Hans Bellmer, a Surrealist who—although under appreciated during his lifetime—continues to be highly influential to artists today, created an emotional, intellectual and erotically charged body of work. Bellmer is best known for a series of photographs of two life-sized adolescent female dolls, which he constructed and photographed between 1934 and 1938. The lighting and staging—with their nods to German expressionist cinema, Renaissance religious painting and illumination, and explicit fetishism—allowed Bellmer to establish a sexually-laden atmosphere and to realize a personal language of desire. The artist intended, in his own words, to “make it possible to recreate physically the dizzying heights of passion and to do so to the extent of creating new desires.”