HANS BELLMER, ANDY WARHOL, ALLEN JONES et al. — Die Puppe: Aspekte zum Bild der Frau, Haus am Waldsee / Schloss Morsbroich / Frankfurter Kunstverein, 1971

Published for the travelling 1971 exhibition Die Puppe: Aspekte zum Bild der Frau (The Doll: Aspects of the Image of Woman), moving from Haus am Waldsee in Berlin to Schloss Morsbroich and the Frankfurter Kunstverein, this compact catalogue gathers a remarkably heterogeneous field around one increasingly unstable subject: the manufactured image of woman.

The exhibition brought together Werner Berges, Saskia de Boer, KP Brehmer, Bob Graham, Richard Hamilton, Paul van Hoeydonck, Allen Jones, Harro Jacob, Dieter Lötsch, Male, Siegfried Neuenhausen, Mel Ramos, Bernard Schultze, URSULA (Ursula Schultze-Bluhm), Andy Warhol, Günter Weseler and Tom Wesselmann, while the catalogue also invokes Hans Bellmer, whose disarticulated dolls of the 1930s provide an unavoidable historical prehistory to its subject.

That breadth is precisely what makes Die Puppe interesting. This isn’t a tidy Pop exhibition. Bellmer’s psychologically charged doll collides with Hamilton and Warhol’s world of reproduced images; Jones, Ramos and Wesselmann push the eroticised female body toward commodity and sign; Berges and Brehmer expose the mechanics of mass-media reproduction; while artists including URSULA, Bernard Schultze, Neuenhausen and Weseler pull the subject elsewhere into object, fantasy, assemblage and physical form.

One spread makes the entire proposition unusually visible. Werner Berges’s Three Beauties (1969) sits opposite the commercial advertisement from which its figures were derived, followed through successive reductions into cut-out silhouettes and sculptural objects.

Woman → advertisement → image → outline → object.

And 1971 matters. The exhibition appeared precisely as the politics surrounding who produced images of women, for whom and under whose gaze were becoming impossible to keep outside the museum. Die Puppe does not arrive as a resolved feminist critique; its contradictions are more historically useful than that. A predominantly male field examines femininity as an image just as that image itself is becoming contested territory.

Seen fifty-five years later, the catalogue therefore reads almost like a document caught between two histories: the Surrealist woman as projection and the coming feminist critique of representation.

The physical object carries that tension beautifully. Its off-white cover reduces a woman’s face to a circular photographic fragment above two enormous abstracted bodily forms, interrupted only by painted lips. Inside, artworks appear beside advertising photographs and source imagery, allowing artwork and visual culture to contaminate one another.

A modest exhibition catalogue from a moment when the question was quietly changing from how to depict a woman to who constructs the image of woman in the first place.

19 × 20 cm. 64 unnumbered pages; 32 black-and-white illustrations. Original paper-covered boards with black cloth spine.

Condition: Good vintage condition. General age toning and surface marking to the pale covers, with light handling, edge and corner wear; black cloth spine intact. Interior clean and well preserved overall. Wear consistent with more than fifty years of circulation.

Securely packed; tracked UK and international shipping available.