Her Perfection is My Wound:
A Look at Hans Bellmer’s La Demie Poupée
Samantha Wahlen
Citation: Wahlen, Samantha. “Her Perfection Is My Wound: A Look at Hans Bellmer’s La Demie Poupée.” The Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture, August 6, 2021.
CW: This article features discussion of past sexual practices that included the involvement of children, which may make some readers uncomfortable, anxious, or angry. Please continue at your own discretion.
CMSMC has published a corrigendum that seeks to clarify language that may be outdated, and therefore interpreted as harmful or offensive, that are present in this article. We provide this corrigendum to explain and correct the use of these terms in the essay to clarify the author’s argument. In no way does the author, or any of the members of the CMSMC team, believe that transgenderism is a mental illness. The article seeks to analyze Bellmer’s struggles with his identity and how that affected his artwork. It does not intentionally malign or degrade any struggles that any reader may have with their own gender identities. CMSMC holds a responsibility to our readers, editors, authors, and wider community to stay informed and sensitive to all topics that handle issues of race, gender, sexuality, and mental illness.
Abstract: In this art critical essay, Hans Bellmer’s sculpture La Demie Poupée (1971) is proposed as the consummate feminine alter ego of the artist. This thesis is supported by research of the artist’s own writings, drawings, photographs, as well as accounts of friends and the work of notable Bellmer scholars. Through the examination of Bellmer’s personal history, accounts of transvestitism, obsessions with androgyny and the pubescent female, this proposition delves into a brief look at this Surrealist German artist who was and continues to be a shadowy, controversial figure in early twentieth century art history. The importance of this thesis resides in the psychology of Bellmer and is meant to shed light upon the possible extent to which Bellmer created his doll series, why he did so, and what liberation he may have found within his work. Ultimately, the vulnerability and discombobulation of La Demie Poupée attests convincingly of Bellmer’s tormented psyche as well as to the emotional manifestations of his frustration, angst, and need for domination.
Keywords: Hans Bellmer, Surrealism, La Demie Poupée, surrealist sculpture, Freudian influence
“Tell me no more how fair she is,
I have no mind to hear,
The story of that distant bliss
I never shall come near:
By sad experience I have found
That her perfection is my wound…”
Song XXV,
Dr. Henry King, Bishop of Chichester, 1657.
Figure 1. La Demie Poupée, Hans Bellmer, (1971 Courtesy of Art Gallery of New South Wales Purchased 1996 © Hans Bellmer/ADAGP. © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP Paris)
Loosely identified as a Surrealist, Polish-German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) is perhaps one of the most unsettling and enigmatic artists of the twentieth century. His work concentrates on themes of male/female cohesion and the body as a type of sentence to be articulated in endless forms in order to express desires, fears, and questions submerged within the subconscious. Outside of Surrealism, Bellmer’s work is either unknown, unwelcome, or placed carefully out of sight on an upper shelf. This lack of popularity is certainly due to the unnerving nature of his oeuvre, which is almost entirely comprised of a singular, life-size doll that could be taken apart and put back together in myriad ways. Bellmer arranged his doll into photographed scenes of grotesque violence and the deconstruction of the female form. Born from the careful craftsmanship and mysterious psyche of Bellmer’s inner world, this artwork was a Frankensteinian monster in its own right. Bellmer used the female body as a codex on which he transcribed the ideas and images that dominated his mind. He would arrange his articulated doll, perhaps made up entirely of legs or seemingly strangled by her own breasts, in macabre scenes of violent sexual encounters, complete with intimate props and sinister lighting, photographed from jarring angles.
Furthermore, Bellmer’s use of the camera as his lens for showcasing his dolls gave both him and viewers a kind of third-party distance needed to absorb the full extent of his scenes. Reminiscent of forensic photography used in police investigations, his snapshots are stories begging to be untangled. They are cold and factual. They are meant to be inflammatory. A set of eighteen of these photographs entitled La Poupée was first published in Karlsruhe, Germany, in 1934 and Paris in 1936.[1] The Surrealist magazine Minotaur, headed by Andre Breton, also published these photographs alongside poetry by Surrealist artist Paul Eluard in 1934.[2] It is primarily from these publications that Bellmer is well-known.
