Hans Bellmer is a French painter from Germany. He created the famour surrealistic object: the Doll (1934). When he was young, he used to work in steelworks then in a coal mine. By encouraging people to revolutionize, he only just escaped prison. In 1923, he attends for courses at the Teschnische Hochschule in Berlin and meets pioneers of the Dadaist movement. Books illustrator, painter and photographer, he comes closer to the surrealists.
When Hitler took the power in 1933, the young artist decides to stop all work useful to the nation so as to create a life-size doll. Bellmer makes series of photographs where the doll appears. She strikes the pose, erotic situations, sadomasochistic and dramatic situations and quicly, this “little articulate girl” fascinates the surrealists. At the beginning, a sort of rebellion against the authority (political, paternalistic), the provocative doll becames the instrument of an original thought  about the body and becames the reference for the contemporary erotic expression.
In 1938, he takes refuge in France and succeeds in escaping a camp. In 1943, Hans Bellmer makes his first personal exhibition. His work is violent and subersive: sculpturs of dolls composed by naked dummy bodies, photographs, etchings which fascinate again the Surrealists. His drawings show the secret urges and ambivalencies of the erotic body. 
In Bellmer works, the female reigns: dolls, little girls, teenagers, sex objects.
In 2006, Centre Pompidou in Paris made a retrospective of the artist’s work, around the anatomy of desire, a major concept in the singular work of the french artist.