A couple of weeks ago, I was at the Baltimore Museum of Art.  It wasn't a super long visit, we didn't see everything.  But I was struck by one piece, Tauromachie, by André Masson , from 1937.  It's from the time of the Spanish Civil War, the same inspiration for Picasso's Guernica, and like much art of the time and place, is a comment on blood and death and war and cruelty:



The color, the movement, the sinuous cubist/surrealist style really got to me.

I just did a search on this painting and found a drawing that goes with it, that appeared in Miroir de la tauromachie   (1938):



While still kind of horrific it's also frankly erotic.

The drawing features an open female crotch, breasts, or an only nominally covered penis of the matador, penis-shaped hooves, the male and female body parts in parallel, all the thrusting and blood on the sheets.  The female pudenda seems to refer to Courbet's scandalous L'Origine du monde  (1866).

Looking back, the shapes can be seen in the painting.  The open female crotch shape is there under the bull's head, breasts hinted at under the head of the matador at the top, pudenda above the horse's mouth.  Were they always sexual, or did Masson revisit his own work with an erotic eye?

it would be facile to say passionate sex or love and passionate killing are the same for Masson; I don't think they are.  But the link between violence and eroticism isn't hard to see.

Masson was for a time associated with a review called Acéphale, where he contributed drawings of powerful headless men.  In some sense this turns around the whole headless female nude trope — the male figure is powerful without its head. 

After looking at so many female body parts and essentially headless female figures in art, it's almost a relief to see neither the male nor the female face is really the point.

Masson was stepbrother to the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.  I've been meaning to learn more about him, maybe I will.