One of the leading players among the Surrealists, it was Bellmer who in 1934 created perhaps the archetypal artefact of that movement, Doll. A hybrid, polymorphic body, resisting easy definitions of “found object” or “sculpture”, it was presented as an ever-ready instrument of desire, an echoing the fantasy of an enslaved Sadeian body. Beyond even the spirit of revolt against the Nazi order which guided its creator, it is first and foremost a melancholic and strange creature, mingling themes of death and desire, cruelty and the supernatural, the everyday and the unlikely.

From 1935 onwards, Bellmer often attended the Surrealist meetings that took place in the Place Blanche in Paris, and several of his drawings were published by André Breton in Le Minotaure and Christian Zervos in the Cahiers d'art. So, when the situation in Germany caused Bellmer to leave Berlin for good in 1938, he emigrated to France, where he was welcomed by the Surrealists with open arms.

The following year was spent in Camp de Milles, a former brick factory in Aix-en-Provence, where he was briefly incarcerated along with various other German national resident in France during the war – including Max Ernst. They shared a bedroom/studio and collaborated on collages and decalcomanias. In his autobiography (written in the third person), Ernst tells how “We all seemed destined to become mere brick dust. Hans Bellmer and Max drew all the time, just to deceive their own hunger and anger. This is where Bellmer made a portrait of Max, whose face is like a brick wall.”