Dark night of the doll. - book review

Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety, by Sue Taylor, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2000; 296 pages, $42.95.

Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer, by Therese Lichtenstein, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001; 266 pages, $45.

In much the way that rising tides are said to lift all ships, so too has the spate of Surrealist exhibitions of the past two decades served to elevate artists once considered secondary to the movement, as well as those long invisible, such as Claude Cahun. The German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1978) belongs more properly among the former, having entered the orbit of French Surrealism as early as 1935, and subsequently published and exhibited regularly within the Surrealist circuit. For most of his working life he specialized in graphic art, and indeed a catalogue raisonne of prints and drawings was issued by Editions Denoel in 1966 and 1969. The first monograph in English, by Peter Webb and Robert Short, appeared in 1972, and since then Bellmer's work has been increasingly present in exhibitions as well as art-historical studies. Lately, however, it has been Bellmer's photographs of his two poupees--nearly life-size dolls constructed of wood-and-plaster movable parts, the first fabricated in 1933, the second in 1935--that have received the most attention, although his particular obsessions and fixations are apparent across the entirety of his oeuvre.

Nevertheless, the coincidental appearance of two recent monographs in English suggests that there is something about Bellmer's disturbing production that has perhaps some special resonance now, when issues of gender, embodiment and sexuality are of such insistent concern in a great deal of contemporary art. Retaining still its capacity to shock, a persistence that is itself impressive, Bellmer's art occupies a place within Surrealist practice quite apart from Breton's more "idealist" or even utopian concepts of love and art. As Hal Foster observed in his excellent essay on Bellmer, "More starkly than any other surrealist, Bellmer illuminates the tension between binding and shattering [of the psyche] as well as the oscillation between sadism and masochism so characteristic of surrealism." (1)

That Sue Taylor's Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety and Therese Lichtenstein's Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer are the work of women scholars, and, moreover, feminist scholars, is perhaps the most surprising aspect of these two studies. The single previous feminist consideration of Bellmer's work, Xaviere Gauthier's discussion in her important but untranslated Surrealisme et sexualite of 1971, was unambiguously critical of his scenarios of feminine dismemberment and mutilation, arguing that the manifest fetishism of the doll photographs represents not the overvaluation or worship of the fetish object but its punishment, violation and abjection. For whatever else there is to be said about the nature of Bellmer's art--sculptural, graphic or photographic--it does not readily lend itself to feminist embrace or recuperation. On the contrary, whether one considers his photographs of the notorious poupees, his sculptures of combined and recombined female body parts, graphic-art images of lubricious nymphets or his pornography de luxe--for example, the illustrations for Bataille's Histoire de l'oeil and Madame Edwarda--Bellmer's work can justly be characterized as relentlessly aggressive, often pedophiliac and, not to put too fine a point on it, flamboyantly perverse. If these features, which neither author is particularly concerned to refute, are not to rule his art out of court, what terms of analysis, what criteria and what critical apparatus should be brought to bear on such scandalous, misogynist or even obscene production?

In Taylor's thorough, thoughtful and judicious study, psychoanalytic theory provides the primary framework within which to consider Bellmer's work, an approach that has been deployed in a number of earlier studies of his art. This is hardly surprising, for Bellmer's production is itself a sort of psychopathia sexualis, and psychoanalysis is, after all, the only body of theory that takes as its proper subjects the unconscious and sexuality. Moreover, psychoanalytic theory, mostly but not exclusively drawn from Freud's own work, features prominently in Bellmer's own writing and, indeed, provides much of the content of his imagery, an issue to which I will return. However, the particular form of psychoanalytic criticism Taylor uses is psychobiographic, that is, the investigation of the artist's unconscious formations via a close iconographic and textual reading of Bellmer's art works and his various writings, in concert with the known facts of the artist's life. (This is an approach associated with such scholars as John and Mary Gedo, both of whom Taylor acknowledges as influential for her own enterprise.) Viewed from this perspective, the violence, sadomasochism and misogyny of so much of Bellmer's work is understood symptomatically--an effect, as Taylor argues, of Bellmer's unconscious and repressed homosexual attachment to his father (i.e., of the negative Oedipus complex), among other factors. "Although Bellmer repeatedly presented himself as a classic oedipal son," she writes, "I propose here that his impassioned expressions of father hatred might work to cover over a repressed homosexual attachment, an hypothesis that runs counter to other psychoanalytic accounts of his oeuvre."