Hans Bellmer

Hans Bellmer is a well known german artist who made life-size pubescent female dolls, he was considered a surrealist photographer. Bellmer's doll project is also said to have been catalysed by a series of events in his personal life, 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.

I found Bellmer's work extremely interesting and very relevant to my project. He experiments in ways to manipulate how a doll can be representing, by changing the composition and theme of the image the doll is seen as something more eerie and sexualised, something that cause alot of controversy in the time of his work. Bellmer created dolls with fragmented bodies that could be dismantled in different ways. His images usually portrayed death and decay, and more interestingly, abuse and longing. 


"The fetishising of body parts and fragmentation of the sexual form ignored the constraints of physical actuality. ...Bellmer's sense of taboo lay not in what convention condemned but what was hidden in the darkness of the psyche (where it is far from safe). Bellmer's psychological confrontation and violence may constitute a spiritual jolt that liberates from habit and known codings. He dragged terrible desires out of the darkness and into cognition so that we could assimilate the full reality of our passions and the content of evil in them. How else were we to transcend them (in whatever way we ought) if not by first knowing them?"