Hans Bellmer

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

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

Bataille’s first novel, published under the pseudonym ‘Lord Auch’, is still his most notorious work. In this explicit pornographic fantasy, the young male narrator and his lovers Simone and Marcelle embark on a sexual quest involving sadism, torture, orgies, madness and defilement, culminating in a final act of transgression. Shocking and sacreligious, Story of the Eye is the fullest expression of Bataille’s obsession with the closeness of sex, violence and death. Yet it is also hallucinogenic in its power, and is one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.