L'idole

Author: Sandra Kisters

L’idole is rather a strange title for a work that gives the viewer anything but an ideal image.^[1] In the kaleidoscopic image, a figure appears to be sitting on a chair. Only the lower part of the body is visible, fanning out top and bottom. Although physically the figure resembles an adult woman or fertility statue, the wrinkled white socks in black shoes are more reminiscent of a schoolgirl. It is a typical example of the dislocating effect of the photo series that Hans Bellmer made of his 1934 mechanical doll.

Bellmer was inspired to make this mechanical doll by the opera Les contes d’Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann, 1851) composed by Jacques Offenbach, which he saw in Berlin in 1932.^[2] In this opera in three acts, the protagonist Hoffmann is hopelessly in love with the mechanical doll Olympia, a joint invention by the mad scientist Spalanzani and the sinister optician Coppélius who gives the doll glass eyes. In the opera Olympia was played by two actresses, a soprano and a dancer, but a life-sized doll was used in the dénouement. In this final act Hoffmann and Coppélius tear Olympia limb from limb during an argument, whereupon Hoffmann discovers that she is an automaton – a mechanical doll.

Some authors associate Bellmer’s lifelong devotion to the doll – it was said that he even wanted to be buried with her – with Freud’s essay ‘Das Unheimliche’ (The Uncanny, 1919), which also discusses Offenbach’s opera. Freud made a connection between the frightening effect of the dismembered doll and the fear of castration, a psychological stage that Freud maintained all small boys go through, which is not satisfactorily resolved if they have poor relationship with their fathers.^[3] Be that as it may, the use of the unheimliche as an ingredient in visual art, and in particular the mutilation of or the positioning of a body in absurd poses, was practised by many Surrealists, see for example Man Ray’s sado-masochistically constricted Vénus restaurée or the infamous scene in Buñuel’s film Un chien andalou (1928) in which a razor cuts an eye in half.

In 1996 the photographs L’idole and La poupée were the first acquisitions of Bellmer’s work for Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s Surrealist collection. Considering that Bellmer had been a member of the Surrealists since the 1930s and the museum had been collecting their work since the late 1960s, it was a relatively late purchase. Since his association with the Surrealists, Bellmer’s work had been regularly exhibited internationally, including during the trend-setting Documenta in Kassel in 1964. In 1970 the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam staged an exhibition of his drawings.^[4] After 1996 there were various other acquisitions, including the booklet Die Puppe and the publication Les jeux de la poupée, which means that the museum now has the most representative selection of his work in a Dutch collection.