Surrealism emerged in the beginning decades of the Twentieth Century in the twilight glow of Freudianism. From the beginning, the Surrealists, led by the likes of André Breton, sought out what they believed to be the reality beneath the reality—that is, the sur-reality—in effect, co-opting Freud’s concept of the subconscious and fusing it to the arts.
The ultimate goal of the Surrealists was freedom, no matter how extreme. Thus, it was inevitable that they would come to admire the eighteenth century writer, the Marquis François de Sade. Sade composed most of his works in prison (to which he had been sentenced for "criminal debauchery"). Sade essentially argued that man is a monster from the beginning and that by only following our desires to the end can we discover who we really are, no matter how appalling.
A main Surrealist theme, thus, was to break social taboos concerning sex, but only with respect to male sexual freedom. For example, in René Magritte’s 1934 painting The Rape, a woman’s face becomes a "genital face"—blind, mute and pathetic. The females depicted in Surrealist art generally had no real faces. The preferred female form was a mannequin. Kurt Seligmann’s 1938 Ultra-Furniture is a stool supported on the legs of three mannequins. It is a direct transcription from the fantasies within the mad ogre Minski’s castle that Sade described in his novel Juliette (1797), in which visiting orgiasts eat a dinner of roast boy while sitting on chairs "constructed" of live, interlocked slaves.
Extreme sadist imagery can be seen in German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975), whose obsession with young girls led him to make a series of twisted, intertwined and erotic dummies, often articulated with ball-and-socket joints. The dolls’ legs could be splayed, bent and combined at will, producing potent vehicles for sexual fantasies centered, it can be assumed, on invasive acts, rape and violence. Bellmer took photographs of his "dolls" in difficult settings which, for the most part, looked like police evidence shots taken after a crime.
Naturally, Bellmer and his radical deconstruction of the body were promoted by the French Surrealists. What he seemed to say meshed neatly with their philosophy.
The life-size, adolescent girl dolls created by Bellmer are the subject of Therese Lichtenstein’s book, Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer (University of California Press, 2001). Disturbing and controversial, Bellmer’s dolls—with their uncanny, fragmented bodies and eroticized poses—were just as shocking during Bellmer’s time as they are today. Until now, there has been little available in English about Bellmer’s dolls, and Lichtenstein’s book is a fresh interpretation of th
e artist’s work and his place in European modernism. Eighty striking photographs accompany the text.
Behind Closed Doors reveals the complex structure behind Bellmer’s photographs of violated female adolescence, a structure in which sadism, masochism, hermaphroditism, fetishism, utopianism and nostalgia all play a role. Indeed, Bellmer had some serious issues. As Lichtenstein writes:In fact, throughout his life Bellmer enjoyed dressing as a woman or girl. This, in part, was his rejection of the strict models of masculine behavior that were sanctioned in the Germany of his day. Bellmer retained this rebellious attitude throughout his life. He often wore nylon stockings under his trousers and dressed as a transvestite to entertain exiles who were interned with him in southern France during the occupation (as part of the Second World War).
Lichtenstein’s study also analyzes the political aspect of Bellmer’s transgressive images: the way in which they may have served to question and undermine the contemporary authoritarian Nazi image of sexual "normalcy" by recourse to a violent return of the repressed.
Working during a time when Nazi fascism was on the rise, Bellmer created several dolls with fragmented bodies that could be dismantled and arranged in various configurations. Using a narrative format, he then photographed the dolls in a range of grotesque—often sexual—positions. The images he conveyed were of death and decay, abuse and longing, in stark contrast to the Nazis' mythic utopian celebration of adolescence.
Lichtenstein interprets Bellmer’s complex expressions of eroticism as a protest against the Nazis and also against his father, a cold and repressive Nazi sympathizer. At the same time, she says, by hyperbolically flaunting a passive femininity in a theatrical manner, Bellmer’s images allow us to consider how cultural representations can affect the formation of identity and alternative possibilities.
The exhibition Behind Closed Doors is at the International Center of Photography in New York City until June 10, 2001.
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