review essay

681

Review Essay

Hans Bellmer, History, and Psychoanalysis

By Christine Mehring,Yale University

MODERNISM / modernity
Hans Bellmer:The Anatomy of Anxiety. Sue Taylor.
VOLUME EIGHT, NUMBER
Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Pp. xx + 310.
FOUR, PP 681–686.
126 illustrations. $39.95.
© 2001 THE JOHNS

Behind Closed Doors:The Art of Hans Bellmer.Therese HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

Lichtenstein. Berkeley: University of California Press,

2001. Pp. xii + 254. 82 illustrations. $45.00.

Mutated, sometimes mutilated, dolls define the German-born art-

ist Hans Bellmer’s (1902–75) place within twentieth-century art. He
began to construct his first doll in Berlin in 1933. Strongly suggestive of
an adolescent girl in shape and size, it consisted of an unusually flexible
wood and metal structure covered with papier-mâché and plaster. A
second doll followed two years later, with various body parts and ap-
pendages made from glue and tissue paper pivoting around a central
ball joint. In staging these dolls as models for a large number of photo-
graphs, Bellmer created one of the most interesting and controversial
bodies of work associated with surrealism. He documented the stages
of construction of the first doll, ranging from the quasi-scientific ar-
rangement of its individual body parts to the near-complete assembly
of a body with face and hair lying on a bed. He experimented more
with the second, more flexible doll, whose upper body and face are
frequently replaced by a second set of legs. We encounter it in dramati-
cally lit interiors or outdoors in the forest with suggestive props such as
a hoop or a carpet beater. The photographs of the second doll are often
hand-colored with garish aniline dyes.
Sue Taylor and Therese Lichtenstein’s recent books on Bellmer are
not the first critical accounts of his doll photographs, which have played
a prominent role in recent art historical scholarship on surrealist art,
most notably in that of Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster.1 Neither are
these books the first to look beyond the relatively brief doll period to
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682 survey Bellmer’s life and complete oeuvre, the subject of a thorough 1986 monograph by Peter
Webb.2 Yet Taylor and Lichtenstein are the first to combine these two objectives as they each
weave a remarkably consistent thesis across different periods of Bellmer’s visual production and
writings. Both authors turn to psychoanalytic concepts as a theoretical basis, but their conclu-
sions could not be more different.
Lichtenstein’s book, Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer, explores the intersec-
tion of psychoanalysis and history. On the one hand, the author identifies as the artist’s the
emotional needs and sexual desires registered in Bellmer’s doll photographs as well as in his
contemporary and later drawings. Yet in her view, these needs and desires run parallel to, are
constructed by, or subvert, those played out in the cultural, social, and political spheres of Ger-
many during the Weimar Republic and National Socialism. She warns early on in the book that
she makes “no claims for a linear causality between Bellmer’s work, his life, and the larger
public sphere.” “Instead,” she writes, “my focus is on the indeterminate space in which personal
and psychosexual elements connect with public, cultural ones. My aim is not to discover or even
look for an ‘origin’ for Bellmer’s work but to investigate the complex context in which it ‘lived’” (17).
Central to her argument is the “anagram” and Bellmer’s interest in the contemporary neu-
rologist Paul Schilder, who developed a theory of the expression of emotions through body
language. The doll’s body and its changing physical appearances (documented in the photo-
graphs) function like anagrams in that they are symptomatic of unconscious psychosexual and
emotional states at work in both the artist and the surrounding culture at large. Various psycho-
analytic concepts lead Lichtenstein to specify these states and elaborate on their multiple mean-
ings. To begin with, there is Bellmer’s fascination with doubles (the multiplying of limbs or the
use of mirrors, for example) and with sadomasochistic power relations (the doll as a martyr or
seductress). These present a response to an early childhood experience of loss and abandon-
ment; mirror to a certain degree the sadistic attitude of the Nazis; but also counter the youthful
image of femininity in contemporary advertising and subvert the sense of normal and natural-
ized images of women under National Socialism. Hysteria is another central concept for
Lichtenstein since Bellmer frequently renders the doll either as mad or as a victim. Linked
during the 1920s to the identity crises and feelings of awkwardness experienced by adolescents,
hysteria allowed Bellmer to explore a search for security and surety at a moment when he in-
creasingly lost control of his own life due to the early death of his first wife and the restrictions
placed on his creative license after the Nazis’ rise to power. Yet, for Lichtenstein, the hysteric
doll also stands as a surrogate for the suffering prevalent under National Socialism, questions
the metaphor of the Nazi state as a healthy body, and, when placed in ominous domestic spaces,
undermines the Nazis’ propagation of the nuclear family and the woman’s role as wife and
mother. Finally, Lichtenstein traces the concept of nostalgia in the delicate collages Bellmer
made for his first wife and in the photographs that present the doll as a corpse, fragmented and
ruined. The yearning expressed here for a disappearing and forgotten past functions as a sur-
vival mechanism vis à vis the solitude and restrictions recently imposed on the artist’s life. At the
same time, this nostalgia is culturally and politically meaningful as it runs counter to the ideal-
