Hans Bellmer

ferrotyped gelatin silver photograph, mounted, signed in pink ink on the mount, framed, 1934

The Collection of André Breton

Calmels Cohen, Paris, André Breton, 15-17 April 2003, Lot 5044

Paris, Musée national d'art moderne / Centre Georges Pompidou, André Breton, la beauté convulsive, April - August 1991

Paris, Musée national d'art moderne / Centre Georges Pompidou, André Breton, la beauté convulsive, March - June 2002

Düsseldorf, K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Surrealismus 1919-1944, July - November 2002

Berlin, Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, Hans Bellmer / Louise Bourgeois. Double Sexus, April - August 2010; The Hague, Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, September 2010 - January 2011; and Columbus, Wexner Center for the Arts, March - July 2011

This print:

Minotaure, No. 6, Winter 1935, p. 30

Hans Bellmer / Louise Bourgeois. Double Sexus (Berlin: Sammlung Scharf-Gerstenberg, 2010), p. 43

Other prints of this image:

Hans Bellmer, Die Puppe (Berlin, 1962), unpaginated

William S. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (Museum of Modern Art, 1968), p. 150

Hans Bellmer (Paris: Centre national d'art contemporain, 1971, in conjunction with the exhibition), p. 13

Obliques, 'Bellmer,' special number, 1979, p. 68

Alain Sayag, ed., Hans Bellmer: Photographe (Paris: Centre George Pompidou, 1983), p. 22

Although never officially a part of the movement, Hans Bellmer is best known for his affiliation with Surrealism in the 1930s through his photographs of life-sized, surrealistic dolls.  In 1933, Bellmer created his first female puppet-doll, or puppe, posed in the image offered here.  Made of papier-mâché and plaster over wood and metal parts, this puppe could be assembled and re-assembled at Bellmer's whim.  He would photograph this doll, and a second, fleshier version with ball joints, obsessively over the coming years.  For the Surrealists, Bellmer's puppe was the perfect Surrealist object, with its combination of unreal and yet sexualized subject matter.