Transfert Des Sens (from "Variation of a Doll's Game")

Hans Bellmer

Done in 1949 this Surrealist color lithograph was done in an edition of 75 plus 25 proofs. The "Doll's Game" theme was something that preoccupied Bellmer in the late 1940's and early 50s.

Bellmer gave up doll-making and spent the following decades creating erotic drawings, etchings, sexually explicit photographs, paintings, and prints of pubescent girls. In 1954, he met Unica Zürn, who became his companion until her suicide in 1970. He continued working into the 1960s.

Of his own work, Bellmer said, "What is at stake here is a totally new unity of form, meaning and feeling: language-images that cannot simply be thought up or written up … They constitute new, multifaceted objects, resembling polyplanes made of mirrors … As if the illogical was relaxation, as if laughter was permitted while thinking, as if error was a way and chance, a proof of eternity.”