And here you thought all those French Resistance guys spent all their time smashing Nazis, smoking cigarettes and looking stoic. German surrealist Hans Bellmer did that as well — and now you can come over and see his etchings in The Songs of Maldoror, an exhibition of rare original erotic copper engravings. Published by art collector Pierre Argillet between 1967 and 1971, Bellmer's work is based on Lautremont's poetic 19th-century novel Les Chants de Maldoror, long a vital cornerstone of inspiration for everything from surrealism to industrial culture. Referencing the novel directly, Bellmer's images are a bizarre, wild welter of bodies literally fused together in passion, creating new bodies and faces in turn as they manifest to become something, as Lautremont put it, “as beautiful as the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.”

Tuesdays-Sundays. Starts: March 2. Continues through March 31, 2011

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