review essay 681
Review Essay
Hans Bellmer, History, and Psychoanalysis
By Christine Mehring,Yale University / modernity
Hans Bellmer:The Anatomy of Anxiety. Sue Taylor. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Pp. xx + 310. 126 illustrations. $39.95.
MODERNISM
Behind Closed Doors:The Art of Hans Bellmer.Therese Lichtenstein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. Pp. xii + 254. 82 illustrations. $45.00.
HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS
Mutated, sometimes mutilated, dolls define the German-born artist Hans Bellmer’s (1902–75) place within twentieth-century art. He began to construct his first doll in Berlin in 1933. Strongly suggestive of an adolescent girl in shape and size, it consisted of an unusually flexible wood and metal structure covered with papier-mâché and plaster. A second doll followed two years later, with various body parts and appendages made from glue and tissue paper pivoting around a central ball joint. In staging these dolls as models for a large number of photographs, Bellmer created one of the most interesting and controversial bodies of work associated with surrealism. He documented the stages of construction of the first doll, ranging from the quasi-scientific arrangement of its individual body parts to the near-complete assembly of a body with face and hair lying on a bed. He experimented more with the second, more flexible doll, whose upper body and face are frequently replaced by a second set of legs. We encounter it in dramatically lit interiors or outdoors in the forest with suggestive props such as a hoop or a carpet beater. The photographs of the second doll are often hand-colored with garish aniline dyes. Sue Taylor and Therese Lichtenstein’s recent books on Bellmer are not the first critical accounts of his doll photographs, which have played a prominent role in recent art historical scholarship on surrealist art, most notably in that of Rosalind Krauss and Hal Foster.1 Neither are these books the first to look beyond the relatively brief doll period to
VOLUME EIGHT, NUMBER FOUR, PP 681–686.
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682 survey Bellmer’s life and complete oeuvre, the subject of a thorough 1986 monograph by Peter Webb.2 Yet Taylor and Lichtenstein are the first to combine these two objectives as they each weave a remarkably consistent thesis across different periods of Bellmer’s visual production and writings. Both authors turn to psychoanalytic concepts as a theoretical basis, but their conclusions could not be more different. Lichtenstein’s book, Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer, explores the intersection of psychoanalysis and history. On the one hand, the author identifies as the artist’s the emotional needs and sexual desires registered in Bellmer’s doll photographs as well as in his contemporary and later drawings. Yet in her view, these needs and desires run parallel to, are constructed by, or subvert, those played out in the cultural, social, and political spheres of Germany during the Weimar Republic and National Socialism. She warns early on in the book that she makes “no claims for a linear causality between Bellmer’s work, his life, and the larger public sphere.” “Instead,” she writes, “my focus is on the indeterminate space in which personal and psychosexual elements connect with public, cultural ones. My aim is not to discover or even look for an ‘origin’ for Bellmer’s work but to investigate the complex context in which it ‘lived’” (17). Central to her argument is the “anagram” and Bellmer’s interest in the contemporary neurologist Paul Schilder, who developed a theory of the expression of emotions through body language. The doll’s body and its changing physical appearances (documented in the photographs) function like anagrams in that they are symptomatic of unconscious psychosexual and emotional states at work in both the artist and the surrounding culture at large. Various psychoanalytic concepts lead Lichtenstein to specify these states and elaborate on their multiple meanings. To begin with, there is Bellmer’s fascination with doubles (the multiplying of limbs or the use of mirrors, for example) and with sadomasochistic power relations (the doll as a martyr or seductress). These present a response to an early childhood experience of loss and abandonment; mirror to a certain degree the sadistic attitude of the Nazis; but also counter the youthful image of femininity in contemporary advertising and subvert the sense of normal and naturalized images of women under National Socialism. Hysteria is another central concept for Lichtenstein since Bellmer frequently renders the doll either as mad or as a victim. Linked during the 1920s to the identity crises and feelings of awkwardness experienced by adolescents, hysteria allowed Bellmer to explore a search for security and surety at a moment when he increasingly lost control of his own life due to the early death of his first wife and the restrictions placed on his creative license after the Nazis’ rise to power. Yet, for Lichtenstein, the hysteric doll also stands as a surrogate for the suffering prevalent under National Socialism, questions the metaphor of the Nazi state as a healthy body, and, when placed in ominous domestic spaces, undermines the Nazis’ propagation of the nuclear family and the woman’s role as wife and mother. Finally, Lichtenstein traces the concept of nostalgia in the delicate collages Bellmer made for his first wife and in the photographs that present the doll as a corpse, fragmented and ruined. The yearning expressed here for a disappearing and forgotten past functions as a survival mechanism vis à vis the solitude and restrictions recently imposed on the artist’s life. At the same time, this nostalgia is culturally and politically meaningful as it runs counter to the idealized image of the past propagated by the Nazis and resonates with the progressive and reactionary types of nostalgia prevalent during the upheavals of the Weimar Republic. By constantly examining the doll photographs from changing perspectives—based on different concepts, informed by multiple contexts, and in comparison to various works by the artist in other media—Behind Closed Doors pays wonderful homage to the intricate play of meanings in Bellmer’s work. This is significant. Given the charges of misogyny that many critics have brought against the artist’s work, Lichtenstein’s insistence on its complexity may make the strongest case yet against the simplicity of such accusations. Moreover, any reader will come away from her book with a pure sense of the pleasure of viewing and reading visual works of art, no small feat within the realm of psychoanalytically driven art historical scholarship, which tends to surrender the
