This biography from the Archives of AskART:
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 Hans Bellmer (1902-1975)
He was born in Kattowitz, now Katowice, Poland, in 1902. After finishing the examinations qualifying for university admittance, he nevertheless worked in a steel factory and a coal mine. In 1922/23 he exhibited some artwork in Poland.
He went on to study engineering at Berlin Polytechnic, where he met John Heartfield, Rudolf Schlichter and George Grosz. In 1924, Bellmer dropped out of engineering, worked as a book printer and then as an illustrator for Malik Verlag. He also took his first trip to Paris.
After his marriage in 1927, Hans Bellmer worked as a commercial artist, attended lectures at the Bauhaus in the early 1930s and traveled to Italy and Tunisia. In 1933, he refused to continue working as a sign of resistance to Fascism. To show his repudiation of Fascism and the aesthetic it propagated, Hans Bellmer began to construct girlish three-dimensional dolls, which he photographed in erotic poses. Some of these works were published by Bellmer at his own expense in 1934, others appeared in the Surrealist journal Le Minotaure, ensuring Bellmer's ranking among Paris Surrealists.
In 1938 Hans Bellmer emigrated to Paris and was interned with Max Ernst at the outbreak of the second world war in the "Les Mille" camp near Aix-en-Provence. On being discharged from the camp, Bellmer renounced his German nationality in 1941 and fled to Castres, where he married his second wife that same year.
During the war years Hans Bellmer did drawings, developing a distinctive figurative style. In 1943, he had his first one-man show at the "Librairie Trentin", a bookshop in Toulouse. It was followed by numerous international Surrealist group shows.
In the post-war era Bellmer created erotic drawings, etchings, sexually explicit photographs, paintings, and prints of pubescent girls in the precision of the Old Masters.
"Hans Bellmer died in February 1975, leaving an œuvre of objects, photography, drawings, some prints and oil paintings, in which the representation of obscenity expresses a rebellion against society, conventional rationality and the Zeitgeist of the times in which the artist lived." (hans-bellmer.com)
Sources include:
www.hans-bellmer.com/
wikipedia.org
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