Lord Noel on 'Dessins Erotiques de Bertrand'

Whatto! Art enthusiasts.......

Today I want to introduce you to an artist named Bertrand......
The first question has to be "Bertrand who?"......
...or even....."Who Bertrand?"
Bertrand’s erotic surrealism first appeared in the late Sixties, going by the dates in collections of his work. Some of his paintings and drawings crept into the underground mags of the period then turned up in odd places throughout the Seventies.
A French porn publisher named Eric Losfeld produced a couple of large, limited edition collections of Bertrand’s work in the early Seventies.

All the drawings reproduced here are from the battered 1971 volume shown above.
If it seems surprising that these haven’t been reprinted it may be that Bertrand’s concerns are too weird or simply too unpleasant for contemporary tastes......
 ....but I personally like them.

Many of his ink drawings, and some of his paintings, seem to have begun life as 'decalcomania splotches', a Surrealist technique invented by Oscar Dominguez as a means of injecting chance into the creative process. Decalcomania produces random patterns which the artist then elaborates upon.

Max Ernst’s famous Europe After the Rain, and a number of his other paintings from the 1940s, began life as a field of vaguely organic marks created by pressing thickly applied paint to the canvas with a sheet of glass or paper.....
 ....and I used the same process whilst decorating my office recently.

Bertrand used ink stains in a similar way, with the result that most of his doe-eyed female figures (and his figures are nearly always women) are fringed by leafy or fungal growths.....(never a good thing)
Many of his scenes are a kind of lesbian equivalent of the human/alien entanglements one finds in William Burroughs’ more elaborate flights of fancy.

If his women aren’t being absorbed into some organic mass, they’re often being subject to investigation (even impalement) by spikes or claws, and here we perhaps find the reason his work remains out of print.
Feminists then and now would have taken a dim view of Bertrand’s more violent works; even if Taschen (whose artwork inspired the entire look of the 'Alien' film series) did produce a Bertrand collection, it’s unlikely that many of the more grotesque pictures would be included.

All the pictures in the Losfeld books were produced in a short period from 1967–69.
What happened to Bertrand afterwards also remains a mystery.

It turns out that the Artists full name is perhaps....Raymond Bertrand.
Did he decide to do pursue a different, more commercial direction?
And indeed........is he even still alive?
Tallyho!

Don't you just love being educated by a Lord who has plenty of spare time on his hands?

Best Wishes - Lord Noel & Lady Jacqueline