HANS BELLMER — The Anatomy of Anxiety, Sue Taylor, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2002

The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts / London, 2002. Text by Sue Taylor. Softcover, 310 pages, 17.5 × 22.5 cm. Colour reproduction to front wrapper; extensively illustrated in black and white.

Before the editable digital body came the adjustable analogue one.

Sue Taylor’s Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety begins with the dolls that made Bellmer notorious and then refuses to leave them safely inside Surrealism. Bellmer’s female bodies are doubled, dismembered, rotated and reconstructed. Limbs become interchangeable. Anatomy stops behaving as biological fact and becomes material for projection.

Taylor asks what kind of psychic machinery might produce such a body. Her reading moves through Bellmer’s erotomania, fantasies of revenge and suffering, castration anxiety, guilt, paternal attachment and the desire for return to the safety of the womb, while bringing a feminist analysis to work whose fascination has always existed uncomfortably beside its violence. The book extends beyond the celebrated dolls and 1930s photographs into Bellmer’s sexually explicit drawings, prints, paintings and later photographic work, accompanied by texts by Bellmer previously unavailable in English.

The result is less a conventional monograph than a prolonged interrogation. Bellmer had constructed distorted bodies partly against the increasingly regulated ideals of the Germany in which the dolls first appeared. Yet resistance does not absolve the image. A body escaping one system of control can still become subject to another: the artist’s desire.

What happens when transgression reproduces domination? When fascination and revulsion occupy the same image? When understanding the fantasy does not make the fantasy innocent? These questions have travelled remarkably well. Avatars, filters, cosmetic alteration, pornography, synthetic bodies and AI-generated people have made bodily recombination ordinary visual experience. Bellmer did not predict that world. He simply constructed one of its more uncomfortable ancestors.

The body is opened. The image is opened. The viewer is not entirely left outside the examination.

Condition: good. Visible handling and shelf wear, light rubbing and age toning to wrappers, edge wear and corner creasing particularly to upper front corner; internally sound.