The Doll (La Poupée)

Hans Bellmer studied art and worked in advertising in the 1920s; when the Nazis seized power in 1933, he renounced useful employment as a kind of protest. Because of his background in commercial design, Bellmer was comfortable with procedures of studio photography, which he employed in his doll series, begun that same year: posing of the model, lighting, use of props, and extensive manual interventions (coloring, retouching, overpainting) on the final prints. The doll pictures do violence to a girlish body that seems nearly alive and somehow more real in feeling than the erotic magazine images manipulated by Bellmer’s contemporaries in the Surrealist movement. He made only a few prints at this remarkably large size, hand-coloring them and mounting them to stretchers as if they were paintings; quite improbably, some of these works were exhibited during World War II, when Bellmer lived in exile in southern France.