HANS
BELLMER
Bellmer completed a second doll sculpture in the autumn of 1935 and photographed it in different stages of dismemberment in over a hundred different scenarios, often shown wearing little white socks and the black patent leather shoes of young girls. The present photograph shows a version of the second Doll with no arms or legs, hanging from a tree. Her torso is a second pelvis placed back to front and upside-down on top of the central ball joint, which forms her stomach. The photograph is taken from below in a way that emphasizes the doll’s breasts and genitals, while her face is partially obscured. Bellmer presents us with the aftermath of torture or abuse. Delicately hand-coloured in pale hues of yellow and green, the photograph, however, has a theatrical presence, as if to remind the viewer that it is a representation, rather than an act, of sadism.
Hans Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire (now Katowice, Poland). Up until 1926, he worked as a draftsman for his own advertising company.
Bellmer is most famous for the creation of a series of dolls as well as photographs of them. He was influenced in his choice of art form in part by reading the published letters of Oskar Kokoschka (Der Fetisch, 1925). Bellmer's doll project is also said to have been catalysed by a series of events in his personal life. Hans Bellmer takes credit for provoking a physical crisis in his father and brings his own artistic creativity into association with childhood insubordination and resentment toward a severe and humorless paternal authority. Perhaps this is one reason for the nearly universal, unquestioning acceptance in the literature of Bellmer's promotion of his art as a struggle against his father, the police, and ultimately, fascism and the state. Events of his personal life also including meeting a beautiful teenage cousin in 1932 (and perhaps other unattainable beauties), attending a performance of Jacques Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann (in which a man falls tragically in love with an automaton), and receiving a box of his old toys. After these events, he began to actually construct his first dolls. In his works, Bellmer explicitly sexualized the doll as a young girl. The dolls incorporated the principle of "ball joint", which was inspired by a pair of sixteenth-century articulated wooden dolls in the Kaiser Friedrich Museum Jonathan Hirschfeld has claimed (without further argumentation) that Bellmer initiated his doll project to oppose the fascism of the Nazi Party by declaring that he would make no work that would support the new German state. Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls (according to this view) were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany.
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Bellmer produced the first doll in Berlin in 1933. Long since lost, the assemblage can nevertheless be correctly described thanks to approximately two dozen photographs Bellmer took at the time of its construction. Standing about fifty-six inches tall, the doll consisted of a modeled torso made of flax fiber, glue, and plaster; a mask-like head of the same material with glass eyes and a long, unkempt wig; and a pair of legs made from broomsticks or dowel rods. One of these legs terminated in a wooden, club-like foot; the other was encased in a more naturalistic plaster shell, jointed at the knee and ankle. As the project progressed, Bellmer made a second set of hollow plaster legs, with wooden ball joints for the doll's hips and knees. There were no arms to the first sculpture, but Bellmer did fashion or find a single wooden hand, which appears among the assortment of doll parts the artist documented in an untitled photograph of 1934, as well as in several photographs of later work.
He once said that his work “Resemble a sentence that seems to invite us to dismantle it into its component letters so that it’s true meanings may be revealed ever anew through an endless stream of anagrams” and with that, its true contents may take shape through destruction. By reconstructing the dismembered figure and giving a new meaning to itself, he completely merges the internal and external together to form up a narrative story in his own way. It might be unpleasant to the eyes, but art doesn’t have to be aesthetically pleasing, not when its purpose is to make us think and question ourselves. The art historian Rosalind Krauss has also described Bellmer’s use of the Doll imagery as a tactic: ‘To produce the image of what one fears, in order to protect oneself from what one fears – this is the strategic achievement of anxiety, which arms the subject, in advance, against the onslaught of trauma, the blow that takes one by surprise.’ (Krauss 1997, p.196.). This may seem like a perfect way to describe how the art can be expressed through hypochondria. To identify my fears is to produce the image of what I fear. The sense of relief can only be existed after I know the cause of it and to find the cause, it needs name, words to called or imaginary visuals. Dragging the inside thought that seems to be intangible out, to form itself up and giving it a way to communicate back. Then dismantle it and reconstruct the shape again and again on the different layer of fold so that the true contents of that thought can be shown.
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La Toupie, Bellmer’s oil painting on canvas, is also one of the works from Bellmer that heavily reflected me to look back at my own works. Bellmer was fond of fetishist ideas, drawing out sexual associations between objects and the body. A ghost-like figure, painted in gradations of light grey and set against a dark smoky background, fills the center of the canvas. At the bottom edge of the picture the figure clings with a single bony hand to a spinning top. The top spins upon an irregularly shaped plinth and the figure balances precariously. A thin, wispy body stretches upward to meet two voluminous breasts and a small peg-top head, reminiscent of a praying mantis. Even though there isn’t a clear image of what is underneath but with the use of shading and lines, Bellmer also construct what is under the spinning skin layer. He distorted the perspective of the audience with a twisted figure. With zig-zag composition, the painting moves without any motion added. La Toupie symbolising a woman turning the heads and hearts of men on her spinning top. When spinning, its visible top half is supported by a lower half that seems to disappear. Historian Weiland Schmied suggests that: ‘This “basis of antithesis” explains how everything visible corresponds to something invisible and absent, which enables it to exist’ (Schmied, ‘The Engineer of Eros’, in Centre Georges Pompidou 2006, p.21).