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Condition: All items are offered for sale subject to Swann Galleries'' standard terms and conditions of sale, which are published in our catalogues.
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Notes: From the Library of David Raymond.
The German-born artist Hans Bellmer is best known for his erotic photographs of life-size pre-pubescent female dolls. Bellmer''s lifelong artistic obsession was driven by childhood escapism and adult fantasies. A consummate draftsman, he constructed his first Doll, in 1933, after he became interested in doll making.
Bellmer''s first series of suggestive photographs was published as "Die Puppe," in 1934 (first in Germany, and then later in France, as "La Poupée"). He celebrated his invention of the doll in an enthusiastic essay titled "Memories of the Doll Theme:" "It was worth all my obsessive efforts," Bellmer wrote, "when, amid the smell of glue and wet plaster, the essence of all that is impressive would take shape and become a real object to be possessed."
"Les Jeux de la Poupée" was a more highly-charged presentation in which Bellmer''s sculptural object became more sexually-defined. The Doll''s exaggerated pudenda and limbs, which could be disassembled and rearranged due to the ball-joints, speak to the intensity of his artistic endeavor and chilling fetishization of the female form. This Doll seamlessly integrates Bellmer''s artistic exploration in a series of fifteen photographs that are childlike and brutal, sexual and intimate. Presented in book-form, these images acquire a peep-show quality, an aspect of the work that is indicative of Bellmer''s initial seclusion in Berlin as he developed this body of work during the Nazi''s rise to power.
Bellmer''s Doll, while a deeply personal object, was also championed as the epitome of the dual Surrealist concepts of desire and revulsion. Though he never officially joined the movement, Bellmer was applauded by its members and was in turn buoyed by the artistic community. He published work in the magazine Minotaure, exhibited, and eventually fled Nazi-Germany to Paris, the heart of the surrealist movement.
