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Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) was a Polish-born surrealist artist whose best-known works were made in Berlin during the Nazis' ascendancy (1933-4). In 1938 he moved to France, where he remained for the rest of his life. Bellmer considered his works to be a conscious act of defiance against German fascism and his father. He created and photographed two life-size pubescent dolls, which he distorted, dismembered, or menaced in sinister scenarios that sometimes included himself. These scenarios seemed to be nightmarish manifestations of a journey into his unconscious. Sue Taylor says in this psychobiog-raphy that “Bellmer depicted female bodies reified, mutated, sodomized, bound, eviscerated” (p. 2). The “degenerative” bodies of the dolls were a challenge to the cult of “the perfect body” prevalent in Germany. Another Bellmer scholar, Alain Jouffroy (1999), has described the dolls quite differently; he considers them manifestations of the “physical unconscious,” as opposed to Freud's “mental unconscious.” Bellmer himself professed that he was attempting with his dolls to show how it felt to be inside the female body, and that the distortions represented the inner body ego as seen from the outside.
Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety is a comprehensive and scholarly book based on the author's doctoral dissertation. Sue Taylor is assistant professor of art history at Portland State University, and an art critic and curator as well. She consulted for this book with John and Mary Gedo, and cites in her text the psychoanalytic writings of Freud, Bak, Chasseguet-Smirgel, Gilman, Greenacre, Kris, and Kuspit, among others. Her aim, she says, is “to set the record straight about Bellmer,” and she takes on the daunting task of examining the gruesome dolls and photographs as well as his later paintings and prints. Previous studies of Bellmer focused on the early works; she painstakingly examines Bellmer's entire oeuvre as well as his many writings, autobiographical and otherwise. Taylo