Hans Bellmer is best known for the life-sized female dolls that he produced in the mid-1930s and which he obsessively photographed over the next decade. His first doll, begun in 1933, was the image of an adolescent girl, made of papier-maché and plaster molded over an armature of wood and metal. The entire body could be assembled and reassembled like a machine. Bellmer's 1934 book Die Puppe (The Doll), produced and published privately in Germany, contains ten black-and-white photographs of Bellmer's first doll arranged in a series of tableaux vivants.

Bellmer's second doll, constructed in 1935, was made of glue and tissue paper, shaped with tools and painted to resemble flesh. More flexible than the first doll, it consisted of various wooden ball joints and appendages pivoting around a central ball joint. Bellmer made over one hundred photographs of this second doll. His myriad rearrangements of its body link his fantasies of adolescent girls as passive victim and powerful seductress with the themes of nostalgia and eroticism, and tie his work to the French Surrealists' ambivalent desire for and revulsion at the female body. Desire is projected onto the body of the doll in a way that remains controversial and disturbing today.

Although Bellmer is generally classified as a Surrealist, he actually initiated his doll project with a specific political purpose: to oppose the fascism of the National Socialist (Nazi) Party in Germany in the 1930s. After the rise to power of the Nazi Party in 1933, Bellmer, an established painter and graphic designer, declared that he would make no work that would support the German state. The unconventional or "degenerate" poses of his dolls were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany. The dolls are represented in a constant state of mutation, multiplication, and recombination, often appearing contorted or bound, and occasionally lacking body parts or sprouting extra sets of limbs. These permutations echo autoerotic sensations rooted in the body. Bellmer's work was also an attempt to destabilize representations of gender being widely circulated in contemporary mass culture.

Therese Lichtenstein, Guest Curator

The exhibition is designed by Andrée Putman. It is made possible by the ICP Exhibitions Committee, with additional support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.