Hans Bellmer’s 1936 Surrealist sculpture series of articulated dolls is titled The Doll.
Bellmer began constructing dolls in Berlin during the early 1930s and photographed them in deliberately staged, unsettling arrangements. The figures could be disassembled and reconfigured, allowing him to disrupt conventional ideas of the human body, identity and childhood innocence.
The Doll was published and exhibited through photographs as well as physical constructions. Bellmer’s images became associated with Surrealist eroticism and with the movement’s interest in desire, chance and transformation. Their disturbing quality has also led to continuing discussion about objectification and the representation of the body.
The title is sometimes rendered in French as La Poupée. Bellmer is not the creator of The Bride, a 1938 work by Marcel Duchamp, and his dolls should not be confused with Méret Oppenheim’s Object, a fur-covered tea service made in 1936. Those works belong to the same broad movement but use very different materials and ideas.