Pierre Molinier

Pierre Molinier est un Peintre et Photographe. Né le vendredi 13 avril 1900 Agen, mort en 1976 à Bordeaux.

Pierre Molinier étudie dans une institution religieuse mais déjà se passionne pour le dessin et la peinture.

Ses premiers paysages sont ceux des vallées du Lot-et-Garonne.

En 1919 il s'établit à Bordeaux comme artisan peintre, à l'instar de son père.
Après son service militaire, il découvre «les œuvres des maîtres» dans les musées parisiens mais préfère reprendre ses «expériences sur nature».
Membre fondateur... en 1928 de la Société des Artistes Indépendants Bordelais, il défend un art «sans contrainte ni restriction». Dés lors il expose à Bordeaux de nombreux paysages de l'Agenais et du Bordelais, des compositions florales et des portraits à la touche large et expressive (« L'homme au shako, Angélica, L'enfant au berceau »).

En 1936, à la suite de la visite d'émissaires du Dalaï-Lama, sa peinture s'oriente vers l'ésotérisme puis vers la peinture «magique».

En 1950 il érige sa «tombe prématurée» et se photographie en gisant, manifestant ainsi sa mort «à toutes les conventions possibles et imaginables [...]».
Après le scandale, en 1951, à Bordeaux, de la présentation de son premier tableau érotique, « Le Grand Combat », Molinier se lie d'amitié avec André Breton: «Soyez sûr, cher Pierre Molinier, que vous n'avez dans le Surréalisme que des amis»lui écrit-il le 8 juin 1955.

En 1956, il expose à Paris, à «L'Etoile Scellée», dix-huit peintures dont « Comtesse Midralgar ». Le catalogue est préfacé par Breton.
Il participe aux manifestations du groupe surréaliste et en 1960 fait ses premiers essais photographiques de photomontages dans lesquels il réunit, à partir de photographies d'éléments travestis et découpés de son propre corps, les genres masculin et féminin.

En 1962 Raymond Borde lui consacre un film, projeté à Bordeaux en 1964, puis en public en 1966. Molinier réalise en 1965 la peinture blasphématoire, « Oh !...Marie, Mère de Dieu ».
Dans les années 1966-1967, Molinier prépare un ouvrage sur ses peintures (publié chez Pauvert en 1969) et le recueil de montages photographiques « Le Chaman et ses Créatures » dans lequel apparaissent les visages de deux de ses inspiratrices Emmanuelle Arsan et Hanel Koeck, «Déesse de l'érotisme». Travaille à la série « L'œuvre, le peintre et son fétiche ».

Vers 1968, il créé « La grande mêlée », apothéose de ses photomontages destinés au « Chaman et ses Créatures » dont la réalisation lui prendra pas moins de 5 ans (l'ouvrage ne sera en fait publié qu'en 1995, à Bordeaux, par William Blake & Co.Edit.).

En 1972 Pierre Chaveau réalise un entretien avec Molinier dans la chambre-atelier de la rue des Faussets.
Les dernières rencontres importantes seront, en 1975, celles de Thierry Agullo et Luciano Castelli avec lesquels il réalise des séries de photographies puis Peter Gorsen, avec qui il correspond depuis la fin des années 1960, compagnon de Hanel et auteur d'un texte publié en 1972: « Pierre Molinier luimême ».

Le 3 mars 1976, Pierre Molinier se donne la mort d'un coup de pistolet.



English

The artist Pierre Molinier was born in 1900 in Agen, France, on a Friday the 13th of April. Since childhood he painted and photographed himself and his family (his father was a painter/ decorator of "faux-bois" and "faux-marble", and his mother was a seamstress). He started sexual matters quite early, claiming to have been interested in ladies' legs from the age of 3, caressed those of his sister at the age of 10, made love for the first time at the age of 13 with a prostitute who kept him for a long time as her lover, and violated the corpse of his sister at the age of 15 after having photographed her on her deathbed (" ... even dead she was beautiful ! I ejaculated on her stomach and legs, and on the First Communion dress she was wearing. She took with her the best of me!") At 18, Molinier began attending regional dance-balls dressed as a woman, and fathered a daughter, Monique, whom he found 20 years later in Bordeaux and took as his mistress!

