Clovis Trouille
(b. 24 October 1889 - d. 24 September 1975)
Camille Clovis Trouille was born in La Fère, France. He worked as Sunday painter and a restorer and decorator of department store mannequins and trained at the École des Beaux-Arts of Amiens from 1905 to 1910, he would die in Paris.
His service in World War I gave him a lifelong hatred of the military, expressed in his first significant 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. 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-satirist.
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 backside you have.") After his work was seen by Louis Aragon and Salvador Dalí, Trouille was declared a Surrealist by André Breton - a label Trouille accepted only as a way of gaining exposure, not having any real sympathy with the Surrealism movement. The simple style and lurid coloring of Trouille's paintings echo the lithographic posters used in advertising in the first half of the 20th Century.