La Poupée (1936) by Hans Bellmer. Black morocco leather binding by Louis Christy frames reliquary display cases made by Georges Hugnet on the front and back cover, each containing metal and jade garters attached to black silk stockings extending from a white lace-trimmed bloomer.
Lotte Pritzel with one of her many dolls in 1923. Rejecting Oskar Kokoschka’s commission for a replication of his lost lover in the form of an articulated doll, the dollmaker later became friends with Hans Bellmer, whose own fascination with dolls had roots in projected psychosexual obsessions, pedophilia, castration anxiety, and objectification of the female form as beckoning its own ruin.
stigmatic blood writing - the process whereby blood from the stigmata or bloody sweat is miraculously formed into writing, images, and symbols upon hankerchiefs, bandages etc.
Léonor Fini - Illustration from Histoire d’O, 1963
18th century faux beauty mark stickers
Echoes of Silence (1965)
19th century mother of pearl hand-carved with the crucifixion
Unknown / Anaïs Nin - House of Incest (1936) / Maya Deren - At Land (1944) / Anne Sexton - Water (1962) / Milena Gierke - Wasserspiel I (1997) / Marina Tsvetaeva - Nocturnal Places (1923)
when clearly intended to be having pleasure … she was in fact … having none … not the slightest … in which case of course … that notion of punishment … for some sin or other … or for the lot … or no particular reason … for its own sake … thing she understood perfectly … that notion of punishment … which had first occurred to her … brought up as she had been to believe … with other waifs … in a merciful … (brief laugh) … God … […] very foolish really but so like her … in a way … that she might do well to … groan … on and off … writhe she could not … as if in actual … agony … but could not … could not bring herself … some flaw in her make-up … incapable of deceit … or the machine … more likely the machine … so disconnected … never got the message … or powerless to respond …
