Hans Bellmer

Hans Bellmer The doll. Memories about the doll 1934 Photobook with 10 vintages, gelatin silver prints high gloss (each about 5.7 x 8.6 cm), mounted on yellow cardboard with pagination on the back and a text, printed on thin pink paper. Marbled paperback binding with pink spine label. 11.7 x 8.9 cm. 34 pages. Signed in pencil on the back cover. Published by Th. Eckstein, Carlsruhe/OS. Provenance From the photographer to the father of the present owner Literature Carl Haenlein (ed.), Hans Bellmer. Photographien, Ausst.kat. Kestner-Gesellschaft, Hannover, Berlin 1984, p. 8 with ill.; Birgit Käufer, Die Obsession der Puppe in der Photographie. Hans Bellmer. Pierre Molinier. Cindy Sherman, Bielefeld 2006, pp. 127-130 with illus. "Was not in the doll, which lived only from what was thought into it, which despite its boundless docility knew how to be reserved for despair, was not to be found in the design of just such doll-like quality what the imagination sought in pleasure and enhancement? Didn't it mean the final triumph over the young girls with their large sidelong looking eyes, when the fingers, eager to attack and to form something, slowly let come into being, limb by limb, what senses and brain had distilled? To join joint to joint, to try out the spheres their largest range of rotation for childlike pose, to follow the hollows gently, to taste the pleasure of the bulges, to get lost in the shell of the ear, to make pretty and a little vindictively also to distribute the salt of the deformations. On top of that, not to stop in front of the inside by any means, to uncover the restrained girl thoughts, so that their undergrounds become visible, through the navel best, deep in the belly as a panorama colorfully electrically illuminated. - Shouldn't that be the solution?" With this question Hans Bellmer ends the introductory text part of his book "The Doll. Erinnerungen zum Thema Puppe", published in 1934 by Th. Eckstein in Carlsruhe/Oberschlesien. On nine pages of text, the artist, who was equally influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism, describes in feverish language his inner struggle with a trauma of his youth. The trigger for the described state of turmoil, which oscillates between sexual overexcitement, theatrical despair, and aggressive vindictiveness, was Bellmer's obsessive affection for his own cousin Ursula Naguschewski ("Ursula N."), to whom the book is dedicated. Bellmer's ostensibly autobiographical text deals with his frustrating experiences with "young girls," whom he equates with "limber dolls." These are described as objects of desire and at the same time as actors who involve the helpless, adolescent first-person narrator - thoughtlessly or deviously - in their cruel game. Hans Bellmer, who withdrew from bourgeois gainful employment when the National Socialists came to power and henceforth devoted himself entirely to his obsessive art, began work on his first doll in 1932, assisted by his technically adept brother Fritz. Not the doll itself, a framework consisting of a wooden construction with ball joints and shell-like rough "skin", formed from layers of flax, glue and plaster, but the photographs staged with its help represent the artist's actual work. By means of the photographic "documentation" of the production (and disassembly) of his doll, Bellmer re-enacts the process of its creation (and destruction), thus taking revenge on the figure that serves as a substitute for the ignominy he has suffered. An act that, as Bellmer admits at the same time, is doomed to failure. It is only through photography that Bellmer's doll acquires its liveliness. "The doll, which confronts us [...] as a morbidly living creature, visualizes par excellence the photographic quality of generating the living image of something dead. [...] With the allusion to the motif of the female corpse, moreover, the pictorial status of femininity is potentiated, for with rigor mortis the body becomes an image and thus virtually challenges further pictorial representations." (Birgit Käufer, op. cit., p. 57). Bellmer uses various photographic approaches to bring the art figure to life. From effective (portrait) photographic staging using highlights to create a chiaroscuro effect, to experimental darkroom processes, here in the form of a negative print. A self-portrait with doll shows the photographer as a semi-transparent, blurred shadow next to his clearly rendered doll, which seems to turn away defensively. The photographer is almost always too close to his subject, showing only fragments and details, sometimes framed by lace and tulle, which makes one think of rape or at least shameful exposure. Into