Untitled

Across his lengthy career Hans Bellmer worked in sculpture, photography, drawing, printmaking, and writing, but his main source of fascination remained consistent: the doll. He constructed his first doll in 1933, inspired by a combination of childhood nostalgia and obscene fantasy. The result was a life-size assemblage of interchangeable body parts adorned with girlish garments and wigs. Bellmer, who had worked as a graphic designer, arguably deployed his erotic imaginings against the conventions of advertising as well as the Nazi obsession with hardened male bodies and the idealized physique. He began obsessively deconstructing, reconstructing, and photographing his doll and publishing the prints in art books and magazines. Encouraged by the Surrealists, who praised his work, Bellmer began a second doll two years later, a version of which is shown in this photograph; it can be seen as provocatively feminine and childish, or disturbingly dismembered and incomplete.