The central joint on which this essay will hinge is found in his final sculpture La Demie Poupée (1971) [Figure 1]. This sculpture, in particular, seems to be rather an oddity within the grand narrative of his oeuvre. Smaller than his original articulated doll, La Demie Poupée lacks the unsettling lifelikeness that made his former dolls capable of both seduction and repulsion. However, La Demie Poupée warrants a thorough appraisal precisely because of her docility. If Bellmer photographed La Demie Poupée in the lewd manner he did his other dolls, those photographs are undiscovered. By the time Bellmer constructed La Demie Poupée in 1971, he had suffered a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body in 1969 and the suicide of his longtime lover and creative partner, Unica Zurn, in 1970.[3] He was an embittered and broken man by the time he died in 1975, at 73. With all of that, the question must be posed as to the purpose of Bellmer’s artistic endeavors during this final phase of his life. In closing his life’s work with La Demie Poupée, what may be psychoanalytically inferred about Bellmer considering the broader context of his work?
This essay seeks to explore Bellmer’s personal experimentation with gender fusion, compulsive sexual fetishes, the disenchantment of adulthood, and unearthing the savagery of human nature in war, technology, psychology, and social frameworks. I returned to Bellmer’s work from the perspective of the 21st century because I believe Bellmer’s work is at last ready to be analyzed by a generation that is equipped to understand him. His oeuvre has needed time to ferment in order to be properly ingested and appreciated. Who better to unwind the tight knot of Bellmer’s psyche than a generation who is more tolerant and accepting of all forms of artistic expression than any that has existed since the Renaissance?
Conceived from his virulent obsession with the prepubescent female and born from the unsettling psyche boiling inside Bellmer’s brain, La Demie Poupée (1971), or “The Half Doll,” is made from wood, paint, and various pieces of fabric accessories. Standing at 35.4 inches tall, she sports a single leg, arm, and breast notably crowned with an erect nipple. Upon her foot are a grey cotton sock and a black Mary Jane shoe that schoolgirls often wear. Stuck to the back of her head is a large, coquettish gingham bow. Her head itself is a nearly blank slate, wearing only a pair of pale, plush lips. Around her neck is a thin black choker necklace. The top of her head is a phallic suggestion, with a deep crease over the crest, potentially meant to resemble the head of a penis or buttocks. As her name suggests, she is divided in half, a combination of femme enfant and femme fatale, both alluring and juvenile; bold yet bemusing. In looking over Bellmer’s oeuvre, it might be simple to dismiss his creations as manifestations of a pedophilic deviant bent on using and destroying the female form in light of domineering misogyny and narcissism. Indeed, most find his work too frightful or strange to warrant it time for an explanation or even a second glance. And yet, there is undoubtedly more to be uncovered. Bellmer is nothing if not mystifying; his raison d'être labyrinthine and full of dead ends. The quest to understanding Bellmer is neither easy nor linear. Within his multiple psychological and artistic layers, we find provocative questions regarding gender dysphoria, psychosexual trauma, and sadomasochism—all of which unequivocally assist in analyzing Bellmer’s fundamentally troubling artwork. I propose that in taking a closer look at Hans Bellmer’s lifelong preoccupation with the theme of the doll—the work that came out of these preoccupations—along with his stark feelings of division within himself, it may be argued that La Demie Poupée was the bookend of his oeuvre. I believe this series of artworks were created to reconcile his dolls as self-preserving vessels for his fragmented psyche and were meant to act as a partial representation of himself.
