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La poupée

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  • Floris asked

    Dear, is there a museum that displays bellmer's doll (torso)?

  • Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen answered

    Dear Floris, The dolls that Bellmer made in the 1930's were very fragile, the first was made of plaster and wire and the second of painted tissue paper. They were not ment to be shown as such and probably have been lost. But from the 1960's Bellmer started to make sculptures. The MoMA in New York and the Tate in London both have one in aluminium and brass dated 1965. When you search 'Bellmer sculpture' you will fond more, I hope this information is helpful! Els

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Specifications

Title La poupée
Material and technique Gelatine silver print on fibre-based paper
Object type
Photograph > Two-dimensional object > Art object
Location This object is in storage
Dimensions Height Error: 28,3 is not a valid BCD value cm
Width Error: 23,7 is not a valid BCD value cm
Artists Artist: Hans Bellmer
Accession number 3752 (MK)
Credits Purchased with the support of FriendsLottery, 2014
Department Modern Art
Acquisition date 2014
Creation date in circa 1933
Provenance Mario and Gisèle Prassinos, 1935-14; AuctionArt, Paris 2014
Exhibitions Paris 1938*; Rotterdam 2015b; Rotterdam 2017b
Internal exhibitions Collectie - surrealisme (2017)
External exhibitions Dalí, Magritte, Man Ray and Surrealism. Highlights from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2023)
A Surreal Shock – Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2021)
Only the Marvelous is Beautiful (2022)
Surrealist Art - Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2021)
A Surreal Shock. Masterpieces from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (2023)
Research Show research A dream collection - Surrealism in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
Literature Bellmer 1949*, p. 67; Bellmer 1962*, unpaged; Paris 1983-84*, pp. 94, 147, cat. no. 112; Taylor 2000, p. 98; London/New York 2001-02*, pp. 207-22; New York 2001*, pp. 137, 139, fig. 54
Material
Object
Technique
Gelatine silver print > Bromide print > Photographic printing technique > Mechanical > Planographic printing > Printing technique > Technique > Material and technique

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Entry catalogue A dream collection - Surrealism in Museum Boijmans Van beuningen

Author: Marijke Peyser

Umbo (Otto Maximilian Umbehr), 'Träumende' (Dreaming), 1928-29, vintage print, 21 x 29.2 cm. Dessau, Stiftung Bauhaus

Hans Bellmer was born in Katowice in Poland, but went to live in Germany in 1911. Pressured by his authoritarian father, he was educated at the technical university in Berlin between 1922 and 1924, but went on to work as a typographer in the advertising world.[1] Through his interest in the Berlin Dada group he met Georg Grosz, Helmut Herzfield (later known as John Heartfield) and Rudolf Schlichter. In 1926 he decided to concentrate on painting. In the late 1920s in Berlin he saw photographs of mannequins made by the Bauhaus artists Umbo (the pseudonym of Otto Maximilian Umbehr) and Xanti Schawinsky, and by Paul Citroen and Werner Rohde.[2]

When Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany on 30 January 1933, Bellmer decided that he would no longer take on paid work for the advertising industry. He regarded every form of ‘useful’ work as a contribution to the efficient functioning of the state and the increase of Hitler’s power.[3] In that same year he began to work on La poupée, a project he described as ‘a compensation for a life that has become impossible’.[4] Encouraged by his wife Margaret and his niece Ursula, aided by his brother Fritz and supported financially by his mother, Bellmer set to work. La poupée, made of papier-maché and plaster, over an armature of wood and metal, was about 135 cm tall. Every body part could be disassembled so that the doll could be placed in various poses. Aside from the political situation in Nazi Germany, Bellmer’s fantasies about the bodies of pubescent girls played a role in the creation of La poupée: dream images that had to do with sadism, masochism, paedophilia and fetishism. Bellmer made a series of photographs of the doll, which Ursula showed to André Breton, the leader of the Surrealists, when she went to Paris in 1934 to study French. Breton and his circle were impressed by Bellmer’s photos, which they believed would seamlessly complement their experiments with Surrealist objects.[5]

In 1935 Bellmer constructed a second doll with ball-and-socket joints that made it even more flexible. Bellmer described the new surprising possibilities: ‘Thanks to a single ball-and-socket joint it was possible to expand the imagination in a direction that was self-evidently even more disturbing.’[6] The composition of a torso lying on an unmade bed not only suggests a link between Bellmer’s psycho-sexual control over the doll as a compensation for the lost hold over his own life, but also calls into question the socio-political climate in Nazi Germany.[7] The situations in which Bellmer placed the doll – in a claustrophobic, domestic setting – were completely at odds with the image of the home as a place of order and virtue that was being promoted by the German government. In 2014 Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen acquired La poupée, a photograph of the first doll that has never been exhibited before. Bellmer gave it to his friend and fellow artist Mario Prassinos in 1935. It was not the first work by Bellmer that the museum purchased; the earliest acquisition dates from 1996 (see L'idole).

 

Footnotes

[1] Paris/Munich/London 2006, p. 233. Bellmer’s activities and success in advertising were remarkable: large corporations like AEG and Santo called upon the artist. See pp. 237-66 for a detailed chronology.

[2] Ibid., p. 240.

[3] Jelenski 1966, p. 5. Bellmer and his father had a poor relationship. The fact that Bellmer senior was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi regime must have contributed to Hans Bellmer’s decision.

[4] New York 2001, p. 5.

[5] For an overview of these Surrealist experiments, see Ades 1995, pp. 151-72.

[6] Bellmer in ‘Erinnerungen zum Thema Puppe’. MBVB Archives, object file Hans Bellmer, La poupée.

[7] New York 2001, p. 135.

Show research A dream collection - Surrealism in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen
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All about the artist

Hans Bellmer

Katowice 1902 - Parijs 1975

The artist Hans Bellmer, originally from Poland, published anonymous photographs of his dolls in the book 'Die Puppe' (the doll) in 1934. Although the maker was...

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