ized image of the past propagated by the Nazis and resonates with the progressive and reaction-
ary types of nostalgia prevalent during the upheavals of the Weimar Republic.
By constantly examining the doll photographs from changing perspectives—based on differ-
ent concepts, informed by multiple contexts, and in comparison to various works by the artist in
other media—Behind Closed Doors pays wonderful homage to the intricate play of meanings in
Bellmer’s work. This is significant. Given the charges of misogyny that many critics have brought
against the artist’s work, Lichtenstein’s insistence on its complexity may make the strongest case
yet against the simplicity of such accusations. Moreover, any reader will come away from her book
with a pure sense of the pleasure of viewing and reading visual works of art, no small feat within
the realm of psychoanalytically driven art historical scholarship, which tends to surrender the
 review essay
pleasures of looking to analytic dissection. For these reasons, her play with layered and often 683
contradictory meanings is largely successful and her individual claims are always thoroughly
developed and convincing. It should, however, be noted that the force of the interplay would be
stronger were these meanings not merely juxtaposed in large subsections but their relationship
elaborated on or their odd coexistence stated more concisely.
Lichtenstein’s interweaving of psychoanalytic and historical readings is compelling. That
Bellmer’s doll photographs were made immediately following Hitler’s seizure of power and are
therefore tied to a German context as much as to the circle of French surrealism where this
work received its first public exposure, is a point that has been made before by Krauss and
Foster. Foster especially has interpreted the photographs’ occupation with sexuality, death, and
insanity as an attack on what he referred to as the armored, aestheticized, and idealized body
promoted by the Nazis. At the same time he related the fluctuation in the doll photographs
between the erotic and the traumatic, the animate and inanimate, and the masochistic and
sadistic, to a Bataillean escape from the outline of the self. Yet Lichtenstein both dramatically
expands the field of historical meanings embedded in the doll photographs and delves more
thoroughly into the specifics of each historical connnection, such as, for example, the National
Socialist politics of the body or the development of theories of degenerate art.
Even more could be done in this respect. What role did Bellmer’s apprenticeship as a typog-
rapher at the leftist Malik Verlag play? What is the significance of his drawings for the commu-
nist magazine Der Knüppel? And what about the crippled World War I veterans filling the
German streets during the 1920s? How did such scenes affect pieces like his 1937 sculpture La
Mitrailleuse en Etat de Grâce (The Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace), which consists of
selected parts of the second doll mounted onto a bare skeleton of wood and metal sticks strongly
reminiscent of prosthetic devices? Given the dating of the doll photographs up to 1938, did
Bellmer’s work on photographic prints of the doll and his coloring of existing prints stop when
he moved to Paris? Or, as Webb has suggested, did his work with the medium of photography
stop only a year later following his internment in the Camp des Milles, a prison camp for Ger-
man nationals living in France (HB, 182)? How would exact answers to these questions affect
the historical meaning of these works?
By representing Bellmer’s work as formed by, reflective of, and yet sometimes counter to the
cultural, social, and political conditions of Bellmer’s surroundings at large, Lichtenstein implic-
itly redresses one of the pitfalls of psychoanalytic interpretations of art ever since Freud’s study,
Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci (1910). If Meyer Schapiro has shown that
Freud did not sufficiently take into account the iconography inspired by the contemporary cult
of St. Anne when analyzing the artist’s representations of the Virgin and Child, Lichtenstein
implies that any reading of the photographs and drawings limited to the artist’s own psycho-
sexual and emotional development must be misguided since it fails to address the formative
impact of images of women in Weimar mass culture and the role of the female body under
National Socialism.
This strength of Lichtenstein’s approach became particularly clear in the exhibition of Bellmer’s
work that she curated for the International Center of Photography in New York and that her
book accompanied. Here, the doll photographs were in the company of books such as A. D. W.
Polzer’s Sexuellperverse from 1930, magazines from the Weimar Republic such as Fetischismus,
and film stills, for example from Fritz Lang’s M. This was one of the most elegantly staged recent
exhibitions to situate a body of work within a compelling historical context—for, rather than rely-
ing on long wall texts or brochures, Lichtenstein effectively selected visually informative mate-
rial that actively encouraged the viewer to draw historical connections. Both book and exhibi-
tion attest to the power of the visual to engage with broad historical and cultural meanings.
Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety is decidedly different, above all because Sue Taylor
presents an exclusively psychoanalytic, specifically Freudian reading of Bellmer’s constructions
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684 of the first and second dolls, their photographic representations, and his drawings, prints, and
writings. Triggered by specific events and emotional distress in Bellmer’s adult life, these works,
in Taylor’s view, tell of the artist’s psychic development, that is, his repressed desires and anxi-
eties from childhood and adolescence. As she writes in her introduction, the story