review essay pleasures of looking to analytic dissection. For these reasons, her play with layered and often contradictory meanings is largely successful and her individual claims are always thoroughly developed and convincing. It should, however, be noted that the force of the interplay would be stronger were these meanings not merely juxtaposed in large subsections but their relationship elaborated on or their odd coexistence stated more concisely. Lichtenstein’s interweaving of psychoanalytic and historical readings is compelling. That Bellmer’s doll photographs were made immediately following Hitler’s seizure of power and are therefore tied to a German context as much as to the circle of French surrealism where this work received its first public exposure, is a point that has been made before by Krauss and Foster. Foster especially has interpreted the photographs’ occupation with sexuality, death, and insanity as an attack on what he referred to as the armored, aestheticized, and idealized body promoted by the Nazis. At the same time he related the fluctuation in the doll photographs between the erotic and the traumatic, the animate and inanimate, and the masochistic and sadistic, to a Bataillean escape from the outline of the self. Yet Lichtenstein both dramatically expands the field of historical meanings embedded in the doll photographs and delves more thoroughly into the specifics of each historical connnection, such as, for example, the National Socialist politics of the body or the development of theories of degenerate art. Even more could be done in this respect. What role did Bellmer’s apprenticeship as a typographer at the leftist Malik Verlag play? What is the significance of his drawings for the communist magazine Der Knüppel? And what about the crippled World War I veterans filling the German streets during the 1920s? How did such scenes affect pieces like his 1937 sculpture La Mitrailleuse en Etat de Grâce (The Machine-Gunneress in a State of Grace), which consists of selected parts of the second doll mounted onto a bare skeleton of wood and metal sticks strongly reminiscent of prosthetic devices? Given the dating of the doll photographs up to 1938, did Bellmer’s work on photographic prints of the doll and his coloring of existing prints stop when he moved to Paris? Or, as Webb has suggested, did his work with the medium of photography stop only a year later following his internment in the Camp des Milles, a prison camp for German nationals living in France (HB, 182)? How would exact answers to these questions affect the historical meaning of these works? By representing Bellmer’s work as formed by, reflective of, and yet sometimes counter to the cultural, social, and political conditions of Bellmer’s surroundings at large, Lichtenstein implicitly redresses one of the pitfalls of psychoanalytic interpretations of art ever since Freud’s study, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo da Vinci (1910). If Meyer Schapiro has shown that Freud did not sufficiently take into account the iconography inspired by the contemporary cult of St. Anne when analyzing the artist’s representations of the Virgin and Child, Lichtenstein implies that any reading of the photographs and drawings limited to the artist’s own psychosexual and emotional development must be misguided since it fails to address the formative impact of images of women in Weimar mass culture and the role of the female body under National Socialism. This strength of Lichtenstein’s approach became particularly clear in the exhibition of Bellmer’s work that she curated for the International Center of Photography in New York and that her book accompanied. Here, the doll photographs were in the company of books such as A. D. W. Polzer’s Sexuellperverse from 1930, magazines from the Weimar Republic such as Fetischismus, and film stills, for example from Fritz Lang’s M. This was one of the most elegantly staged recent exhibitions to situate a body of work within a compelling historical context—for, rather than relying on long wall texts or brochures, Lichtenstein effectively selected visually informative material that actively encouraged the viewer to draw historical connections. Both book and exhibition attest to the power of the visual to engage with broad historical and cultural meanings. Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety is decidedly different, above all because Sue Taylor presents an exclusively psychoanalytic, specifically Freudian reading of Bellmer’s constructions
