). He continued
working into the 1960s.
The interdisciplinary artist, dancer, and multiple
amputee Lisa Bufano lists Hans Bellmer's doll work in her artist's
statement as an influence.
