Notes:

1. Putman’s choice of wooden boxes and drawers as repositories for these related Bellmer materials recall relevant passages from Freud’s dream analyses about their hidden meanings: “Boxes, cases, chests…represent the uterus, and also hollow objects, ships, and vessels of all kinds;” and “Wood seems, from its linguistic connections, to stand in general for female ‘material.’” Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams. Trans and ed. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1965), 389, 391.

2. Therese Lichtenstein, Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer (University of California Press/International Center of Photography, 2000), 19.

3. Lichtenstein, 5, citing a letter from Bellmer to Jean Brun, April 3, 1936.

4. It is important to note that the fantasies included identification with the feminine. One of the primary arguments against Bellmer’s misogyny can be found in his 1936 essay “Le Père,” where he describes he and his brother cowering against his Nazi-sympathizer father: “In fact, we were probably… more like little girls than the formidable boys we would have preferred to be. Yet, it seemed to be more fitting than anything else to lure the brute out of his place in order to confuse him.” Translation in Lichtenstein, 177.

5. Bellmer’s work was not exhibited publicly in Germany during the years of Nazi rule.

6. Interview with Erwan Le Bourdonnec, Putman design project manager, November 19, 2001.

7. Including Dictionnaire abrégé du surréalisme, 1938, in which Bellmer had an entry on La Poupée, a book about the “Street of Mannequins,” in the 1938 Surrealist Exhibition, and collaborations between Bellmer and surrealist poets like Eluard and Georges Hugnet.

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