Exhibition Design as Installation Piece

by Vanessa Rocco

Fig 1: The opening of the exhibition. On the left are the tall vitrines with boxes, valises, and drawers containing erotica. On the right is a photographic enlargement of the interior of Bellmer's studio, ca. 1935-36. The flesh-colored paint of the first section can be seen beyond the mural.

Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer
International Center of Photography
March 29 – June 10, 2001
Exhibition Design as Installation Piece

The first North American retrospective of the German artist Hans Bellmer (1902-1975) in the lower galleries of the International Center of Photography was a press favorite. The New York Times, Village Voice, Time Out, and New York Magazine all carried extensive reviews, some publishing more than one article. The critics were clearly ready for a treatment of this artist, best known for his construction and serial photographs of two life-sized dolls in various guises and poses taken between 1933-38. Surprisingly, despite all the attention, none of the major reviews considered the role of exhibition design in this “site-specific” installation at ICP, the only venue, other than to note that it was the work of famed French designer Andrée Putman. The assertiveness of her design warrants a deeper discussion of its how its elements related to the displayed work.

Curator Therese Lichtenstein’s thesis was more focused than one typically finds in a show designated as a retrospective. She was attempting to expand the often limited understanding of Bellmer as an artist whose work’s meaning is tied strictly to his private desires and borderline misogyny, and whose discovery by André Breton in 1934 allowed him to be accepted into the art historical canon as a Surrealist. In contrast, Lichtenstein located Bellmer’s oeuvre within a cross-section of German political and cultural influences in a way that allowed for social as well as biographical interpretations of the work. Lichtenstein worked closely with Putman on the concept of the exhibition and the presentation of the material was an integral component to expanding the context within which Bellmer’s work is interpreted.

The first section of Behind Closed Doors was entitled “Dolls, Mannequins, Robots.” The emphasis was on Bellmer’s early career as a painter, typographer, and illustrator in Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s, where he came under the influence of major Dada and New Objectivity artists, such as George Grosz, Otto Dix, and Rudolf Schlichter. These artists were responding to rapid cultural changes in Germany during the interwar period, including intense industrialization, the increased presence of women in the public sphere, and severe economic fluctuations. There were also significant psychological developments in Bellmer’s life at this time, as he became sexually obsessed with his adolescent cousin Ursula who had moved next door. The progression of his fantasy life about her dovetailed with his viewing a 1932 production of Jacques Offenbach’s “The Tales of Hoffman.” In the first act, “The Sandman,” a girlish doll named Olympia comes to life before the loving eyes of the protagonist, Nathaniel.

A confluence of this early source material that led Bellmer to begin construction of his first doll in 1933 was presented in the opening section with the usual curatorial strategies of selection and juxtaposition: works by Dix and Schlichter depicting prostitutes; newspaper clippings about the Hoffman production; and German film stills documenting the popular but unsettling subjects of automatons and robots in the face of industrialization. Through various design elements there was also an attempt to show Bellmer’s private collecting habits and his fascination with German and French erotica. At the start of the exhibition, samples of contemporaneous erotic magazines, postcards, and books on masochism of the kind Bellmer amassed were displayed in tall vitrines, designed by Putman, which aggressively cut through the architecture of the galleries (illustration 1). The printed material was displayed spilling out of antique boxes, drawers, and cases. These usually “closed” objects served as metaphors for the private nature of the erotic images that preoccupied Bellmer and for the sexual nature of his future work using dolls through which he would act out his fantasies, social anxieties, and identity issues. 1 The boxes containing the erotica echoed (anticipated?) the object viewers would see as they moved into the next gallery: the Personal Museum, ca. 1938-70, is a display box Bellmer began to put together and add to after his mother sent him a box of his childhood toys in 1931. The toys were sent when his parents relocated to Berlin from Gleiwitz after Bellmer’s autocratic father suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, which proved to be another momentous event for Bellmer in the early 1930s.²

Fig 2: Section 1, "Dolls, Mannequins, Robots," with the Personal Museum, right,and Bellmer's photographs, left, flanking the wall text.

