Hans Bellmer

Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) was a German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer. Bellmer was born in the city of Kattowitz, then part of the German Empire, now in Poland. Up until 1926, he'd been working as a draftsman for his own advertising company. He 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 were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. The erotic imagery of Hans Bellmer's art is both witty and violet obsessed with his central them - that of the "Doll" - Bellmer creates capricious, often sado-masochistic, assemblages of parts of the female anatomy. Directed not only against the Nazi regime but toward a freer sexual and human expression, they were admired by the surrealist artists in Paris where Bellmer finally settled in 1938, shortly before his work was to be confiscated by the national Socialists. With remarkable technical virtuosity, the artist introduces a new repertory of physical combinations and transformations in drawings, gouaches, engravings, and assembled objects. This book, the first to present the totality of Bellmer's art, reproduces in stunning color and black-and-white illustrations the many facets of his art. The author, Sarane Alexandrian, has written a compelling text that illuminates Bellmer's of art history in the grand tradition of the erotic art of Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, the German artists of the Renaissance, the Romantics of the nineteenth century, and the Surrealists. The author, who belonged to the circle of Andre Breton, is one of the most important interpreters of Surrealism and has published many books on the subject and individual Surrealist painters.