"You are today the master of vertigo, of one of the vertigoes that Rimbaud set himself the task of fixing, and perhaps of the worst. The photographs attached to your letter leave no doubt as to your aspiration in this direction, and I find it difficult to carry the confusion any further. They are as beautiful as they are scandalous, in unison with what you unveilled from your work».
That is how, on 16 April 1955, André Breton welcomed the letter that Pierre Molinier had just sent him. Alongside reproductions of paintings (which would be exhibited at the end of the year in his Étoile Scellée gallery) were the very first photos Molinier had just taken. It is these photos that we are proud to be able to present to the public for the first time after a long process of reassembly that has lasted more than 25 years (some of his images come directly from the André Breton Collection).
First essays of auto-eroticism, of transvestism, precursors of more than a decade of a groundswell that accompanies the first works devoted to the "Gender Studies", this exceptional set lifts a veil on a part of Pierre Molinier's work that few amateurs and researchers have been able to see until now.
But let's leave the final word to the artist himself who, answering Breton, described his first photographs thus:
"As for the photos "Magic Girls"-scandalous perhaps, I say "equivocal", and if there is eroticism, there is especially misunderstanding, deception, secrecy, finally magic, because nothing is more magical than the makeup that puts its mask and adds to the structure of the face. Of the attached photos, I believe that the sepias are the most magical, besides the girl remains to be "taken", and with the black on white, the girl is taken.
I had the curiosity (photo automatically taken) to see myself making outrages, but all that smells trouble, two characters in one, jubilation in the secret. The waves are scrambled, we don't get it... "
Christophe Gaillard - November 2022
