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 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 ass you have".) After his work was seen by Louis Aragon and Salvador Dali­, Trouille was declared a Surrealist by Andre Breton - a label Trouille accepted only as a way of gaining exposure, not having any real sympathy with that movement. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.