David Rimanelli introduces a portfolio of paintings by Pierre Molinier
In portray I used to be in a position to fulfill my leg and nipple fetishism.
—P. Molinier
I WAS SHOWING A FRIEND some photos by cross-dressing painter-photographer Pierre Molinier, and we had been arrested by one of many artist en travesti, posing beside certainly one of his work, sporting a maniacal grin of the kind one involves anticipate in his pictures—a smile that’s wealthy, stunning, luxurious, fascinating, insane, “Joan Crawford stars in Possessed!” The inside is drab, dreary, “comfy,” in that asphyxiating method we’re acquainted with from Zola’s Thérèse Raquin. Molinier is a personality principally of the postwar interval, and his work from the Sixties and ’70s percolates with sick genius, with energized wit. But, trawling for references, I need to evaluate his deportment to the Paris of the Second Empire within the poetry of Baudelaire. The Walter Benjamin quotes really feel like they’re simply there. “One thing completely different is disclosed within the drunkenness of ardour: the panorama of the physique,” writes Benjamin in his Passagenwerk. “These landscapes are traversed by paths which lead sexuality into the world of the inorganic. Vogue itself is simply one other medium attractive it nonetheless extra deeply into the universe of matter.”
In most pictures, Molinier wears what’s just about a uniform: Black stockings encase legs I can’t assist feeling are too skinny for a person; there are corsets, gauntlets, spike-heeled pumps, garters, perhaps a pleasant lace brassiere. Fetish put on. It’s vaguely humorous, as sexual costumes so usually are (c.f. Peter Berlin, Girl Gaga). As ever, Molinier’s actually sinister frozen smile beams sans cesse. It could possibly be a plastic attachment it’s so regular, everlasting.
Born in Agen, France, in 1900 and a lifelong resident of Bordeaux, Molinier in 1931 married Andrea Lafaye. Already, nevertheless, he had acquired some notoriety as a sexual nonconformist. He was an notorious transvestite, however was he considerably or primarily gay? It’s exhausting to say. André Breton favored him. “Be assured, pricey Pierre Molinier, that the Surrealists are very a lot your folks,” he wrote. Breton organized the only exhibition of Molinier’s work within the artist’s lifetime, held on the Paris gallery À l’Étoile Scellée in 1955; he additionally invited the artist to contribute to the journal Le surréalisme, même. However Breton was a prude, actually, and the core Surrealist group fairly stridently homophobic. By 1959, the Pope of Surrealism had had it with Molinier’s dildo bisexual transvestite filth, and specifically recoiled, it’s mentioned, from the artist’s varied lewd advances. Surrealism was such a bourgeois affair.
Molinier was a housepainter by commerce, however early on he grew to become possessed by the spirit of the avant-garde and the Faculty of Paris, passing by Impressionist, Symbolist, and Cubist modes in a way glancingly much like the younger Picabia. The Symbolist section caught, and the work that had been proven at L’Étoile Scellée, in addition to those who seem within the following pages—most of them disappeared into non-public collections; a number of had been reproduced in a 1979 French exhibition catalogue—suspire the perfumed and humid air acquainted from the work of Gustave Moreau and Jean Delville. Sure different off-the-most-beaten-track Surrealist painters additionally come to thoughts—Remedios Varo and Léonor Fini—and clearly Hans Bellmer’s drawings and images. One of many works right here, unfinished, portrays a gilt seraphim whose bee-stung lips evoke the artist’s rictus. It has by no means earlier than been proven; this portfolio is its debutante ball.
In 1950, Molinier, within the spirit of Surrealist effrontery and I’m-going-to-kill-myself-I-swear teasing, created a mock tombstone with this epitaph:
Right here lies
Pierre MOLINIER
born on 13 April 1900 died round 1950
he was a person with out morals
he was pleased with it and gloried in it
No want to wish for him.
Twenty-six years later, he shot himself with a Colt handgun, killing himself in the dead of night condo he’d lived in for fifty-odd years. Isn’t parody eo ipso merciless? Even so, Molinier’s works are loving. When guys (particularly homosexuals) costume up in ladies’s garments, they like it but it surely’s a mockery. Or so I’ve been informed.
David Rimanelli is a contributing editor of Artforum.
