George Hugnet
George Hugnet was awriter but might be best known for his hauntngly beautiful and erotic photomontage. Hugnet was a French graphic artist but was also active as a poet, writer, art historian, graphic artist, bookbinding designer, critic and film director. Hugnet was a figure in the Dada movement and Surrealism.
A series of works collected under the title, he Love Life of the Spumifers, or La Vie Amoureuse des Spumifères, combines Surrealist poetry's fascination with l'amour and Dada's tendency towards deliberate grammatical spontaneity and absurdity. Words like bowoodling, friskadoodling and labamaraminating are concocted by Hugnet to describe the seductive strategies of his imaginary creatures. Each text is dedicated to a different creature, describing how it woos, teases, gropes and molests its intended love conquest. Each Spumifer is illustrated by a gouache "beast," which is added to an early Twentieth Century vintage "French" photo postcard. The mellifluously painted monsters slyly slither around the bare flesh of the pictured "mademoiselle," nibbling and tickling, arousing her sexual desire. Hugnet's illustrations seduce the viewer, parodying the human pursuit of love and lovemaking through these adorable grotesques.
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