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684 of the first and second dolls, their photographic representations, and his drawings, prints, and writings. Triggered by specific events and emotional distress in Bellmer’s adult life, these works, in Taylor’s view, tell of the artist’s psychic development, that is, his repressed desires and anxieties from childhood and adolescence. As she writes in her introduction, the story begins and ends with his family drama, and I hope to show how the erotomania, fetishism, sadomasochistic enactments, and repetitious sexual researches Bellmer performs in his art ‘replay elemental scenarios’ that are also the concern of psychoanalysis. . . I remain convinced that the very nature of Bellmer’s apparently compulsive rehearsals renders a psychoanalytic reading of his work a most productive one. [15] She also insists, however, that his artistic expression ultimately does not help him resolve or overcome his repressions. “For Bellmer, building, possessing, manipulating, and ‘assaulting’ the doll did not prove to be the solution, nor was there ever a solution—just an unending repetition of his anxious fantasies” (85). Due to this repetition, Taylor documents little change and few developments as she leads the reader through the course of Bellmer’s work as far as the 1960s. She argues that his art continuously registers a disavowal of sexual difference, a repressed feminine identification and homoerotic desire for his father. What changes during the various stages of his adult life are the triggers for confronting these repressions and the way they are expressed. The construction of the first doll, for Taylor, is intimately related to the illness of his father, the illness and death of his first wife, as well as the artist’s fascination with his younger cousin Ursula. The rendering of the doll as an adolescent girl, the amputation of its limbs, and the prevalent iconography of nursing and childbearing in his drawings around this time are read as means of revisiting a discovery of sexual difference and parental intercourse, and of confronting castration anxiety and a homoerotic desire for his father. This becomes even more prevalent in the construction and photographs of the second doll, which is more drastically mutilated and placed in more threatening surroundings. On the one hand, the violent representations of the doll express an eroticized rage in the face of real and potential emotional abandonment caused by his loved ones’ illness. On the other, according to Taylor, the doll’s sadistic treatment remains on the surface of these images, because he in fact identifies with the girl doll and acts out feelings of guilt given his forbidden desire for his father. His disavowal of sexual difference continues to find expression in drawings as well as in the doll’s increasing mutations with its multiplied limbs and interchangeable body parts. His later French work largely revolves around two other important moments of psychological crisis. In 1946, the artist learned of the death of his father five years earlier and his second marriage dissolved, and later in life, his girlfriend’s illness and his mother’s failing health caused further emotional distress. Taylor reads his increasingly scoptophilic and pornographic iconographies in prints, drawings, and photographs as ways of managing psychological tensions engendered by these circumstances. His continued exploration of sadistic imagery and erotic fantasies about a sexual object without volition—such as photographs of the distorted flesh and anatomy of tied up, female nudes—are now read as means of selfhealing. One of the greatest strengths of Taylor’s study is that she succeeds in building a psychoanalytic argument in strict art historical fashion. That is to say, rather than using biography as a starting point from which to read life into art, her analysis demonstrates remarkable visual and historical precision. Her scrutiny of images in terms of psychic repressions is iconographic, for example, as well as formal. The photograph of the second doll, spread out on a bed with open trousers next to a set dining table reenacts the classic Freudian primal scene not simply because of its setting, but also because of the way Bellmer chose to shoot it: from an elevated and compressed point of view that suggests voyeurism and confusion. Even more important and pervasive throughout
review essay the book is Taylor’s historical exactness, despite the fact that her concern is clearly not with history as such. We find its evidence in local remarks as much as in large scale methodological strategies. She makes a compelling point about the first doll as a “family affair” given that many close relatives actually helped and participated in its construction. Or, by working out thoroughly the differences between Jacques Offenbach’s opera Hoffmann’s Erzählungen, which is widely known to have inspired the first doll following Bellmer’s attendance, and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s story Der Sandmann, on which the opera is based, she is able to draw more specific analogies to Bellmer’s circumstances at the time than would have been possible otherwise. Or, by treating his photographs, drawings, and contemporaneous writings in a synchronic manner, and not as factual explanation “but as an allegory in need of an explanation,” she weaves historically convincing parallels and crossovers of meanings. Taylor does not shy away from what remains one of the most pressing questions with respect to psychoanalytic readings of art, and of surrealist art in particular: “To what degree was Bellmer aware of his own psychopathology and its symbolization in his art?” (6) She proposes a diplomatic answer. “Not only might Bellmer be seen as an active subject who ‘applies’ psychoanalysis for his own purposes and as an appropriate object of inquiry, he may also be a product of its theoretical propositions, his conflict-ridden identity constituted at least in part by its discourses” (11). And this diplomatic answer may be the only acceptable one. The recent work by Michael Leja on Jackson Pollock’s engagement with surrealism, Jungian symbolism, and his own analytic treatment has set an important standard for interpreting the complex ways in which such a dualism may play itself out in an oeuvre.3 Yet while Taylor makes just this compelling point about a similar coexistence of Bellmer’s awareness of psychoanalysis and an unconscious surfacing of his desires and anxieties in her introduction, she does not pursue this dualism throughout her book. Bellmer’s prints and drawings for many books, such as the 1947 edition of Georges Bataille’s L’Histoire de L’Oeil or an unrealized