begins and ends with his family drama, and I hope to show how the erotomania, fetish-
ism, sadomasochistic enactments, and repetitious sexual researches Bellmer performs in
his art ‘replay elemental scenarios’ that are also the concern of psychoanalysis. . . I remain
convinced that the very nature of Bellmer’s apparently compulsive rehearsals renders a
psychoanalytic reading of his work a most productive one. [15]

She also insists, however, that his artistic expression ultimately does not help him resolve or
overcome his repressions. “For Bellmer, building, possessing, manipulating, and ‘assaulting’ the
doll did not prove to be the solution, nor was there ever a solution—just an unending repetition
of his anxious fantasies” (85).
Due to this repetition, Taylor documents little change and few developments as she leads
the reader through the course of Bellmer’s work as far as the 1960s. She argues that his art
continuously registers a disavowal of sexual difference, a repressed feminine identification and
homoerotic desire for his father. What changes during the various stages of his adult life are the
triggers for confronting these repressions and the way they are expressed. The construction of
the first doll, for Taylor, is intimately related to the illness of his father, the illness and death of
his first wife, as well as the artist’s fascination with his younger cousin Ursula. The rendering of
the doll as an adolescent girl, the amputation of its limbs, and the prevalent iconography of
nursing and childbearing in his drawings around this time are read as means of revisiting a
discovery of sexual difference and parental intercourse, and of confronting castration anxiety
and a homoerotic desire for his father. This becomes even more prevalent in the construction
and photographs of the second doll, which is more drastically mutilated and placed in more
threatening surroundings. On the one hand, the violent representations of the doll express an
eroticized rage in the face of real and potential emotional abandonment caused by his loved
ones’ illness. On the other, according to Taylor, the doll’s sadistic treatment remains on the
surface of these images, because he in fact identifies with the girl doll and acts out feelings of
guilt given his forbidden desire for his father. His disavowal of sexual difference continues to
find expression in drawings as well as in the doll’s increasing mutations with its multiplied limbs
and interchangeable body parts. His later French work largely revolves around two other im-
portant moments of psychological crisis. In 1946, the artist learned of the death of his father five
years earlier and his second marriage dissolved, and later in life, his girlfriend’s illness and his
mother’s failing health caused further emotional distress. Taylor reads his increasingly scopto-
philic and pornographic iconographies in prints, drawings, and photographs as ways of manag-
ing psychological tensions engendered by these circumstances. His continued exploration of
sadistic imagery and erotic fantasies about a sexual object without volition—such as photographs
of the distorted flesh and anatomy of tied up, female nudes—are now read as means of self-
healing.
One of the greatest strengths of Taylor’s study is that she succeeds in building a psychoanalytic
argument in strict art historical fashion. That is to say, rather than using biography as a starting
point from which to read life into art, her analysis demonstrates remarkable visual and historical
precision. Her scrutiny of images in terms of psychic repressions is iconographic, for example, as
well as formal. The photograph of the second doll, spread out on a bed with open trousers next
to a set dining table reenacts the classic Freudian primal scene not simply because of its setting,
but also because of the way Bellmer chose to shoot it: from an elevated and compressed point of
view that suggests voyeurism and confusion. Even more important and pervasive throughout
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the book is Taylor’s historical exactness, despite the fact that her concern is clearly not with 685
