Clovis Trouille

Camille Clovis Trouille, was born on 24 October 1889, in France. He worked as Sunday painter and a restorer and decorator of department store mannequins, and trained an the École des Beaux-Arts from 1905 to 1910. He died in 1975.

Works
His service in World War I gave him a lifelong hatred of the military, expressed in his first major painting Remembrance (1931). The painting depicts a pair of wraith-like soldiers clutching white rabbits, an airborne female contortionist throwing a handful of medals, and the whole scene being blessed by a cross-dressing cardinal.

This contempt for the church as a corrupt institution provided Trouille with the inspiration for decades of pictorial blasphemies including 1944's Dialogue at the Carmel shows a skull wearing a crown of thorns being used as an ornament.

The Mummy shows a mummified woman coming to life as a result of a shaft of light falling on a large bust of Trouille. The Magician (1944) has a self-portrait satisfying a group of swooning women with a wave of his magician's wand. My Tomb (1947) shows Trouille's tomb as a focal point of corruption and depravity in a graveyard.

Trouille's other common subjects were sex, as shown in Lust (1959), a portrait of the Marquis de Sade sitting in the foreground of a landscape decorated with a tableau of various perversions, and a "madly egoistic bravado" employed as self-satirism.

His portrait of a reclining nude shown from behind entitled Oh Calcutta, Calcutta! - a pun in French - was chosen as the title for the 1969 musical revue. (The French phrase "oh quel cul t'as" translates roughly as "oh what a lovely arse you have".)

The paintings are the excellent portrayal of the events and scenes that we see around us. The painters are the best cameras of the world. They reproduce many different types of pictures. They even draw imaginary pictures that do not exist in this world. We tend to use both thinned oil paints and dense oil paints. Masterpieces can be dyed more than once, but each time it may be different from the existing paintings.h

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