I suggest here that Bellmer used his dolls as vessels for and representations of the portion of himself he did not fully understand. These creations were manifestations he had no other way of personally exploring or expressing without causing real-world carnality. His preoccupation with gender cohesion, self-violence, and potential underlying trauma spilled over and crystallized into a different form: his dolls. Through his work, Bellmer revealed his angst, dismembered psyche, desires, and fears. I surmise that Bellmer worked solely in these dark and gruesome themes as an outlet of self-preservation in order to avoid causing harm to himself and others.[4] According to notable psychoanalyst and author Dr. Andrew Brink, it is almost certain that Bellmer was the victim of psychological damage that scholars can only now unpack and better comprehend with evolved psychoanalysis and the breakdown of stigmas. Though most likely unable to be diagnosed during his lifetime, Brink correlates much of Bellmer’s artistic expressions as signs of mental distress. Bellmer potentially suffered from several psychosexual (paraphiliac) disorders, including fetishism, sadomasochism, pedophilia, and possible autogynephilia (in which a man becomes sexually aroused by imagining himself as a woman). These psychosexual disorders would explain Bellmer’s personal association with his artwork. It is very common for sufferers of paraphilias to have more than one psychosexual disorder at a time, and for those paraphilias to be established as defense mechanisms from early childhood trauma.[5]
It is fortuitous that Bellmer lived during the introduction of Surrealism, as his work captured the movement’s zeitgeist perfectly. Born out of the intense hardships and psychological trauma of The Great War, Surrealism sought to detach art from polite society. Art became a tool to look inward and explore the darker themes of humanity that became appallingly obvious in Europe throughout the war. The basic tenets of Surrealism revolve around automatism (allowing the unconscious to direct the artistic process), Freudian theories on sexuality and dreams, and a general disavowal of authority and social mores. In his First Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Breton described Surrealism as “pure psychic automatism…intended to express the true function of thought…outside all aesthetic and moral preoccupations.”[6] Breton insisted that truth and value were to be found in the strange, foggy workings of the unconscious, and the only way to root out that truth was to indulge in content far beyond the society’s boundaries.[7] Although Bellmer did not go out of his way to follow the principles of Surrealism (nor did he ever refer to himself as a Surrealist), he was greatly lauded by Surrealist artists such as Breton, Paul Eluard, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Max Ernst amongst many others.[8] He exhibited in Surrealist exhibitions in Paris and New York in 1938, and his doll photographs inspired an infiltration of mannequins to be included in these exhibitions by other Surrealist artists,[9] who found it to be “the ultimate embodiment of the muse as an inanimate object of desire…”[10] Though his friendships secured him artistic support and success in Paris in the late 1930s, Bellmer felt he was far too careful and attentive with his artwork to leave their creation up to the mechanisms of the subconscious.[11] Nevertheless, Bellmer fit in well as his work corresponded with common Surrealist metaphors of the female form, salacious imagery, and the disestablishment of cultural norms. Surely Bellmer could not have presented a better example of the quintessential Surrealist object. Bellmer dramatically established the doll theme as a format of catharsis and ultra-spiritual value in his adopted artist circle.
Bellmer stated to his biographer, Peter Webb, that his early family experience could have come directly from one of Sigmund Freud’s casebooks.[12] Born in 1902 in what is now Katowice, Poland, Bellmer was named after his father, Hans Bellmer, Sr., whom his children knew to be cold, oppressive, frightening, and religious. Bellmer made no secret that he despised his father, and the heart of this tale may very well reside within the cradle of that repugnancy. Bellmer, Sr. typified the mythological ogre, casting his will upon his helpless subordinates. We can read in Bellmer’s writings that he identified with and admired femininity early on for the combined purpose of self-preservation and rebellion. In one instance, while being escorted to the Berlin Polytechnic Institute by his father, Hans exited his train compartment in the guise of a woman. Wearing lipstick, powder, and drawn-on curls, he was determined to subvert and embarrass the wits out of his father.[13] He was twenty-one years old and succeeded admirably. In an undated letter to his brother, Bellmer appears to have been writing as a female persona. “I, poor woman, have already brought eight doll children into this world,” he writes, referring to his doll creations. He signed the cryptic letter with, “Many greetings and kisses, Lulula.”[14] Whether against the rising Nazi state or just general convention, his acts of rebellion included wearing nylons under his trousers and occasionally crossdressing, as in one instance “to entertain exiles who were interned with him in southern France during the occupation.”[15] From a young age, Bellmer seemed to seek refuge in the feminine form. To infuriate his father, Bellmer recalled that he and his brother made efforts to appear more girlish than foreboding in their provocations and misdemeanors as children.[16] Bellmer wrote of fear, hatred, and the literal gnashing of teeth that his father incited in the home.[17]
We learned early on to protect ourselves…In sadness, we had the hurtful mocking laughter of broken glass shards; in a night mist, the foreboding of acidulous irony; in simulated excitation, we vomited and defiled everything…We attacked tirelessly until he had his first apoplectic fit. We were unassailable.[18]
Bellmer noted that he and his brother would take on these kinds of female formats as a subversive tool against their father. Without a doubt, Bellmer appeared to find a strength and a sense of selfhood within the female form. However, the extent of such identification is rather difficult to comprehend as Bellmer does not give readers and scholars clear explanations.
