HANS BELLMER La Poupée [The Doll]

Sale 2703 - Lot 243

Price Realized: $ 37,500

?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price

Estimate: $ 30,000 - $ 45,000

HANS BELLMER.
La Poupée [The Doll].

Translated by Robert Valencay. With 10 (of 10) silver prints of Bellmer's doll in various poses, mounted on card and bound in as issued, each measuring 4¼x3 inches (10.8x7.6 cm.). 8vo, printed tan dust jacket over wrappers; rose-tinted text pages. Roth 88; Parr/Badger I 106; Hasselblad 120; Auer 235. THIS IS ONE OF 80 COPIES WITH THE TEXT PRINTED ON ROSE PAPER, FROM A TOTAL EDITION OF 105 COPIES.
(Paris): (G.L.M.), 1936

Provenance
A Cleveland Private Collection

Originally published in Germany in 1934 as Die Puppe, Hans Bellmer's La Poupée (1936) is a Surrealist interpretation of the femme-enfant complex. The ten silver print photographs depict a life-size female mannequin conceived by Bellmer and custom-crafted from wood, flax fiber, plaster, and glue. The mannequin, who appears in each of the photographs, is arranged at odd angles, with twisted limbs, to convey the adolescent female as both seductress and victim. Bellmer treated the female automata as both an animate and inanimate figure, simultaneously objectifying and personalizing the doll. Indeed, some of the images show "her" as a specimen with whom he shared an erotic connection.

A masterwork of the photobook genre, La Poupée was designed with a direct purpose. The pink endpapers in the French edition subtly evoke the tenderness of the young female form, while its small-format binding encourages notions of privacy and special intimacies.

During the Nazi period, Bellmer's artwork found greater recognition at the same time that the National Socialist Party was seizing more power and authority. His bizarre drawings and photographs of the female body increasingly conveyed a grotesque manipulation and dismemberment of the human body that reflects Nazi brutalities. Ultimately, Bellmer fled Germany for Paris, where, for a time, he worked freely amongst other Surrealist artists outside the confines of a repressive regime.

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