Die Puppe (The Doll)

Hans Bellmer, an artist with ties to the Surrealist movement, trained in Berlin in the 1920s and was influenced by the teachings of George Grosz, the writings of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. Pertinent among Bellmer’s early projects was Die Puppe (The Doll), which he began in 1932 and continued to develop for several years. He built a series of mannequin pieces with female attributes, assembling the works in a variety of combinations and scenarios to photograph them. Bellmer approached the construction of the female body as a linguistic game, and through the free association of units he was able to awaken and reveal profound meanings hidden in the psyche. The resulting images connected to the Freudian concept of the sinister or the uncanny and captivated members of the Surrealist group. This connection, along with the labelling of Bellmer’s output as “degenerate art” in Nazi Germany, drove the artist to flee to France. In 1934, he published a sequence of his photographs in the magazine Minotaure under the title La Poupée. A year later, in 1935, this work, with a broader framing, was part of the Exposición Surrealista (Surrealist Exhibition) at the Ateneo in Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The same year, Bellmer published the book Die Puppe.

Concha Calvo Salanova