French painter, photographer and “maker of objects;” a homosexual and a transvestite who lived his life in Bordeaux.
Molinier began his career by painting landscapes until his work soon turned towards a fetishistic eroticism. He began to take photographs at the age of 18. 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 exhibition of Molinier’s paintings in Paris, in January–February 1956. By 1959 he was showing at the International Surrealist Exhibition.
Between 1965 and his suicide in 1976, he chronicled his exploration of his subconscious transsexual desires in “Cent Photographies Erotiques”: graphically detailed images of pain and pleasure. 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 mannequins 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.
He married Andrea Lafay on 7 July 1931. In the 1970s, his health began to decline. Like his father before him, Molinier committed suicide on 3 March 1976 at 75 years of age by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Pierre Molinier’s enigmatic photographs have influenced European and North American body artists since the 1970s, including Jürgen Klauke, Cindy Sherman, Ron Athey, Rick Castro and his work continues to engage artists, critics, and collectors today.
Link to Wikipedia biography