One cannot help but draw psychiatric correlations between his early experiences and his artistic manifestations. Bellmer detested authoritarianism of any kind and bucked at his father’s forceful interference in his life. They were at constant odds. When the father died sometime in or after 1931 (the records are unclear), Bellmer wrote that he shed no tears.[19] Considering these accounts of Bellmer Sr., it may be that the father was perhaps the figure who tormented his son into the very artist he became.
From whence this son contracted his pernicious obsession with the prepubescent female is perhaps too shadowy of an origin to pinpoint. In Bellmerian mythology, three events occurred between 1930 and 1932 that Bellmer scholars agree directed his proclivity towards doll-making. The first was receiving a box of childhood toys from his mother shortly after his father suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1931. In the box, which Bellmer later converted into a private curio cabinet, were broken dolls, magic tricks, tops, penknives, ribbons, and glass marbles.[20] This portion of childhood, given back to him by his mother, was fortuitous and foreshadowed Bellmer’s interests in childhood playthings being transformed by the disenchantment of adulthood. The second event was the arrival of his cousin, Ursula Nagushewski, when she came to live near Bellmer and his first wife, Margarete Schnell.[21] Bellmer had purportedly been infatuated with his much younger cousin in his early years. This infatuation coalesced into a fixation. The relationship between the cousins as they aged is a rather gray area, but it may be surmised that Ursula’s role in the doll-making was more than just conceptual—it was believed that the first doll resembled her.[22] Lastly, the third component linked to Bellmer’s artist manifestations occurred in 1932, when the Bellmers attended the play Tales of Hoffman, in which the protagonist falls in love with an automaton. We can only imagine how inspiring this story was to Bellmer. Altogether, these events form the fundamental mythology of Bellmer’s idée fixe, his lifelong fixation. However, I believe more can be added to the makings of the Bellmerian mythology. The sex-murder scenes of his mentor, Surrealist artist George Grosz, wildly influenced Bellmer’s aesthetic. The result of this mentorship can be followed in Bellmer’s work as its themes became progressively darker. The literary work of the Marquis de Sade(from whence the term sadism comes), as well as the chilling narratives of Edgar Allen Poe, arguably lay an influential role in formulating Bellmer’s proclivities, as these were commonly read authors in Bellmer’s circle. Following these events, themes of sadism, horror, and violence begin to arise and form into key ingredients in Bellmer’s oeuvre.
