Hans Bellmer : the anatomy of anxiety / Sue Taylor.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Taylor, Sue, 1949-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Bellmer, Hans, 1902-1975--Criticism and interpretation.

Bellmer, Hans.

Bellmer, Hans, 1902-1975.

Erotic art.

Fetishism in art.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

xxii, 310 pages, 4 pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press, [2000]

Summary:

The German-born surrealist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975), best known for his life-size pubescent dolls, devoted an artistic lifetime to creating sexualized images of the female body-distorted, dismembered, or menaced in sinister scenarios. In this book Sue Taylor draws on psycho-analytic theory to suggest why Bellmer was so driven by erotomania as well as a desire for revenge, suffering, and the safety of the womb. Although he styled himself as the quintessential Oedipal son, an avant-garde artist in perpetual rebellion against a despised father, Taylor contends that his filial attitude was more complex than he could consciously allow. Tracing a repressed homoerotic attachment to his father, castration anxiety, and an unconscious sense of guilt, Taylor proposes that a feminine identification informs all the disquieting aspects of Bellmer's art.

Most scholarship to date has focused on Bellmer's work of the 1930s, especially the infamous dolls and the photographs he made of them. Taylor extends her discussion to the sexually explicit prints, drawings, paintings, and photographs he produced throughout the ensuing three decades. The book includes a color frontispiece and 121 black-and-white images (eight published here for the first time), as well as appendixes containing several significant texts by Bellmer previously unavailable in English.

Contents:

Part I Fetishism and the First Doll

Chapter 1 The Self-Proclaimed Oedipal Son 18

Chapter 2 An Iconography of the Nursery 36

Chapter 3 Uncanny Automata 56

Part II Sadomasochism, Castration Anxiety, and the Ball-Jointed Doll

Chapter 4 Doll Games: Pleasure in Pain 70

Chapter 5 Pseudorationality and the Virtual Body 98

Chapter 6 Mechanical Metaphors in the Service of Symmetry 110

Part III Transgression, Pornography, Scoptophilia

Chapter 7 Bellmer Illustrates Bataille 132

Chapter 8 Loving and Loathing the Father 152

Chapter 9 The Resort to Perversion 168

B. Hans Bellmer, "The Father" 210

C. Hans Bellmer, "Notes on the Subject of the Ball Joint" 212

D. Hans Bellmer, "Striptease" 220.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [280]-292) and index.

ISBN:

0262201305

OCLC:

44133139