(b Kattowicz, Germany [now Katowice, Poland], 13 Mar. 1902; d Paris, 24 Feb. 1975). Polish-French graphic artist, painter, sculptor, photographer, and writer, all of whose work is explicitly erotic. In 1933 he constructed an articulated plaster figure of a young girl, inspired partly by an infatuation with his 15-year-old cousin Ursula. He photographed his creation in various poses and states of dismemberment (sometimes partly clothed) and published a collection of the photographs as Die Puppe (‘The Doll’) in Karlsruhe in 1934; a French edition, La Poupée, was published in Paris in 1936. Bellmer sent samples of the photographs to André Breton in Paris, and the Surrealists were highly excited by these striking images of ‘vice and enchantment’.