Hans bellmer photographer biography samples

FRAME DETAILS & ELEMENTS

Frame

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Mat

All prints are hinged to a conservation quality, acid-free and lignin-free Alpha Cellulose matboard, using an acid-free linen tape. The mat's surface paper is fade and bleed resistant and is attached to a conservation quality foam-core mounting board that will keep the work safe from deterioration over time. Artworks with a deckled or decorative edges will be floated on the matboard, with acrylic spacers to separate the art from the glazing. All mounting is fully reversible, without any potential damage to the art.

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Dimensions

For images up to 30" x 40"

• 1 1/4” wide, 3/4” deep, with a 2 1/2” wide mat.
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Summary of Dada and Surrealist Photography

In post-WWI Germany and Paris, a ground-breaking practice of photography emerged, inspired by Dada's improvisational practices and the Surrealist's foray into the unconscious, dream, and fantasy realms. Whereas photography had been widely used as a tool to document reality, artists began to work with the camera and progressive techniques to create images jarringly detached from photography's original uses. These visuals oftentimes challenged the viewer's perceptions with a strong basis in conceptualism, conjuring the uncanny, ethereal, or unordinary. Other times, they emphasized the artist's intent, by presenting familiar images unlatched from their usual context, inviting new perspectives of the ordinary. This practice would spread to America and become a forebear to the decades-long exploration of the possibilities of the photographic image that remains common in today's art world.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

• Artists during this time began to explore revolutionary photographic techniques, born from the Surrealist impetus toward discovering affinities in fragments of imagery. This included photomontage, collage, post-production manipulation of photos, staging, and the photogram.
• Many of these photographers focused on presenting images grounded in reality but which challenged perception, or tricked the eye of the viewer into seeing what lay beneath, forcing a sense of distorted reality. These pictures, upon first glance might be deemed familiar, but would instantly require a double take.
• Much of the photography of this time evolved Surrealism's combination of imagery and text in order to carry the artist's intention through to the viewer. By borrowing methods from the magazine and newspaper industry, these artists were turning their work into "advertisements" of the individual artist's mind.
• Many art journals were birthed during this time, a perfect platform for printing these photographs, and a way to mass dist

CADAVRE EXQUIS OR THE VOLUPTUOUS DECAY OF THE SHIVERING VEIL
Initiated by Stanislava Kovalčíková
November 15, 2023 - January 13, 2024

PRESS TEXTBIO

HANS BELLMER, *1902 Kattowitz, PL; †1975 Paris, FR

Hans Bellmer was born on 13 March 1902 in Kattowitz, Germany. After receiving his baccalauréat in 1921, he left for Kassel to work in a coal mine. Whilst there, he came in contact with the writings of Lenin and Marx; read Zola, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Poe and Wilde; and became familiar with Berlin Dada, discovering the works of Ernst, Arp, Grosz, Dix, Tzara and Klee. This was a formative period, where he would develop a revolutionary and provocative spirit that would define him for the rest of his life. Between 1922 and 1924, his father enrolled him in the Berlin Technische Hochschule to study engineering.

Bellmer acquainted himself with Grosz and Heartfield in Berlin, the former commenting on his drawing ability. In 1924, he began working as a typographer and bookbinder for Malik-Verlag before opening a small advertising firm in Karlshorst, a suburb of Berlin, which he would continue to run until 1934. Bellmer would also work as an illustrator during this period and married Margarete Schnell in 1928. With Hitler coming to power in 1933, Bellmer decided to cease all utilitarian work as a show of defiance. Thus, along with his brother Fritz, an engineer, Margarete and his cousin, Ursula, began working upon a large mechanical doll made of wood, plaster, glue, metal rods, nuts and bolts, called ‘Doll’ (‘Puppe’/‘Poupée’). Bellmer took a number of photographs of the Doll in various poses and stages of construction, ten of which were published with an accompanying text, Die Puppe, in 1934. Eighteen were also published in the Surrealist review, Minotaure (no. 6, Winter 1934). Bellmer would make a second doll in 1935, which he also photographed in various states of dismemberment.

In 1938, Bellmer fled to Paris from Germany, where the disquieting and sexuali

Known as a surrealist photographer, Hans Bellmer was born in Katowice, Germany (1902). At the age of 24, he worked as a draftsman for his own advertising company. However, when the Nazi party assumed control of Germany in 1933, Bellmer’s life changed drastically.

In fact, his first and best-known work, the life-size pubescent female dolls he produced, was made as a protest to the Nazi Party. Because Bellmer vowed he would not do any work to support the German state, his dolls served as a reaction against the Nazi’s obsession with the perfect body. He posed them in unconventional ways and in mutated forms.

Hans Bellmer’s Dolls: The La Poupee Series

A number of factors influenced Hans Bellmer’s art, including:

• the letters of Oskar Kokoschka, Der Fetisch, published in 1925
• the arrival of his beautiful female cousin, Ursula Naguschewski
• seeing a performance of Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman in 1932 (in which a man falls tragically in love with an automaton named Olympia)
• the arrival of a box of old toys (shipped from his mother).

As Bellmer himself described, he developed a need “to construct an artificial girl with anatomical possibilities…capable of re-creating the heights of passion even to inventing new desires.”

Bellmer introduced his dolls to the world in the Surrealist journal Minotaure in France in December, 1934. This first compilation included eighteen photographs published under the title, “Doll: Variations on the Montage of an Articulated Minor.”

His dolls often take sexual poses, such as on a bare mattress or lacy cloth, occasionally enhanced by undergarments or an artificial rose. He sometimes posed the dolls naked or scantily clad. In one case, he used the technique of double exposure to include himself next to a doll in type of ghostly self-portrait.

Hans Bellmer’s essay, “Memories of the Doll Theme,” (1934), focused on the sexual aspect of the dolls. Although surrealists in general had a fascination with both mannequins and an idea