Pierre Molinier
1900 - 1976
Pierre Molinier was a painter and photographer who began his career painting landscapes but turned his work towards a fetishistic eroticism.
When Pierre was a young man his obsessions began to take form, androgyny, wearing stockings and high heels and focussing on auto eroticism.
He was fond of wearing the stockings of his younger sister and mother and he became a practising transvestite at the age of 18. The same year his sister Julienne died.
He thought of his sister as the perfect embodiment of androgyny. During her wake he photographed her body and it is said he would have had sex with her corps.
From 1920 he studied as a painter, progressing in style through Realism and Impressionism to abstraction. By 1936 he was producing surreal Symbolist works in which he interwove Moreau-esque imagery with a fascination for the more savage aspects of ancient Egyptian and Indian religions, Satanism and the teachings of the Brotherhood, a secret masonic order which he had joined in the 1920s. It was in these paintings of cruel, multi-limbed women, reminiscent of the work of Hans Belmer, that the artist began his investigation of the sexual ambiguity which was to become his obsession.
After serving in the French army from 1921 to 1922, he settled in Bordeaux where he lived and worked for most of his life. He considered himself primarily a painter, making photographs for his own erotic pleasure, considering them ancillary to his artistic production. In his early years as an artist, he experimented with previously established styles such as post-impressionism and Symbolism.
Molinier started his erotic production around 1950 with a wide range of specially made props like dolls, various prosthetic limbs, stiletto heels and dildos. In 1955 Molinier made contact with the leading Surrealist Andre Breton and by 1959 was showing at the International Surrealist Exhibition. At this time he defined the purpose of his art as 'for my own stimulation', indicating his future direction in one of his exhibits in the 1965 Surrealist show - a dildo. It was also in this year that Molinier, with the aid of a remote control switch, began to create photographs in which he assumed the roles of dominatrix and succuba previously taken by the women of his paintings.
In these beautifully-made, intimate black and white photographs, Molinier, either alone with doll-like mannekins or with female models, appears as a transvestite, transformed by his 'fetish' wardrobe of fishnet stockings, suspender belt, stilettos, mask and corset. In montages, an unlikely number of stockinged limbs intertwine to create the women of Molinier's paintings. In other, more direct images, the artist presents himself alone, in dominant pose, with his hands on his hips or lying in submission across a chair, buttocks exposed to the camera.
Molinier intended his photographs to shock. He invites each viewer to bring to the images his or her own response, of excitement or disgust. What was essential was that everyone should be 'contaminated'. Only then would they be able to know themselves, to discover their true erotic sensibility and find real spiritual freedom. He was a transvestite Baudelaire who rather than words, chooses as his medium the corset, the mask and the chain. He asks the viewer to challenge received orthodoxies of art and morality and, like a jester, seeks to destroy taboos.
Molinier would often invite his male and female intimates to pose for use in his montages. His most beloved collaborator and model was Hanel Koeck, a German art student whom he met in 1967 when she was in her early twenties and he was sixty-seven. Koeck became the embodiment of Molinier’s androgynous ideal, replacing his long-dead sister. Other models who posed for him were: Emanuelle Arsan, Michelle Secque & Skindo.
In the 1970s, Molinier's health began to decline. Like his father before him, Pierre Molinier committed suicide at 76 years of age by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
There are two articles I recommend with more back ground information on Molinier, The Independent & an article written by Mark Alice Durant
