ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa

Scope and Contents Camille Clovis Trouille, was born on 24 October 1889, in La Fère, France. He worked as a restorer and decorator of department store mannequins, but is remembered as a Sunday painter who trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts of Amiens from 1905 to 1910. He died on 24 September 1975 in Paris. 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: Dialogue at the Carmel (1944) 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 Andre Breton. The Magician (1944) has...