Hans Bellmer — Die Puppe. Die Spiele der Puppe, Frankfurt, 1976

German language.

This 1976 Ullstein edition gathers three of Bellmer's key texts and image sequences: Die Puppe, Die Spiele der Puppe, and Die Anatomie des Bildes. Issued a year after Bellmer's death, it functions less as a conventional monograph than as a compact repository of the artist's central project. Photographs, diagrams, drawings, and writings circulate together, allowing the doll to appear simultaneously as sculpture, image, text, and psychological apparatus.

Hans Bellmer occupies a singular position within twentieth-century art. Produced in opposition to the authoritarian idealization of the body promoted by National Socialism, his doll constructions of the 1930s fragmented and reassembled anatomy into unstable psychological forms. Adopted by the Surrealists after his move to Paris, Bellmer's photographs became some of the most influential and controversial images of the movement, shaping later generations of artists concerned with desire, identity, fetishism, performance, and the constructed body.

Within a contemporary context, the book reads as an early document of body manipulation before digital technologies. Bellmer's assembled figures anticipate later concerns found in artists as varied as Cindy Sherman, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, and Charles Ray, where the body becomes image, prop, surrogate, and constructed fiction.

Copies remain obtainable but are increasingly encountered within specialist Surrealism, photography, and avant-garde libraries rather than general circulation. The edition is particularly desirable because it consolidates several foundational Bellmer publications into a single portable volume.

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