Les jeux de la poupée

Author: Marijke Peyser

In February 1935 Hans Bellmer spent a short time in Paris, where he got to know André Breton and other Surrealists, including Paul Éluard and Henri Parisot. From then on, Bellmer’s work was included in the Surrealists’ exhibitions. In the same year he made a second version of the doll with greater flexibility than the original doll he made in 1934. She had arms, two pairs of legs, four spherical breasts, three pelvises and a torso complete with female genitalia that could be assembled in all manner of ways. The doll also had her own extensive wardrobe, wigs and shoes.

This doll played the leading role in Les jeux de la poupée, which was published in 1949. As there was in Die Puppe, which was made in 1934, there is an accompanying text. In 1934 Bellmer himself wrote an introduction headed ‘Erinnerungen zum Thema Puppe’: in 1949 the photos were accompanied by fourteen poems by Éluard and, again, an introductory essay by Bellmer, ‘Notes au sujet de la jointure a boule’, a pseudo-scientific discourse he wrote in 1938 and translated into French with the Surrealist poet and artist Georges Hugnet in 1946.^[1] Along with Éluard, friends like Raoul Haussmann and Christian d’Orgeix helped Bellmer to colour the photographs by hand.^[2] A hundred and forty-two copies were published. In 2002 Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen purchased number 109.

Each photograph in Les jeux de la poupée tells a story. The doll is usually shown in a domestic setting, for example in a bedroom, a kitchen, on stairs or in a cellar. The atmosphere of the photographs is perverted and menacing: a carpet-beater indicates that the doll will get a beating or has already been hit; other photographs show her hanging on a hook or the parts of her dismantled body left like rubbish on stairs. Torture threatens or has already happened. It is dangerous outside as well: a bloodied doll is watched by a voyeur hiding behind a tree. The viewer is part of a cruel world, created by the artist, where the tormentor remains unseen. What we do see is the ‘foreplay’ or the result of the tortures the doll has undergone.^[3]

Bellmer’s disturbing, erotic manipulations of the doll were the starting point for the artist Cindy Sherman’s ‘Sex Pictures’ (c. 1992), one of which, Untitled # 258, is in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen’s collection. In this series of photographs she reacts to the visual imagery and conventions of the Surrealists, whereas Bellmer in his turn was campaigning against the Aryan ideal type of the healthy, fertile woman in his photographic series about the damage to the girl’s body.^[4] In a departure from her other work, Sherman did not pose for the ‘Sex Pictures’ herself, but used parts from plastic dolls that had clearly been very badly treated, comparable to Bellmer’s photographs. Unlike Bellmer’s pictures, however they never become truly disturbing.