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When the pioneering Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori considered the future of his field in 1970, he anticipated a phenomenon that he found troubling. As automata became more lifelike, more closely resembling humans, Mori predicted that they’d enter an “uncanny valley,” a realm where they were disarmingly bizarre. Mori’s prediction has come to pass in technologies ranging from Disney animatronics to metaverse avatars. However, the great German artist Hans Bellmer anticipated Mori by nearly half a century, deliberately using the uncanny for artistic effect.

Bellmer’s celebrated Poupée series …