Erinnerungen zum thema Puppe

Author: Marijke Peyser

In 1938 Hans Bellmer moved from Berlin to Paris. The year before that, the Nazis had staged the Entartete Kunst exhibition in Munich, in which progressive artists were branded as degenerate. The political climate in Germany had become intolerable for Bellmer. He lived and worked in France for the rest of his life. He was received with open arms in Paris and soon counted Man Ray, Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Jean (Hans) Arp and Yves Tanguy among his friends.^[1] They were very impressed with Bellmer’s photographs of a hand-made doll, La poupée. The subconscious, the erotic, playfulness, death and delirium feature largely in these photographs.

In 1953 Bellmer returned to Berlin for a short visit, the first time he had been back since 1938. There he met the gallery owner Rudolf Springer, who staged an exhibition of Bellmer’s work in the Maison de France in November of that year. The drawings, the photographs, the early work that had been stored in his mother’s house and the photo montage Nous la suivons à pas lents (1937), attracted a great deal of attention. It was the beginning of his recognition in Germany. On a personal level, too, this visit to Berlin was a new beginning for Bellmer: he met Unica Zürn during an exclusive preview of the exhibition. He is said to have exclaimed ‘Here is the doll!’^[2] Bellmer and Zürn were inseparable until her death in 1970.

Bellmer was extremely grateful to Springer for the exhibition and gave him a copy of Die Puppe, which was published in 1934 as a bibliophilic gem with a marbled cardboard cover by Thomas Eckstein in an edition of a few dozen.^[3] This little book contains ten original black-and-white photographs mounted on yellow paper. They are accompanied by lettering on pink paper in well-designed typography, and are some of the eighteen photographs published in December 1934 in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure. Revue artistique et littéraire.^[4] The copy in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection is dedicated to both Springer and his own niece Ursula. Bellmer wrote: ‘Dieses Büchlein gehört R. Springer, freundschaftlich, H. Bellmer 1953’, and ‘Für Ursula’.

The photographs show how the doll was put together step by step. One of the first shows a profusion of separate body parts. The basic shape of Die Puppe was a torso with a schematic head and stick-like legs and arms that were yet to be covered by a ‘skin’. At a later stage the doll has a face, long hair partially covered by a kind of beret, and a ‘dressed’ leg. Her stomach is not covered. Bellmer saw this part of the body as a window that offered a view of the thoughts and fantasies of young girls.^[5] A fascination with the alienating effect of separate body parts, placed in absurd positions or otherwise, and mannequins in strange poses was shared by a number of Surrealists. Mannequins were the point of departure for the Rue surréaliste during the Exposition internationale du surréalisme in Paris in 1938, and Dutch photographers like Paul Citroen and Wally Elenbaas also chose similar subjects.