A reply might be that we should look at Bellmer’s dolls in the same way we do at the art of the insane—for instance, Messchersmidt’s distortions of the human head, or Richard Dadd’s imagery of murderous attack on a father figure in magical fairyland. But Bellmer was not insane; he was never accused of bizarre behavior, let alone of threats to women, or to anyone at all. His demeanor, though Germanically severe (reminiscent of Dracula as he always wore black) is reported to have been “very reserved, very correct, very private”. The British surrealist Roland Penrose continues: “He was highly intelligent, and seemed to have no sense of culpability or sin—there was an innocence in his perversity. His eroticism was intellectual rather than sensual, cold rather than hot: this attracted me to him because, like me, he was basically a puritan, and like me, he had no time for vulgar sensuality”.2 Bellmer was closer to the American erotic writer Henry Miller than he was to any purveyor of pornography such as Larry Flint of Hustler magazine. The more apt comparison should be to Vladimir Nabokov’s portrayal of pre-adolescent fascination in the novel Lolita. Bellmer’s sly and winning sadism suggests an obsessive character pathology that enlists the viewer, or reader—a tactic brilliantly used by Nabokov when presenting the pedophile Humbert Humbert. But Bellmer’s dolls are uncompromisingly forlorn and damaged compared to Nabokov’s idealized inveigling child-woman Lolita who excites Humbert into frantic pursuit. The dolls, or mannequins, are mechanized Lolitas, with none of her temperamental girlishness. They are sensually full-breasted adolescents but incomplete, lacking body parts. It is uncertain whether they have been left unfinished, lacking arms and legs, or whether limbs have been re-moved—perhaps wilfully deconstructed. In any case, they are incomplete, grossly distorted torsos, sometimes awkwardly posed, sometimes in “thrown” positions. No doll is a comfortable presence; all are distressed, with lost facial expressions accompanying one state or another of dismembered limblessness. They are caught in a living death, potentially alive in a humanoid state but never quite human. The dolls are more mechanistic assemblages than organic growths. They are not so cynically contrived as Duchamp’s Brides, nor do they go to the risible extreme of Dali’s soft constructions, as in Soft Construction with Boiled Beans.Premonition of Civil War (1936). There is no hint of the mass-market pop extravaganza as, for instance, in the erotic art of Allan Jones, a British painter of the ’60s and ’70s. Mass market pornography, media-hyped sex and cute Barbie Dolls had not yet arrived. Bellmer’s effigies are more disturbing being triumphs of engineering, explorations of the “ball joint’s” mechanical possibilities, and only marginally in the human world at all.3 They are indeed very private creations of fantasy, working with the force of new technology. The classic sentimentalized dressed German child’s doll has been completely overthrown. Winnicott’s hopeful “transitional object” is traumatized by sadism yet preserved by a kind of pathos, with which Bellmer could identify.
This makes the seeming doll perversion all the more worrying; being hidden under a triumph of technique, never explicit; only an aura of the doll “games” as Bellmer calls them, the perversion eludes easy definition. The “game” might be of anagrams, a metaphor attempted by Bellmer: “the sentence may be compared to a body, which invites us to disarticulate it, in order that its true contents may be recomposed through an endless series of anagrams. If one examines it closely, the anagram is born from a violent and paradoxical conflict ...” becoming a “schema of his own ego”—a comment occurring in a postscript to Unica Zurn’s Oracles and Spectacles 4 The clues here to Bell-mer’s motives in doll-making are the words “disarticulate” and “violent and paradoxical conflict”; they suggest projections of his own residual traumatized childhood onto the dolls’ fractured being. In one paradigmatic photograph, the adult Bellmer is seen as a phantom presence, bent over, hands on knees, at the same head level as his doll. Is this the damaged mother, now an effigy of the lover? Armless, her right leg only a pylon, she looks away, while he gazes outward engaging us in his psychic turmoil. He seems to be saying: “Here she is; I can’t help the compromised form in which she appears because it is my own”. He would have been unlikely to add, “she mimics my own childhood suffering”.
As Sue Taylor emphasizes, Bellmer’s comments, especially on the second doll series (1935), are of “revenge, growing out of frustrated desire”: “Would it not be the final triumph over those adolescents with wide eyes which turn away if, beneath the conscious state that plunders their charms, aggressive fingers were to assault their plastic form and slowly construct, limb by limb, all that had been appropriated by the senses and the brain? Adjust their joints one to the other, arrange childlike poses by using ball joints to their fullest extent, follow very gently the contours of the hollows, taste the pleasures of the curves, wander in the labyrinths of the ears, make everything pretty, and ruthlessly spill the salt of deformation ... Should not that be the solution?”. This is the language not only of vengeful attack on the ostensible victim, the doll; it is also a kind of cherishing. Neither attack nor perverse cherishing is any “solution”, as Taylor points out from evidence of Bellmer’s “unending repetition of his anxious fantasies.”5 However, rather than accept Taylor’s Oedipal explanation of Bellmer’s aggression towards females in terms of a supposed repressed homosexual love of his father, let us examine the psychoanalyst Robert Stol-ler’s theory of perversion emphasizing developmental trauma.6
Stoller sees perversions as serving fantasies containing “remnants of the individual’s experiences with other people who in the real world, during childhood, provoked the reaction that we call perversion. And at the center is hostility”. Stoller’s well-known dictum that perversion is “the erotic form of hatred” proposes further that “The hostility in perversion takes form in a fantasy of revenge hidden in the actions that make up the perversion and serves to convert childhood trauma into adult triumph. To create the greatest excitement, the perversion must also portray itself as an act of risk-taking”.7 This theory has the advantage of shifting emphasis from universalized Oedipal theorizing to the specific individual life history of the subject in question. It asks: what, in terms of that individual’s interaction with parents and caregivers, does deflection into perverse fantasizing, as it leads to behavior, actually mean? How did it come about that an “erotic form of hatred” implanted itself in the emotional makeup of that individual? Why the need for revenge against attachment objects, and by what “creative” (or destructive strategy) is that wish for revenge converted, openly or disguised, into symbolic statements? Like the very empirical attachment theorists, Stoller asks not for a “one programmatic theory fits all” approach to perverse ideation but for as detailed as possible developmental histories of the affected persons. This challenges psychobiographers of creative people such as Bellmer to gather as much developmental data as possible and to construct it parsimoniously into patterns of meaning. These patterns must pertain directly to early developmental relations with both mothers and fathers, together with other family members, taking into account the wider social and cultural circumstances in which they occurred.
In this respect, art historians such as Taylor and Lichtenstein who unquestioningly appropriate Freudian Oedipal theory, are apt to be led astray in the search for convincing reasons why Bellmer constructed, then photographed, the deformed plastic and metal dolls. While such art historians may be relied upon for iconographic sources, from Offenbach’s Olympia in The Tales of Hoffman to Oskar Kokoschka’s effigy of his mistress, they neglect looking into more recent research concerning the psychology of child abuse and its consequences for destructive relations of men with women. In Bell-mer’s instance, we are looking for the reasons why his dolls are degraded yet coyly appealing, making the assumption that they suffered because of some prior suffering of his own—that they register the sadistic result of underlying masochism, self-punishment inflicted in response to developmental circumstances needing reconstruction. But before attempting that, let us review Bellmer’s adult relations with female partners who, in one way or another, partook of his doll fantasy and subsequent ventures in erotic drawing and painting.