Pierre Molinier (1900 - 1976)
Related: exhibitionism - erotic art - erotic photography - French surrealism - French art - transvestism
Influential to: Gilles Berquet
Pierre Molinier (1996) - Wayne Barewaldt, Pierre Molinier
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]Pierre Molinier's enigmatic photographs influenced European and North American body artists in the early 1970s and continue to engage artists, critics, and collectors today. Viewers are asked to reconsider, with broad implications, the notion of "deviation" in the sexual object and in the sexual aim (transvestism, voyeurism, exhibitionism). --amazon.com
Biography
Pierre Molinier (April 13, 1900 - March 3, 1976) was a painter, photographer and 'maker of objects'. He was born and lived his life in Bordeaux, France. He began his career by painting landscapes, but his work turned towards a fetishistic eroticism early on.
Molinier began to take photographs at the age of sixty. With the aid of a wide range of specially made 'props'--dolls, various prosthetic limbs, stiletto heels, dildoes and an occasional confidante – Pierre Molinier focused upon his own body as the armature for a constructive form that ultimately produced an extraordinary body of photographic work. Most of his photographs, photomontages, are self-portraits of himself as a woman.
He began a correspondence with André Breton and sent him photographs of his paintings. Later Breton integrated him into the Surrealist group. Breton organized an exposition of Molinier's paintings in Paris, in 1955.
Pierre Molinier's enigmatic photographs influenced European and North American body artists in the early 1970s and continue to engage artists, critics, and collectors today.
Pierre Molinier committed suicide in 1976, at 75 years of age. On his door he wrote in chalk the following words: "Je prends ma vie. La clef est avec le concierge". ("I'm taking my life. The key is with the concierge.") --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Molinier [Jan 2005]
your Amazon recommendations