The Doll (Maquette for The Doll's Games) 1938

Hans Bellmer created this unsettling sculpture, "The Doll," as a maquette for his photographic series "Doll's Games," amid the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany. Bellmer was in vehement opposition to the Nazi idealization of Aryan beauty. He constructed his life-size doll from wood, plaster, and papier-mâché, which he then photographed in various staged, surreal scenarios. The doll, with its fragmented and reconfigurable body, challenged conventional notions of the female form. Bellmer once wrote that the body is "comparable to a sentence that invites us to disassemble it, so that its real content becomes visible." The artist reconfigured the female body to reflect a fractured, fetishized image, inviting questions about desire, control, and the objectification of women. "The Doll" is an eerie reflection of the anxieties of its time, born from a personal and political rebellion against oppressive ideologies. It serves as a disturbing mirror, reflecting society’s complex and often troubling relationship with the female body.