history as such. We find its evidence in local remarks as much as in large scale methodological
strategies. She makes a compelling point about the first doll as a “family affair” given that many
close relatives actually helped and participated in its construction. Or, by working out thor-
oughly the differences between Jacques Offenbach’s opera Hoffmann’s Erzählungen, which is
widely known to have inspired the first doll following Bellmer’s attendance, and E. T. A.
Hoffmann’s story Der Sandmann, on which the opera is based, she is able to draw more specific
analogies to Bellmer’s circumstances at the time than would have been possible otherwise. Or,
by treating his photographs, drawings, and contemporaneous writings in a synchronic manner,
and not as factual explanation “but as an allegory in need of an explanation,” she weaves histori-
cally convincing parallels and crossovers of meanings.
Taylor does not shy away from what remains one of the most pressing questions with respect
to psychoanalytic readings of art, and of surrealist art in particular: “To what degree was Bellmer
aware of his own psychopathology and its symbolization in his art?” (6) She proposes a diplo-
matic answer. “Not only might Bellmer be seen as an active subject who ‘applies’ psychoanalysis
for his own purposes and as an appropriate object of inquiry, he may also be a product of its
theoretical propositions, his conflict-ridden identity constituted at least in part by its discourses”
(11). And this diplomatic answer may be the only acceptable one. The recent work by Michael
Leja on Jackson Pollock’s engagement with surrealism, Jungian symbolism, and his own analytic
treatment has set an important standard for interpreting the complex ways in which such a
dualism may play itself out in an oeuvre.3 Yet while Taylor makes just this compelling point
about a similar coexistence of Bellmer’s awareness of psychoanalysis and an unconscious surfac-
ing of his desires and anxieties in her introduction, she does not pursue this dualism throughout
her book.
Bellmer’s prints and drawings for many books, such as the 1947 edition of Georges Bataille’s
L’Histoire de L’Oeil or an unrealized edition of the Marquis de Sade’s Les 120 Journées de
Sodom suggest the urgency of the problem. If these works are, to begin with, illustrations of
literary treatments of sexual fantasies and psychic states, their status as analytic material for
Bellmer’s own disposition should be treated according to the dualistic sense of psychoanalytic
awareness that Taylor’s introduction promises. While she rightly points out that his illustrations
for Bataille have always been reproduced in the wrong order, she nevertheless proceeds to de-
emphasize their illustrative function solely because the prints do not always correspond to the
accompanying text. Certainly, this lack of correspondence may have practical explanations, or,
more likely, it may serve to enhance the circulation of metaphor central to Bataille’s narrative. A
related problem is that many of Bellmer’s later drawings may have been conceived as studies for
unrealized illustrations without having been identified as such, as Webb has pointed out (HB,
185).
Bellmer’s relationship to Freud and his theories is equally complicated in this respect. Based
on the artist’s multiple references to them in his writings, and on other historical evidence, it
seems undisputed that he owned and knew some of the psychoanalyst’s writings. We also know
that Bellmer later in life acknowledged that “his childhood experience in the family circle at
Katowice could have come straight out of Sigmund Freud’s casebooks” (HB, 13). Finally, we
should take into account one of his earliest book illustrations for the dadaist writer Mynona’s
Das Eisenbahnunglück oder der Anti-Freud (1925), a satire in which a group of professionals
gathered in a bar seeks to disprove Freudian theories in very funny ways. Although these illus-
trations predate what has commonly been regarded as the proper beginning of Bellmer’s work
with the 1933 doll, one should consider the possibility of their formative role. While the exag-
