La poupée (The Doll)

The Surrealist artist Hans Bellmer began to assemble and photograph sculptural forms of doll parts in 1933. After self-publishing (with his friend Thomas Eckstein) ten silver gelatin prints of unsettling doll compositions, Die Puppe, in Karlsruhe in 1934, eighteen of Bellmer’s photographs found wider distribution in the Paris-based surrealist journal Minotaure in December of 1934 (“Poupée, variations sur le montage d'une mineure articulée,” Minotaure 6 (Winter 1934–35, pp. 30–31)). This 1936 book is a limited-edition re-issue by Guy Lévis-Mano in Paris of Bellmer’s first publication.

Faithful to the photo album-like format of the artist’s first design, this book contains ten gelatin silver prints mounted on cardstock and bound into a collection. With each page, the viewer is confronted with compositions both visceral and impossible. The doll’s soft curves and anatomical details visually suggest living forms that upon closer examination reveal themselves as dismembered fragments too numerous or too few to form a real body. It’s no surprise that the uncomfortable tension between bodily attraction and revulsion appealed to Surrealist sensibilities. Bellmer’s sculptural assemblages and the eerie photographs of them he produced bear a resemblance to both pornography or the depiction of a hideous crime.