Figure 2: L’Aigle Mademoiselle, 1968 (© 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP Paris)
Regarding a kind of feminine alter ego or second self in which Bellmer may have found shelter from his psychological angst, this is also very common for people who struggle with gender dysphoria or paraphiliac disorders.[23] Beyond crossdressing, Bellmer, according to his countless drawings and depictions, was seemingly trapped by the all-consuming thematic web of female/male cohesion. The theme plays a primary role in Bellmer’s art. We find many examples of drawings of young girls with additional male genitalia, giving a strong indication of both male and female arousal within the same body. Such is seen in the 1968 drawing L’Aigle Mademoiselle [1.2]. This drawing is especially interesting regarding the details Bellmer included. For example, there is the Mary Jane shoe and sock on a single foot as we see mirrored in Le Demie Poupee.[24] Additionally, how Bellmer has drawn her leg is worth a second glance. Spreadeagle, as the title of the work describes, the girl’s upper leg is set at an acute angle, suggesting extreme flexibility. As we follow the calf down to the foot, one can see the foot turning inward at such an impossible angle to suggest that her knee and ankle joints must be broken. Bellmer carefully creates a leg that shows off a rotating perspective, highlighting its most delicate attributes. Again, Bellmer has created a character of fantasy. Even more fantastical is the intricate unity of genitalia. Why does Bellmer include this secondary indication of arousal? This young girl is not being ravished in a biologically comprehensible way. Instead, she exudes a holistic arousal and sexuality. This modification of his favorite version of the female form—the young girl—reaches out to a universal audience whilst also expressing Bellmer’s own sense of sexuality. We know that this male/female amalgamation is a recurring theme in Bellmer’s work, and some scholars believe this to be a testament of Bellmer’s “desire to actually be [the woman], as he looks out of her body from his position inside.”[25] Bellmer himself wrote in his published 1957 work Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious or the Anatomy of the Image, “What is always vital is that the image of a woman must have been ‘lived’ (experienced) by the man in his own body before it can be ‘seen’ by the man.”[26] No doubt Bellmer felt a keen division within himself. Considering that the nubile, sexualized body was, in essence, Bellmer’s only interest as an artist, we get the sense that this was a subject that he orbited around like the planets around the sun.
Figure 3: La Poupée, 1938-1939 (Art Gallery of New South Wales Purchased 2001 © Hans Bellmer/ADAGP. Licensed by Copyright Agency © 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP Paris)
Despite Bellmer’s intense personal connection to his dolls, it is important to note how he transfers violence onto them meticulously. In this respect, the struggling, sensitive Bellmer recedes into the background, and his darker side emerges: that of the cruel, possessive owner of the dolls. Sharp juxtapositions between beauty and pain, fetish and aversion, brutality and care, are packaged together in the disambiguated female form. There is such a feeling of strangulation in each scene that one might just as well breathe deeply of exhaust fumes. It is no secret that Hans Bellmer had an astonishingly fractured identity. His work is reminiscent of stained glass: turbulent yet calculated; manic yet methodical. Between himself and his dolls, Bellmer is a veritable Dr. Jekyll and Little Miss Hyde. Perhaps a better term would be femme brutalisé: the brutalized woman. His escape into the female form is undeniable and androgyne colored nearly all of his work.[27] Bellmer invented his dolls as a means of liberation, found solace in a feminine identification, and, as one scholar notes, “located his wandering libido in a female other.”[28] As Bellmer scholar Therese Lichtenstein comments, it is as if Bellmer is “immersed in a solipsistic world of daydreams [where he] ‘controls’ his fantasy through playing out different roles and identifications with his dolls.”[29] These photographed scenes of his dolls, in which he incorporates as many elements of the sinister as possible, speak to a ragged punishment towards the feminine, in all that makes her a product to be used, a predator to be tamed, and a sex to be enjoyed [1.4-1.6]. As another scholar puts it, oscillating “between fetish, seductress, and victim, [the doll] evokes a complex dynamic…one that fluctuates between fascination, revulsion, and anxiety.”[30] This quote makes it seem as though he were a serial killer inventing his victims, of which he was the central casualty. It makes stark the grappling nature in which Bellmer strove to understand his own sexuality. With the dual purpose of expressing the brutality of human nature and his own personal turmoil, it seems that each scene Bellmer created was both a question and an answer to his quest for identity.
