Hans Bellmer
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Bellmer–a leftist who was born in 1902 in Kattowitz (then part of Germany)–quit his advertising work at the start of the Third Reich, saying that no one should support the new regime, and retreated to private art making in his apartment. Because his figures were often distorted or dismembered, the photographs he created could not have been exhibited in Germany under the Nazis, who cultivated kitschy images of healthy people. In fact Bellmer’s photos of doll limbs and doll amputees offer a disturbing vision of the true ethos underlying Nazi ideas of “health.” Bellmer did promote his work to an extent, sending his images to French surrealists, who published them in journals and books. In 1938 Bellmer fled to France, where he continued to make photographs, drawings, and sculptures focused on the female form; he died there in 1975.
Art historians–and Bellmer himself–have claimed sociological meanings for the “La poupee” series; Therese Lichtenstein suggests that they protest Nazism “by using psychosexual ‘control’ over the doll as a substitute for the loss of control in [Bellmer’s] own life.” But the first thing to understand about these photos is that they’re fetish images. In one the doll has ribbons in her hair, which are a bit incongrous given that she’s nude. Her face is partly hidden behind her breasts; her other parts are similarly bulbous, and the fissures where they’ve been assembled easily visible. Recalling some of the more perverse comics of R. Crumb, this image seems to say, “give me your body, never mind your humanity.” The dolls that have no head make this wish even clearer. In one image, a skirt pulled most of the way down reveals black little-girl shoes and white socks, but attached to the doll’s torso is not a head and shoulders but a belly, which leads to another set of legs pointing into the air. This figure is posed in front of a bathroom, the toilet just visible.
What saves Bellmer’s images from being mere fetishes is that he understood and made explicit his own destructiveness and the artificiality of his fantasy images. He wrote in “Memories of the Doll Theme” that his figure “despite her limitless submissiveness understood that she was reserved for despair.” His photographs’ power is matched by their awful hollowness: we feel ourselves in the presence of a powerful fantasy that’s all the more vivid for its failure.
