Art History and Psychoanalysis

December 12, 2003. I am grateful to JAPA for the review by Janice Lieberman of my book, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety (JAPA 51/4), and for the opportunity to respond. There are several errors in the review, which I would like to correct. Bellmer (1902-1975) was German, not Polish; his birthplace, the town of Kattowitz, became part of Poland only after World War I. The book's cover image, Ball Joint (1936), displays not the red bloody vagina Lieberman describes between two doll's arms but, perhaps just as strange, a large eyeball with a blue iris. It was in 1923, not 1913, that Bellmer went to Berlin with his father to study engineering. The second ball-jointed doll he created in the 1930s had two pelvises, not three. And when he divorced his second wife in 1946, he was separated from his twin daughters, not stepdaughters as Lieberman reports.

These factual inaccuracies are accompanied by several misstatements about my interpretive positions. I do not dispute that Bellmer hated his father, as he loudly proclaimed; instead, I acknowledge this conscious hatred while proposing, in addition, a repressed erotic attachment. Nor do I refute Susan Suleiman's argument that in surrealism the female body is an accessory in the male artist's oedipal skirmishes with the father. On the contrary, I embrace this thesis enthusiastically and build upon it. (The title of her book is Subversive Intent, not Subversive Thought, as Lieberman lists it in her references.) Although I do use the classical concept of the fetish as phallic substitute in my discussion of Bellmer's doll, I also invoke the contemporary view of the preoedipal origins of fetishism, so effectively summarized by Donald Kuspit (1993) in his essay “The Modern Fetish.” Finally, I suggest a return to the primal scene not, as Lieberman states, in Bellmer's graphic photographs of female genitals, but in several late drawings and prints that depict the artist himself having sex with two children.