In every section and room of this exhibition, Bellmer’s photographs of both the first and second doll (completed in 1935) were prominently installed, even in the gallery concerning early “pre-doll” context. Lichtenstein and Putman wanted to be certain that the viewer would always have Bellmer’s main works in mind when considering the mediating influences. Bellmer produced at least thirty photographs of the first doll, and one hundred of the second doll, each time changing the pose, states of dress or undress, hair, accoutrements, and settings, which included domestic interiors and outdoor scenes. The paint color chosen for this first section was a sensual, fleshy peach. Combined with the dolls, the erotica, and the lighting softened by colored gels, it created the feeling of being in a boudoir, both lovely and somewhat forbidden (illustration 2). Throughout the exhibition, the lighting-- in combinations of pink, yellow, and orange-- picked up the colors of the hand-tinting that Bellmer often used on the doll photographs. The gentleness of the green and pink pastel tints seemed to mock the violent positions into which he would twist the dolls, and Putman, along with her lighting designer, Hervé Descottes, wanted to achieve a similar ambiguity in the installation.

Fig 3: From this viewpoint, the visitor is standing in Section 3, "Bellmer and Surrealism," looking into Section 2, "Bellmer in Nazi Germany." The florescent lights were built into the sides of the entry walls.

The second section, “Bellmer in Nazi Germany,” the crux of Lichtenstein’s thesis, was the most minimal in design of the three. In this room the content was allowed to speak more directly for itself. The paint was left a stark white, although the same lighting scheme was used, this time either illuminating the works from below, or by installing lighting directly into the walls of the main entrance of the gallery (illustration 3), which maintained the sense of being in an alternate realm. Here, the viewer initially confronted numerous images of the first papier-mâché doll in poses varying from prostrate and vulnerable, to coy, with over-the-shoulder glances. Two vitrines, shorter and less dominating than the aforementioned erotica-filled cases, contained the kind of Nazi propaganda to which Bellmer would have been constantly subjected after Hitler took power in 1933. This propaganda included a 1935 edition of the journal Das Deutsche Lichtbild (German Photography), with photographs of healthy, tanned, Aryan youths, catalogues from the Great German Art Exhibitions of 1936, 1937, and 1938, Nazi-sponsored shows of sanctioned artwork, often highlighting Hitler’s favorite sculptor of classical Greek rip-offs, Arno Brecker, and an original brochure from the 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition in Munich in which the Nazis tried to lay out a cohesive argument that any art relying on primitivism, expressionism, or pure abstraction was corrosive to a healthy society. This led Bellmer to declare that he would no longer make commercial work that contributed in any way to the economy of the fascist state and to retreat into the studio to create a body of work that stood in stark contrast to the Nazi program. His production was a self-proclaimed “remedy, the compensation for a certain impossibility of living.”³

Fig 4: In this photograph of Section 2, the house lights are on, so the full effect of the lighting design is absent. But one can see how the short vitrines containing the National Socialist ephemera were placed in relation to Bellmer's photographs on the walls, perpendicular to and in front of them.

Examples of how Bellmer’s reaction to this repressive environment leaked into his work were immediately accessible to the viewer through the photographs of the second doll that were placed on walls adjacent to the Nazi-era vitrines (illustration 4). The construction of this doll was more complex than the first in that the center ball joint Bellmer had fashioned with his brother Fritz could have numerous appendages attached to it. He often photographed the doll with multiple legs, and in one piece he hand-tinted angry red spots on the legs, making them look inflamed with disease, and thus providing a foil to the sculpted bodies sprinting through the Nazi magazine pages nearby. Directly behind the vitrines was a disturbing image of the doll propped against a tree in the woods, with the shadowy figure of a voyeur standing behind the tree. In a perfect blend of social and private, the figure functions as a stand-in for Bellmer and the fantasies he could act out on his dolls,⁴ but concomitantly for the watchful and repressive regime within which he created work that would be damned as degenerate if discovered.⁵

