La poupée

Author: Marijke Peyser

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).