1 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!

2) 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.

3) 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.

4) 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."

5) 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.

6) 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.

PIERRE MOLINIER, sa dernière année : mars 1975 - mars 1976
«  J'ai fait carrière dans la liberté de mon individu »

Le propos de cette exposition, est de présenter de la façon la plus exhaustive possible les oeuvres et les circonstances de la dernière année de la vie de Pierre Molinier. Elle est marquée par ses rencon-tres avec les jeunes artistes Thierry Agullo et Luciano Castelli, marquée aussi par la disparition accidentelle de son fils Jacques, et ses contacts et collaborations avec les cinéastes Noël Simsolo - français, et Luis Berlanga - espagnol.

Le caractère inédit de cette exposition tient à la présentation exhaustive des 140 clichés noir et blanc de la performance de Molinier et Agullo du 19 mars 75 «Indécence» et à la présentation de 30 tirages couleur de «Thérèse Agullo» les seuls existants avant sa mort survenue en février 1980, retrouvés chez lui par son frère Loÿs qui nous les a confié, portraits faits par Molinier 3 jours avant son suicide, le 3 mars 1976. Les transparents originaux A cette époque Pierre Molinier ne peint plus du tout et ses seules oeuvres sont photographiques : photographies en noir et blanc, mais aussi autoportraits fétichés en couleurs, notamment ceux de la série dont un est en plan fixe dans le film de Simsolo.

En effet le film de Simsolo a été tourné durant cette année 1975 et monté dans les premiers mois de 1976, après une interview de Berlanga par Simsolo pour la revue Les Cahiers du Cinéma à propos de son film « Grandeur Nature ou la Poupée » dans le quel jouait Michel Piccoli, film inspiré aux dires de Berlanga par Molinier. Alors Simsolo avait eu envie de rencontrer et de filmer Molinier et d'autre part Berlanga aurait souhaité tourner un film avec Molinier qui, trop fatigué demandait à Thierry Agullo de le représenter, ce qui motivait une lettre de Agullo à Berlanga début 1976 où il est essentiellement question de Molinier et de l'année écoulée - celle qui nous intéresse ici; lettre qui sera exposée. Enfin, les derniers jours de Molinier sont marqués par les portraits qu'il a fait de Thierry Agullo, sous le titre « Thérèse Agullo », travesti avec ses propres affaires qu'il avait mis aux mensurations de Agullo. Après ses mises en scène mortuaires de fiction en 1950 « mes faire-parts de deuil à la vie conventionnelle » et sa rupture en 1951 avec ses amis artistes « traditionnels », après également la rupture avec sa femme quelques mois auparavant, MOLINIER dans cette intimité provoquée, commence ses autoportraits travestis qu'il ne montre à presque personne - sinon personne - jusqu'en 1964-65, lorsqu'il fait connaissance de Hanel Koeck et de Jean-Pierre Bouyxou : Il pensait que ces « autoportraits fétichés n'intéressaient personne, » autoportraits qui étaient de la matière première pour ses photo-montages: « ses inventions érotiques » selon ses termes. Cette intimité s'est une première fois ouverte aux spectateurs (Molinier en train de peindre) et aux portraits de visiteurs (une inconnue fétichée) dés 1962 avec le film de Raymond Borde, et ensuite de nombreuses fois, à l'occasion de films ou d'expositions, la première de photos et de photo-montages organisée par Jean-Pierre Bouyxou en 1965 à Bordeaux pour le festival de l'érotisme dont Molinier avait d'ailleurs fait l'affiche. Mais en même temps cette pratique d'autoportraits en toute intimité s'est poursuivie jusqu'à la fin de sa vie comme le démontre le choix des toiles ( L'Empalée 1973) à coté desquelles il s'est photographié, fétiché, aux cotés d'une des poupées et en couleurs, ou l'usage fait de l'un de ses autoportraits, également en couleurs dans le film de Simsolo en 1975. « l'Indécence » suggérée par Alexandre Bonnier, est-ce précisément l'intimité offerte aux autres ... en une rupture brutale ? « Ce pourquoi - comme l'écrit Thierry Agullo à Berlanga - j'ai perdu tous mes clients, une première moitié à la publication de la revue ARTITUDES à l'été 75, et la seconde moitié à réception de ma carte de voeux de 1976, » image prise par / avec Molinier.