Biography
Hans Bellmer: vita e opere in 10 punti from Artesplorando YouTube Channel (audio dub and english subtitles at disposal)
Hans Bellmer was born on 13 March 1902 in Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire and today Katowice in Poland. He worked in coal mines before entering the Technische Hochschule in Berlin in 1923 to study engineering. There he studied perspective with George Grosz and came into contact with the Dada artists. From 1924 he worked as a typographer and draftsman, and until 1926 he ran his own advertising company.
His path towards the doll began in the early 1930s. He had read the letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925), and in 1932 several events converged: he met a beautiful teenage cousin, he attended Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann, whose hero falls in love with an automaton, and he received a box of his old toys. In 1933 he built his first doll in Berlin. In those same years, as Nazism rose, he declared that he would make no work supporting the new state. In 1934 he published Die Puppe privately and anonymously, a book of ten photographs of the doll. The same year the images appeared in the Surrealist review Minotaure, which opened the door to the Paris circle around André Breton.
The anti Nazi reading of the dolls is the one Bellmer himself promoted, and many critics repeat it. Wikipedia points out that it has been accepted rather uncritically, and that the project also drew on resentment towards a severe father and on erotic fixation. I would present both layers.
His work was eventually declared “degenerate” by the Nazi Party, and in 1938 he left Berlin for Paris. When war broke out he was interned as a German national at the Camp des Milles, near Aix en Provence. He helped the French Resistance by making false passports. After the war he stayed in Paris for the rest of his life. He gave up the dolls and turned to erotic drawings, etchings, paintings and photographs, as well as portraits of friends such as Marcel Duchamp and Tristan Tzara. In 1954 he met Unica Zürn, who became his companion until her suicide in 1970. Bellmer died on 24 February 1975 and was buried beside her at Père Lachaise, under a tomb marked “Bellmer Zürn”.
Approach and Technique
Hans Bellmer - 2 minutos de arte from
LS / Galería YouTube channel (english dub and subtitles at disposal)
For Bellmer the camera was never a secondary tool. The first doll has been lost, and we know it through about two dozen photographs he took while building it. It stood roughly 140 centimetres tall, with a torso of flax fibre, glue and plaster, a masklike head with glass eyes and an unkempt wig, and legs made from broomsticks, one ending in a club shaped wooden foot. A second set of hollow plaster legs followed, with wooden ball joints at hip and knee. The joint was inspired by two sixteenth century articulated wooden dolls he had seen in a Berlin museum.
The ball joint is the key to his method. It allowed the body to be rearranged into endless configurations, appearing dismembered, monstrous or hybrid. Bellmer described the doll as an “artificial girl with multiple anatomical possibilities”. He also compared the body to a sentence that invites us to rearrange it endlessly, an anagram of desire. In Die Puppe he arranged the doll in a series of tableaux vivants, and for the first edition he coloured the photographs by hand. Between 1936 and 1938 he made a second series of dolls, even more disarticulated than the first.
The sources are clear about what the doll represents. He desexualized it explicitly as a young girl, and the ICP describes the work as an obsessive exploration of the pubescent female figure as a fetish object. This is the part of his legacy that remains controversial, and it is why critics read the same images both as a protest against the cult of the perfect body and as an expression of fantasy and control.
In Paris he carried the same logic into two dimensions. His Cephalopods paintings use the female body as an anagram of erotic desire, with strange, fetish like creatures built from ambiguous overlapping forms. His portraits show the same fascination with anatomy and visual ambiguity, with a realism that recalls his training as a draftsman and printmaker and his closeness to photography.
His influence reaches far. The 1983 Pompidou exhibition was titled Hans Bellmer, Photographe, and the ICP show of 2001 was called Behind Closed Doors. The dolls inspired Mamoru Oshii’s film Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and his work has influenced contemporary photography, body art and feminist discourse. His photographs reached Japan early, shown in Nagoya in 1949 with the VIVI sha collective.
Personal Considerations
Film sur Hans Bellmer (1974) from raubida YouTube Channel (english subtitles at disposal)
The story of Bellmer is one to face with caution, more than any other artist I have written about in this series. It belongs to the wider dark art that explores and expresses trauma, fetish and taboo, and it is a cautionary tale for every artist who draws on personal wounds to the limit of the practice. Yet his vision was seminal, and that cannot be ignored or diminished. It has influenced modern visual art, Japanese anime and cinema.
We should also remember that the darkness of his desires and thoughts grew in a toxic family and a toxic nation, where the Nazis’ constriction of everyday life weighed heaviest on the most sensitive spirits. His fascination with the pubescent female body belongs to the fields of fetish and taboo, and I do not want to soften that.
After all, what was the work of another German photographer, even more famous and celebrated, Helmut Newton (covered earlier in this series), if not an interplay of power inflicted on beautiful women? Both men knew toxic environments, and both left Germany in 1938, Newton as a Jewish teenager fleeing persecution, Bellmer as an artist refusing a regime. Bellmer rejected the Aryan convention of beauty and went deeper into the wounds of a childhood under a severe and unloving father.
No doubt he became a target of the feminist movement, which cried loud about the objectification of the female figure in his photographs, drawings, etchings and puppet models. His relationship with the Surrealist poet and artist Unica Zürn has also been called abusive, because she lived with serious mental illness, diagnosed as schizophrenia, and spent long periods in psychiatric hospitals. They lived together in Paris, in the Surrealist circle that welcomed Bellmer with open arms. She was fragile and many sided, he was marked by the heavy weight of Aryan “normality”. According to the Surrealist ideal, the apex of life is love, two lovers becoming that strange hermaphrodite animal with two backs, a Shakespearean image, living satisfied by caressing itself.
That environment, those ideals and their heavy bags brought them together, and together they made images of impersonal, bound flesh, tied to the point of distorting the body and escaping the ideal of beauty, and also open to abuse. Can we speak of consent in a case like this, with a subject like Zürn? I do not think the question has a clean answer.
Another question. Do you believe that screaming, swearing and being agitated will make your anger go away? I do not, at least in the long run. Your brain will keep returning to the most irritating aspects of life, even when someone asks for your help, maybe a foreigner, maybe a little son. This is my own opinion, and I hold it as an opinion: something similar may have happened to Zürn. Working on these images with Bellmer may have kept her attention on her wounds, narrowing her world to a small and crowded circle where the sun does not shine, where wet grass has no pleasant smell and the moon no longer gleams, with only the wounds and the heavy bag that drags you down. No one can know why a person takes their own life, and the same shared work may have sustained her as much as it weighed on her. Her own books, such as Dark Spring and The Man of Jasmine, show an artist with a voice of her own.
My surviving historical neurons also tell me that context matters. Between 1920 and 1970, how much psychological knowledge was there to learn from? They had art, they used it, perhaps they overused it, and the frailer of the two could not carry its weight.
Art is not there to be your psychologist, and it does not have to be useful. It explores all the facets of human life in the great common task of depicting it whole, with all its nuances, differences and surprising similarities.
From Bellmer’s work we learn that we are luckier than he and Unica were, because we now have a vocabulary for psychological wounds that did not exist in their time.
So if a girl shows you a dark selfie, apparently sexy, with a skeleton behind her breasts, caution is too generic a word. What is needed is care. She may tell you she likes to be used and call it a kink, and it may even be play. Someone in that much pain, though, cannot give clean consent. Care means looking after her and after yourself, approaching a possible relationship with a positive attitude, and, if you both enjoy your time together, also helping her heal with loving support.
Shine on!