gerated mannerisms, distorted proportions, and stiff outlines attest to the influence of George
Grosz, Bellmer’s peer at the time, one also finds many resemblances to the late doll photographs
including the theatrical and isolated positioning of the figures and their overstated, even clichéd
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686 psychological dispositions. Indeed, the connection between these works as illustrations and the
demonstrative character of the dolls seems to urge us to acknowledge the intricate interplay
between Bellmer’s own desires and anxieties and his illustration of generic psychological sce-
narios.
Taylor gives considerably more attention than do Lichtenstein and many other writers to
Bellmer’s work in media other than photography as well as to the artist’s later work following the
doll imagery. This for the most part contributes to the force of her argument, especially con-
cerning his obsessive personality. But our heightened awareness of the different media in which
he worked—ranging from black and white photography and hand-colored photographs to draw-
ings, etchings, and occasional paintings and sculptures—opens up many new questions about
the status of the object in his work. For what reasons did he choose to work in which medium?
Did he stop making photographs during the war simply because of practical difficulties, or did
the medium of drawing address a different psychic need? How do the nuances and implications
of a given motif shift as he renders it in different media? One could argue that the drawings are
more intimate and immediate, and thus more involved with his own desires, and that the photo-
graphs by contrast are more public and mediated in nature and hence more illustrative. Or, one
could argue the opposite, that the photographs function in a more direct way by implicating the
beholder in their specific viewpoints, whereas the drawings function in more illustrative ways as
they make such viewer identification more difficult. Bellmer’s hand coloring of his doll photo-
graphs in bright, artificial colors (a practice not unheard of at the time but nevertheless unusual
in both contemporary German and surrealist photography) may serve precisely to complicate
these matters, introducing the immediate into the mediated, and a barrier into that with which
we immediately identify. Bellmer also played with similar meanings generated by the size of his
photographs. Whereas the initial photographs of the first doll were extremely small (4 3/4 by 3”)
and collected in an equally small book seemingly made for intimate consumption, some vintage
prints of the second doll (as large as 30 by 20”, a scale quite rare at the time) gives them a
decidedly public, even promotional aura.
Some more thought, if only a little, could have been given to such material matters in both
Lichtenstein and Taylor’s books. This should not deter us, however, from the conclusion that
both make interesting and nuanced cases for Bellmer’s work. As different as their methodologi-
cal approaches are, their arguments do not contradict one another. Where Lichtenstein pursues
a combination of psychoanalytic and historical interpretations, Taylor exclusively focuses on the
former. At the expense of the wealth of the historical connections Lichtenstein draws, Taylor
brings more detail to the relationship between the artist’s life and work. At the expense of the
clarity and complexity of Taylor’s psychoanalytic interpretation, Lichtenstein paints a compli-
cated picture of Bellmer’s involvement with his cultural context at large. With their different
focal points, these books elegantly complement one another, giving us both breadth and depth.

Notes
1. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York:
Abbeville Press, 1985); Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993).
2. Peter Webb with Robert Short, Hans Bellmer (London: Quartet Books, 1985); henceforth ab-
breviated HB.
3. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New
Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993).