The Doll 1934

Hans Bellmer made this doll, we don't know exactly when, using wood and other mixed media, but it's a real object, that's for sure. I look at this piece and wonder what it must have been like to make. The labor! All that cutting, piecing, assembling... was it a struggle? You can almost feel the artist's hand in the rough textures and deliberately awkward construction. The doll feels haunted. The fragmented, disjointed form reminds me of Picasso and his Cubist experiments. The doll's body is reconfigured into strange angles, its limbs and torso abstracted into geometric shapes. Bellmer’s doll is so very unsettling. A conversation with our own bodies, perhaps? The ambiguity of the form allows for multiple interpretations and emotional responses; we bring ourselves to it, and it reflects us back.