Hans Bellmer
German, born Poland, 1902–1975
The Doll (La Poupée)
INV-2233
Hans Bellmer
German, born Poland, 1902–19751935
The Doll (La Poupée)
Hans Bellmer German, born Poland, 1902–1975 →Surrealismphotographphotography
Date
1935
Medium
Gelatin silver print overpainted with white gouache
Dimensions
Image/paper: 65.6 × 64 cm (25 7/8 × 25 1/4 in.); mount: 65.8 × 65.5 cm (25 15/16 × 25 13/16 in.); frame: 81.4 × 80.9 × 3.9 cm (32 1/16 × 31 7/8 × 1 9/16 in.)
Museum
Art Institute of Chicago
Location
Chicago, IL
Credit
Purchased with funds provided by an anonymous donor; through prior purchase with Special Photography Acquisition Fund; through prior gifts of Boardroom, Inc., David C. and Sarajean Ruttenberg, Sherry and Alan Koppel, the Sandor Family Collection in honor of The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Robert Wayne, Simon Levin, Michael and Allison Delman, Charles Levin, and Peter and Suzann Matthews; purchased with funds provided of Lynn Hauser and Neil Ross
Hans Bellmer studied art and worked in advertising in the 1920s; when the Nazis seized power in 1933, he renounced useful employment as a kind of protest. Because of his background in commercial design, Bellmer was comfortable with procedures of studio photography, which he employed in his doll series, begun that same year: posing of the model, lighting, use of props, and extensive manual interventions (coloring, retouching, overpainting) on the final prints. The doll pictures do violence to a girlish body that seems nearly alive and somehow more real in feeling than the erotic magazine images manipulated by Bellmer’s contemporaries in the Surrealist movement. He made only a few prints at this remarkably large size, hand-coloring them and mounting them to stretchers as if they were paintings; quite improbably, some of these works were exhibited during World War II, when Bellmer lived in exile in southern France.
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