Bellmer, Hans
French (b. Katowice, 1902-1975)

DESCRIPTIVE TITLE: The Doll
BOOK TITLE: "Les Jeux De La Poupee," 1949

ca. 1934 / print ca. 1949
gelatin silver print with applied color
13.5 x 14.0 cm.
Museum Purchase: Alvin Langdon Coburn Fund
82:1894:0005

BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES:
Bellmer, Hans. --Die Puppe.-- Berlin: Gerhardt Verlag, 1962. p. 71.//
Sayag, Alain. --Hans Bellmer Photographien.-- Munich: Schirmer-Mosel, 1983. p. 82.//
Mulligan, Therese & Wooters, David. --Photography from 1839 to today: George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.-- Cologne: Taschen, 1999. p. 539.//

INSCRIPTION: (no inscriptions)

NOTES: Catalogued 7/97, DZ. "'Les Jeux de la Poupée' includes photographs of (Bellmer's) second doll, and each photograph is hand-coloured. This technique involved applying special aniline dyes with a small flat brush in the manner of turn-of-the-century postcards. ... The colours are mostly pale and delicate - purples and mauves, blues and greens, oranges and yellows - and applied so as to create an artifical rather than a natural effect. The result intensifies the atmosphere of each image, so that the Doll can appear more vulnerable, the setting more threatening. ..." [Peter Webb/Robert Short, --Hans Bellmer--, 1985, p. 67] "[Paul] Eluard was working with Picasso and Man Ray after his return from Spain, but in December 1938 when Bellmer had moved to Paris, the poet chose fourteen of the second series of photographs and used the as inspiration for 14 short prose-poems. Bellmer had written an introduction earlier in 1938, and Zervos planned to publish the whole as a book entitled 'Jeux Vagues la poupée' in 1939. ...the project had to be cancelled at the outbreak of the war... It was another ten years before the introduction, the poems and the photographs were published together by Editions Premières in Paris in November 1949 as 'Les Jeux de la poupée' [The Games of the Doll]. [Webb/Short, p. 62]

SUBJECT: artifact, doll