A legendary work on eroticism, surrealism, and photography. Includes a suite of poems by Paul Eluard, 15 colour photographs, 10 in black and white, plus numerous line drawings.
Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) is one of the most illustrious names in the field of erotic art and Surrealism. The Doll comprises a series of photographs that have acquired iconic status and which exemplify the Surrealists’ conception of “convulsive beauty”. They are accompanied by a body of theoretical, poetic and speculative texts written between the 1930s and early 1960s which reveal Bellmer as one whose ideas are a “scandal for reason” (Joë Bousquet).
The insight Bellmer’s writing provides into his work is crucial. He weaves together a remarkably disparate set of concepts - covering such diverse fields as the body, psychology, anagrams, chance, the laws of optics and mathematics, the fourth dimension, hermaphroditism, the marvellous, intuition - into a theory of eroticism which forms the underlying rationale of his fearsome art.
This English edition is based exactly upon Bellmer’s original, the texts having been translated for the first time from the final German version.
