Hans Bellmer

Hans Bellmer (Katowice, 1902 - Paris, 1975) was one of the most radical and original figures of Surrealism, a German-born artist who made Paris his home, today recognised as one of the great innovators in the visual language of the body in twentieth-century art.

After studying engineering in Berlin, he moved in Dada circles during the 1920s. In 1933, with Hitler’s rise to power, he abandoned all socially useful professional work in refusal of the regime and devoted himself entirely to his artistic research, constructing the Poupée, a life-size articulated doll which he photographed in compositions of dismantled and reassembled bodies. The images, published in 1934 in Die Puppe and in the Surrealist journal Minotaure, were enthusiastically embraced by André Breton and Paul Éluard.

Settled in Paris in 1938, Bellmer developed an unmistakable language across photography, drawing, printmaking and sculpture, grounded in the concept of the “anatomy of desire”. In 1949 the Poupée returned in Les Jeux de la poupée, with fourteen poems by Éluard; he also illustrated texts by Georges Bataille.

His works are today held in institutions including Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, Tate and the Art Institute of Chicago. The major retrospective Hans Bellmer. Anatomie du désir, presented at the Centre Pompidou in 2006 with more than 250 works and later in Munich and at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, further confirmed his central place in the history of twentieth-century art.