Upon seeing Bellmer’s dolls, the viewer simultaneously experiences horror and fascination, disgust and desire. This combination of opposing impulses connects us to the sadomasochistic shadows in our own psyches, cloaked in social mores and moral values, hovering as if to taunt that “here is one’s wildest fantasy.” It is here, in the liminal space of emotions, that Bellmer reveals the depravity of mankind. He has, perhaps unknowingly, become a version of his father—an exacting master, a creator to be dreaded—who forces his creation into a kind of violent submission to his will with utmost precision. Alternatively, perhaps Bellmer was acting out his father's role upon his own self, identifying his plight with that of the doll. Possibly the doll became the egress of his fluid sense of self, both a victim and a powerful executor of emotional and physical turmoil.
The themes of The Half Doll, though Bellmerian, stray to outstanding polarities that have less to do with the sensational and much more to do with the philosophical. La Demie Poupée seems to pose the question of (perhaps to Bellmer himself), “Who or what am I?” Her single arm leaves her defenseless against the onslaught of the male gaze and female judgment. This lack of left-side appendages also mirrors Bellmer’s own loss of his left arm through his stroke-induced paralysis, further contributing to the idea that Bellmer uses the doll as a kind of votive figure for his disrupted psyche. She sits, bare and seemingly unaffected, a strength of will protecting a jelly core. A blend of both masculine and feminine, adult and child, with half of herself absent, she is yet left unbalanced on a precipice of uncertainty and seemingly tragic resignation. Interestingly, the commercialization of The Half Doll perhaps adds to the significance of the sculptural self-portrait. La Demie Poupée was made in nine variations by an unnamed carpenter and was meant to be sold as sex toys or other variations of erotic accessorization.[31] As noted previously, Bellmer intentionally fashioned La Demie Poupée with an erect nipple, bequeathing her an eternal condition of lust. This subtle state of arousal inherently creates a reciprocal relationship with her owner, making her a willing and active participant in their interchange. She is the epitome of objectification, helpless against her physical disabilities and her physiological state of being in which the inner desires are manifested through her body’s “natural” reactions. Though intended to be a sex toy, Bellmer created her in such a way that La Demie Poupée is also experiencing desire. She has a kind of life in her that adds a level of dimensionality not seen before in any of Bellmer’s other dolls. Giving her a level of consciousness intensifies her humanity and underlines Bellmer’s objective. Bellmer deliberately created this child-woman, small enough to be cradled like a child and relegated to a submissive function, in order to inspire a taboo relationship within her owner. Disheveled, undressed, and aroused, La Demie Poupée practically channels desperation for a caretaker of the most scandalous degree. Reinforcing a parental half needed to complete The Half Doll, La Demie Poupéee was most likely a kind of offspring for Bellmer. This is corroborated rather fatefully in his undated letter to Fritz, in which he claimed to have given birth to the eight doll children. Here then is the ninth child, the final, the bitter end. Taking the analysis one step further down the Bellmerian rabbit hole, La Demie Poupée is arguably the consummate metaphor for Hans Bellmer: half-formed, vulnerable, predatorial, and left en déshabillé in the childish get-up of schoolgirl fantasy.[32] The Half Doll represents a rupture inherent in Bellmer, undulating in a kind of turbulent never-ending identity crisis. And yet, La Demie Poupée stands apart as a work of innate truth about Hans Bellmer. Here was a man of great intelligence and artistic talent who deeply experienced the internal and external world. He alienated himself from society and yet was even more alienated from himself. As a dying, agonized, metaphorical Prometheus, lonely, crippled, and unable to care for himself in his final state, perhaps La Demie Poupée was exactly that with which Bellmer felt most aligned: a broken, undone version of himself, created in pity, love, and sorrow. Perhaps through his feminine identification, homicidal imagery, and prurient tastes in the androgynous pubescent female, he was searching for a measure of preservation from a father figure who never understood him. This final creation, La Demie Poupée, is the most instructive work of art Hans Bellmer made regarding his personal demons. The style and the purpose for La Demie Poupée speak less to a sense of fetish and much more to a sense of recognition. Or rather, a bitter acceptance of himself.