In 1922-23, after his military service, Molinier moved to Bordeaux, where he started a house-painting company. He painted landscapes and portraits in an impressionist style, of a high but conventional quality. He married and had two children, Françoise and Jacques. He kept many mistresses whom he would invite home, despite his wife being one of the most attractive women of Bordeaux and very jealous. He claims to have also fallen in love with his daughter, Françoise, which futher heightened the domestic tension.

In 1936, he received an unexpected visit by a delegation of Tibetan monks, sent by the Dalai Lama, who commissioned several paintings to decorate a Buddhist temple of unknown location.

The post-war period of 1946-1951 was characterized by Molinier's total rejection of conventional life through his behaviour and work. During these years he wrote "Les Orphéons Magiques" (which André Breton accepted as surrealist). He left his wife and broke all ties with his painter friends in Bordeaux (with whom he had founded a Salon in 1925).
In 1946 he painted "Amour", a canvas which he never sell but offered in 1965 to Jean Pierre Bouyxou; in 1948 "Les Amants à la Fleur" (they are dressed and standing); in 1949 "Les Amants à la Campagne" (they are reclining and she is nude); in 1950 "Succube" (a mixture of legs, faces and asses) which was included in the 1997 exhibition "L'Amour et le Surréalisme" at the Balcon des Arts, Les Halles, in Paris. In 1951 he painted "Le Grand Combat" which he described as representing multiple acts of intercourse. This resulted in a scandal and Molinier's protest, during which he accused his exfriends of being "Sunday painters, all gas-pumps and red-lights!" At this time he also began to fictionalize his own death.

From 1951 to 1966, in the privacy of his studio, Molinier produced his transvestite photographe, concentrating on his leg fetish. These photos were seen only by a handful of people who visited him. He later cut pieces from these photos from which he created his "erotic inventions", his photomontages.

He continued to paint, and in 1955 sent a file of his writings and reproductions of his paintings to André Breton, who reacted enthusiastically and promised Molinier a show at the "L'Etoile Scéllée" gallery in Paris in 1956. A small catalog was prepared for the show. During this period, Molinier met Hans Bellmer, Man Ray, Max Ernst among others. Molinier introduced Breton to Joyce Mansour, a very rich and very talented Egyptian poet. His photomontages appeared in various surrealist publications, further spreading his fame. Raymonde Borde filmed him, and in 1965 Molinier filmed a ten-minute autoportrait called "Jambes". Ten years of close friendship with Breton (who described Molinier's painting as "magical"), ended abruptly when Molinier presented his blasphemous painting "O Marie, Mère de Dieu". From this period dates Molinier's infamous visiting card, which shows him in auto-fellation, an act which Molinier claimed took him "two years to achieve, aided by a metal construction used by yogis ... I spent 18 days without eating anything other than my sperm."

Beginning in 1966 or a little earlier, he began to receive numerous guests, usually young men and women 20-25 years old, who he photographed in drag and/or erotic rituals. The last of these portraits were of the Bordeaux artist Thierry Agullo, who was closest to Molinier toward the end of his life. Other well-known friends included Emmanuelle Arsan, author of erotic literature, Regine Deforges, and Hanel Koech, a young German woman with close ties to the Vienna Action Group. Koech's husband, Peter Gorsen, published the first book of Molinier's photographe in 1972.

During this period he worked further on his photomontages and searched for an editor for his great work "Le Chaman", a book for which he made three successive layouts of his most superb and retouched prints. The book was scheduled to be published by Pauvert in 1969 but was cancelled due to pressure by Madame de Gaulle. It was finally published in 1995, nearly twenty years after Molinier's death, respecting the artist's layout.

Molinier planned his death. After two gall bladder operations in 1970 and 1974 (which could explain his difficult character towards the end of his life), and the accidental death in 1975, of his son, Jacques, Molinier committed suicide. On March 3, 1976, he shot himself in the mouth after his doctors said he would require an operation for prostate cancer that would include removal of the anus. He said "the day that my sperm becomes water, I'll kill myself". He had choreographed his suicide at least three times since 1950, saying later that these were announcemnts of his departure from conventional life. Molinier left his body to science, hoping that "my balls are grafted onto an impotent, 30-year old male". But this wasn't done.

voir aussi :
http://www.enseigne-des-oudin.com/artistes/molinier.htm
http://www.lattuadastudio.it/Artisti/Molinier/molinier2.ht