edition of the Marquis de Sade’s Les 120 Journées de Sodom suggest the urgency of the problem. If these works are, to begin with, illustrations of literary treatments of sexual fantasies and psychic states, their status as analytic material for Bellmer’s own disposition should be treated according to the dualistic sense of psychoanalytic awareness that Taylor’s introduction promises. While she rightly points out that his illustrations for Bataille have always been reproduced in the wrong order, she nevertheless proceeds to deemphasize their illustrative function solely because the prints do not always correspond to the accompanying text. Certainly, this lack of correspondence may have practical explanations, or, more likely, it may serve to enhance the circulation of metaphor central to Bataille’s narrative. A related problem is that many of Bellmer’s later drawings may have been conceived as studies for unrealized illustrations without having been identified as such, as Webb has pointed out (HB, 185). Bellmer’s relationship to Freud and his theories is equally complicated in this respect. Based on the artist’s multiple references to them in his writings, and on other historical evidence, it seems undisputed that he owned and knew some of the psychoanalyst’s writings. We also know that Bellmer later in life acknowledged that “his childhood experience in the family circle at Katowice could have come straight out of Sigmund Freud’s casebooks” (HB, 13). Finally, we should take into account one of his earliest book illustrations for the dadaist writer Mynona’s Das Eisenbahnunglück oder der Anti-Freud (1925), a satire in which a group of professionals gathered in a bar seeks to disprove Freudian theories in very funny ways. Although these illustrations predate what has commonly been regarded as the proper beginning of Bellmer’s work with the 1933 doll, one should consider the possibility of their formative role. While the exaggerated mannerisms, distorted proportions, and stiff outlines attest to the influence of George Grosz, Bellmer’s peer at the time, one also finds many resemblances to the late doll photographs including the theatrical and isolated positioning of the figures and their overstated, even clichéd
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686 psychological dispositions. Indeed, the connection between these works as illustrations and the demonstrative character of the dolls seems to urge us to acknowledge the intricate interplay between Bellmer’s own desires and anxieties and his illustration of generic psychological scenarios. Taylor gives considerably more attention than do Lichtenstein and many other writers to Bellmer’s work in media other than photography as well as to the artist’s later work following the doll imagery. This for the most part contributes to the force of her argument, especially concerning his obsessive personality. But our heightened awareness of the different media in which he worked—ranging from black and white photography and hand-colored photographs to drawings, etchings, and occasional paintings and sculptures—opens up many new questions about the status of the object in his work. For what reasons did he choose to work in which medium? Did he stop making photographs during the war simply because of practical difficulties, or did the medium of drawing address a different psychic need? How do the nuances and implications of a given motif shift as he renders it in different media? One could argue that the drawings are more intimate and immediate, and thus more involved with his own desires, and that the photographs by contrast are more public and mediated in nature and hence more illustrative. Or, one could argue the opposite, that the photographs function in a more direct way by implicating the beholder in their specific viewpoints, whereas the drawings function in more illustrative ways as they make such viewer identification more difficult. Bellmer’s hand coloring of his doll photographs in bright, artificial colors (a practice not unheard of at the time but nevertheless unusual in both contemporary German and surrealist photography) may serve precisely to complicate these matters, introducing the immediate into the mediated, and a barrier into that with which we immediately identify. Bellmer also played with similar meanings generated by the size of his photographs. Whereas the initial photographs of the first doll were extremely small (4 3/4 by 3”) and collected in an equally small book seemingly made for intimate consumption, some vintage prints of the second doll (as large as 30 by 20”, a scale quite rare at the time) gives them a decidedly public, even promotional aura. Some more thought, if only a little, could have been given to such material matters in both Lichtenstein and Taylor’s books. This should not deter us, however, from the conclusion that both make interesting and nuanced cases for Bellmer’s work. As different as their methodological approaches are, their arguments do not contradict one another. Where Lichtenstein pursues a combination of psychoanalytic and historical interpretations, Taylor exclusively focuses on the former. At the expense of the wealth of the historical connections Lichtenstein draws, Taylor brings more detail to the relationship between the artist’s life and work. At the expense of the clarity and complexity of Taylor’s psychoanalytic interpretation, Lichtenstein paints a complicated picture of Bellmer’s involvement with his cultural context at large. With their different focal points, these books elegantly complement one another, giving us both breadth and depth.
Notes 1. Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985); Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993). 2. Peter Webb with Robert Short, Hans Bellmer (London: Quartet Books, 1985); henceforth abbreviated HB. 3. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism: Subjectivity and Painting in the 1940s (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993).
