La poupée

Author: Marijke Peyser

In 1934 the French Surrealist magazine Minotaure. Revue artistique et littéraire published eighteen photographs Hans Bellmer had taken of his first doll with the accompanying text ‘Poupée: variations sur le montage d’une mineure articulée’.^[1] Bellmer’s work was enthusiastically received by the Surrealists. His second doll, which he made in 1935, was even more flexible than the first thanks to the ball-and-socket joints he used. This doll could also be given a second pair of legs where the arms would normally be. The doubling of the genitals this caused may refer to Bellmer’s hermaphroditic desire to become a ‘woman’.^[2] This desire was fulfilled with the birth of his twin daughters Doriane and Béatrice in 1943: ‘Doriane utterly fulfils the dream that I have always had to be able to taken on the bodily form of a little girl. I am that little girl,’ said the artist.^[3]

Photographs of this second doll are often dramatic in composition, as is La poupée in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection. In this photo the doll is lying on a haystack: she appears to be the victim of a crime. The position of the four legs resembles a cross, which could refer to the Crucifixion of ChriSt This episode from the Bible greatly appealed to the imagination of an artist who was fascinated by images of martyrdom. In 1929 he visited Colmar, where he saw the Isenheim Altarpiece (1510-15) by Matthias Grünewald and Nicolaus Haguenauer. Mary Magdalen’s grief moved him profoundly. Bellmer described her sorrow, which is expressed by every inch of her body, in an undated letter to the art historian Patrick Waldberg. He added, ‘When a person’s reaction or gesture does not have repercussions throughout the body – whether it’s a contemporary photograph or a masterpiece – I’m not interested.’^[4]

Bellmer also made more explicit references to the Crucifixion. In a photograph in Les jeux de la poupée, the doll has no head, just a trunk with two pairs of legs. The bottom pair of legs stands in woodland; the top pair is bound with ropes to a tree that is bifurcated in the shape of a cross. Round breasts in the shape of testicles hang left and right of the topmost feet.