A study of Hans Bellmer's eroticized images and the psychological origins of his disturbing art.

Until now there has been little available in English about Bellmer's dolls, and Lichtenstein's book will be welcomed for its fresh interpretations of the artist's work and his place in European modernism. Eighty striking photographs accompany the text."--BOOK JACKET.

The only complete illustrated biography of Hans Bellmer, with a detailed analysis of his oeuvre. Featuring many of Bellmers surreal/erotic drawings, paintings and sculptures as well as his classic series of Doll photographs, it is also the complete story of Bellmers remarkable life, from Nazi Germany to the inner circle of the Paris Surrealists, a fascinating story encompassing the history of both surreal and erotic art and literature. De Sade, Bataille, Jean de Berg and Andr Pieyre de Mandiargues are just some of the authors whose work Bellmer illuminated with his perverse and complex ilustrations. And with his legendary Doll, Bellmer established one of the most disturbing creations in modern art; his text, The Anatomy of the Image, remains crucial to understanding the reciprocity betwen body and imagination. completely updated and revised edition of the standard work on Bellmer. Solar Art Directives 2. originally published by Quartet, 1985, as Hans Bellmer

Long an underground classic, The Doll at Play, created by German artist Hans Bellmer and French poet Paul Eluard, is one of the strangest of texts in modern art. Presenting Bellmer's photography of "the doll, " this book combines the doll photos with text by Eluard that creates a strange tension between the contorted human images of Bellmer and the illusive poetry of Eluard. "Puffing out her cheeks, greedily swallowing a flower, fragrant inner skin, inevitably pink mouth, even on the pediment of the pitch black forest."

In the 1930s, Georges Bataille proclaimed a ferociously religioussensibility characterized by simultaneous ecstasy and horror. Ecce Monstrum investigates this religious sensibility by examining Bataille's insistent linking of monstrosity and the sacred.Bataille enacts a monstrousmode of reading and writing in his approaches to other thinkers and artists-a mode at once agonistic and intimate. Ecce Monstrum examines this mode through investigations of Bataille's sacrificialinterpretations of Kojve's Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche; his contentious relationship with Simone Weil and its implications for his mystical and writing practices; his fraught affiliation with surrealist Andr Breton and his attempt to displace surrealism with hyperchristianity; and his peculiar relations to artist Hans Bellmer, whose work evokes Bataille's religious sensibility

Surrealism was ostensibly directed at the emancipation of the human spirit, but it represented only male aspirations and fantasies until a number of women artists began to redefine its agenda in the later 1930s. This book addresses the former, using a 'thick description' of the historically specific circumstances which required the male Surrealists to manufacture a sexual reputation of narcissism and misogyny. These circumstances were determined by 'hegemonic masculinity', an ideological construct which had little to do with individual masculinities. In male Surrealism, the 'beribboned bomb' signified something both attractive and volatile, a specific instance of the Surrealist principle of convulsive beauty. In hegemonic masculinity, similar devices served as metaphors of the sexuality all men were supposed to possess. The intersection of these two axes produced an imagery of unrepentant violence.