Hans Bellmer

Hans Bellmer (13 March 1902 – 24 February 1975) was a German artist, best known for his drawings, etchings that illustrates the 1940 edition of Histoire de l’œil, and the life-sized female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s.

Hans Bellmer takes credit for provoking a physical crisis in his father and brings his own artistic creativity into association with childhood insubordination and resentment toward a severe and humorless paternal authority.

Perhaps this is one reason for the nearly universal, unquestioning acceptance in the literature of Bellmer's promotion of his art as a struggle against his father, the police, and ultimately, fascism and the state.

Represented by mutated forms and unconventional poses, his dolls (according to this view) were directed specifically at the cult of the perfect body then prominent in Germany.

As the project progressed, Bellmer made a second set of hollow plaster legs, with wooden ball joints for the doll's hips and knees.

[6] Bellmer gave up doll-making and spent the following decades creating erotic drawings, etchings, sexually explicit photographs, paintings, and prints of pubescent girls.

[12] The New York-based avant-garde band Naked City used images of Bellmer's dolls for the front cover and liner notes of their final album, Absinthe.