Figure 4: Untitled, from La Poupée series, 1935 (© 2021 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ ADAGP Paris)
In summary, Hans Bellmer created and utilized his dolls as a means of self-evaluation and catharsis. In reviewing the nature of his life’s work, I believe Bellmer ultimately found and lost himself through the modality of his creations. It calls to mind the reparative use of art, studied in disciplines like art therapy, and how Bellmer’s work seems to have skirted that goal entirely. These dolls, which Bellmer identified with on many levels and through many perspectives, were undoubtedly an outlet, but whether they provided Bellmer with the peace and wholeness all humankind strives for is doubtful. In examining La Demie Poupée, Bellmer enthusiasts must acknowledge that because Bellmer found no healing in his work, his battle was ultimately lost. The doll was his quest, his lens, his body and mind, and ultimately his crutch. He became trapped in its loop until the momentum ran him dry, leaving a brittle husk and haunting images of moments long past. In the end, with bits of him filling each doll in the most spiritual sense, Bellmer was left even more piecemeal than ever. Half vicious creator, half mutilated creation, the splintered Bellmer found no comfort in female perfection but rather a piercing, infected psychological wound through which he sorrowfully entered into what his partner Unica Zurn had once called that “old enchanted land of death.”[33]
Endnotes
[1]Andrew Brink, Desire and Avoidance in Art: Pablo Picasso, Hans Bellmer, Balthus, and Joseph Cornell. Psychobiographical Studies with Attachment Theory, New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2007.
[2] Peter Webb with Robert Short, Death, Desire, and the Doll (Paris: Quartet Books, 1985).
[3] Peter Webb, Death, Desire and the Doll, 179.
[4] Sue Taylor, The Anatomy of Anxiety (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 18.
[5] Roxanne Dryden-Edwards, “Paraphilias,” Medicinenet.com. Medically reviewed on September, 9, 2018. Accessed February 15, 2020. https://www.medicinenet.com/paraphilia/article.htm#what_are_causes_and_risk_factors_for_paraphilia
[6] Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971), 66-75.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Peter Webb, Death, Desire and the Doll: The Life and Art of Hans Bellmer, 67.
[10] Esra Plumer, Unica Zurn: Art, Writing and Postwar Surrealism, 91.
[11] Sue Taylor, 87.
[12] Sue Taylor, The Anatomy of Anxiety (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 18.
[13] Sue Taylor, 18.
[14] Therese Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 48
[15] Ibid. Bellmer was briefly held in an internment camp during World War Two.
[16] Ibid, 20.
[17] Sue Taylor, 20.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Peter Webb with Robert Short, Death, Desire, and the Doll (Paris: Quartet Books, 1985).
[20] Therese Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001, 19.
[21] Sue Taylor, The Anatomy of Anxiety (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2002), 33-34.
[22] Andrew Brink, Desire and Avoidance in Art.
[23] “Psychosexual Dysfunction,” Winchester Hospital. Updated July 3, 2017. Accessed February 2, 2020. https://www.winchesterhospital.org/health-library/article?id=96748.
[24] In this 1968 drawing, the sock and shoe are placed on the left side, whilst The Half Doll was put on the right. Again, this could be further indication that his final work was a self-portrait as his left side was paralyzed by a stroke.
[25] Andrew Brink, 85.
[26] Hans Bellmer, Little Anatomy of the Physical Unconscious: Or the Anatomy of the Image, Vermont: Dominion Publishing, 2004. Originally published in 1957.
[27] Peter Webb with Robert Short, Death, Desire, and the Doll (Paris: Quartet Books, 1985), 82.
[28] Sue Taylor, “The Wandering Libido and the Hysterical Body,” The Art Institute of Chicago, 2001, accessed April 29, 2019.
[29] Therese Lichtenstein, 52.
[30] Jeremy Bell, "Uncanny Erotics - On Hans Bellmer's Souvenirs of the Doll," Feral Feminisms, 2014, accessed April 29, 2019.
[31] Sue Taylor, “The Wandering Libido and the Hysterical Body,” The Art Institute of Chicago, 2001, accessed April 29, 2019.
[32]To use his own term, he described his dolls en dishabillage, as noted by Peter Webb.
[33] Peter Webb, 77.
Bibliography
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