Hans Bellmer (Kattowitz 1902 - Paris 1975) was a German artist who moved to Paris in the late 1930s where he was embraced by the surrealist group. He is best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s and for the photographs he took of them.

Bellmer's first book Die Puppe (The Doll), printed anonymously in 1934, featured photographs of his first doll arranged in a series of living pictures. Bellmer's work was declared "degenerate" by the Nazi Party, forcing him to flee to France, where is work became admired and gathered attention from the likes of André Breton's inner circle. 

Hans Bellmer’s first doll was an articulated construction of wood, plaster, metal rods, nuts and bolts which represented a young girl. A disquieting sculpture, it embodied a number of qualities of the surrealist object: subversive and erotic, sadistic and fetishistic.