Hans Bellmer's Dolls

I visited an exhibition, called Double Nexus at the Gemeente Museum in The Hague, The Netherlands last week, which exposed me to the work of an artist who was completely new to me. The exhibition examines similarities in the work of Louise Bourgeois and Hans Bellmer.  I must admit, I had never heard of Hans Bellmer before. I found his work to be intriguing and disturbing. Bellmer was a German artist who lived from 1902 to 1975.  His work was famous among the surrealists in France.  During the 1930s Bellmer worked in almost complete isolation in Nazi Germany, producing art that was deliberately opposed to the Nazi aesthetic.  Eventually his work was banned and he went into exile in Paris; when the Nazis conquered France he was imprisoned in a camp.  After the war he continued to live and work in France.

He was possibly inspired by his love for a teenage girl and he was certainly influenced by Jacque Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman, in which the protaganist falls in love with an automaton - the stuff of typical German expressionist angst. Most importantly, the Nazis famously promoted a reactionary view of art that idolized the human body, at least, the perfect Aryan body.  Bellmer rejected this authoritarian concept of art and instead he created a series of dolls that he mutilated and then photographed. The dolls have the appearance of young girls and are obviously sexualised. It is as if Bellmer is wishing himself to fall in love with his own young, mutilated images. The result is disturbing because of the eroticism inherent in the photographs of these child-like forms, intriguing because they are mutilated, yet beautiful.

One of Bellmer's original dolls