An element which allowed Putman to dramatically foreground her design in this section was the crown jewel of the installation, the actual second doll (La Poupée, dated 1932-45 due to elements of the first doll being incorporated into the second) which was lent by the Centre Georges Pompidou in France. The work was located in an intimate room just beyond the gallery with the Nazi printed material and placed on a platform made to look like a bed, with two blankets thrown over it on which the doll and her double pair of legs rested (illustration 5). Putman insisted that the blankets be the kind used for packing and shipping artwork, for two reasons: Bellmer used the same type of padded, stitched blankets as a backdrop for one of his strangest doll photographs, one with the ball joint and a leg, a bow and blond hair, but no head, and a long string with a detached eye (see illustration 37 in Lichtenstein); also, the colors one often finds in these blankets are, like the dolls themselves, a weird mix of sweet and ugly, like “piss yellow and sucked-lollipop pink.”⁶ The platform was shrouded behind a scrim, and the translucency of this material combined with theatrical lighting installed along the bottom of the floor indulged the spectators in voyeuristic pleasures, inviting them to peek into a forbidden zone in order to get to the core element of the exhibition. Putman used a similar setting (without the packing blankets) to display La Poupée in the 1998 Guggenheim exhibition Guggenheim/Pompidou: A Rendezvous.

Fig 5: Plan your day to prevent fatigue. Lillian Gilbreth sits at a desk she designed to help homemakers plan their days, weeks, and months. [Photo: Gilbreth files, Purdue University Library]

After encountering the grandiosity of La Poupée, the viewer then moved into the third and final section, “Bellmer and Surrealism.” Aspects of this section reflected those of the first: pastel hues, this time in light green, and tall vitrines, although the second time around the disconcertingly “pretty” color and huge vitrines were not as jarring to the eye. The cases contained Surrealist books and journals that bore Bellmer’s influence⁷ spilling out of the boxes and drawers. Breton and Paul Eluard, the leading poets of the Surrealist movement, were introduced to Bellmer’s work by his adored cousin Ursula when she went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. She brought eighteen photographs of Bellmer’s first doll to Breton and Eluard, who so admired them that they were published the same year in Minotaure. The two poets understood that Bellmer’s project was an attempt to explore the same subversive, sexual realm that they tried to use in their work as an alternative to the dictates of bourgeois existence. Since Freud’s sexually-based readings of the subconscious became a powerful weapon for the Surrealists in this battle against the bourgeoisie, the boxes, drawers, and valises that contained the Surrealist journals carried as much metaphorical weight in this section as in the earlier section with the erotica. Bellmer finally left Germany in 1938 after his wife’s death, and came to Paris to join up with these kindred spirits. In the 1940s he began collaborating with the renegade Surrealist, Georges Bataille, on his book Story of the Eye. Original dry-point engravings of the illustrations for the book were installed in wall vitrines toward the end of the exhibition. Bellmer lived in France for the rest of his life, and the section on Surrealism thus appropriately functioned as the conclusion to the retrospective.

The most successful synthesis of design and content in Behind Closed Doors was achieved in the first section and in aspects of the second. The heart and soul of the exhibition’s thesis, namely that Bellmer’s art was socially engaged, was illuminated in the middle section on “Bellmer in Nazi Germany.” To that end, the contrast between the “diseased” doll and “healthy” Aryans, as well as the presentation of the doll, the object on which he worked out these ideas in the studio, were critical revelations. However, the opening section was crucial in establishing a more nuanced and variegated examination of what drove Bellmer first to create these dolls and then to photograph them over and over. Erotica, films, operas, childhood toys, social unease, adolescent crushes: these sources and sensibilities coalesced in the early 1930s as the artist began producing his unsettling and subversive oeuvre. The public met the private in this exhibition, within a framework of German cultural realities in the 1920s and 1930s. As an installation piece in and of itself, the first section was a stunning achievement. All the tools of design were mustered to engage the viewer with the contextual material: imaginative vitrine design and installation, lighting, color scheme, and juxtaposition of works with related ephemera.

Given the number of prizes (including the Grand Prix National de la Creation Industrielle from the French Minister of Culture in 1995) and commissions she has won, it is understandable that Putman’s name would be mentioned by reviewers. But Behind Closed Doors did, quite literally, recreate the history of Hans Bellmer, and the design actively interpreted that historical material. In the future, let’s hope exhibition design will be treated more vigorously by reviewers.

Behind Closed Doors: The Art of Hans Bellmer has been named Photography Exhibition of the Year by the International Association of Art Critics, and one of the Best of 2001 by Artforum.