Les larmes d'Éros, Georges Bataille
(Part of Catherine Millet’s theme: Great Classics)

Georges Bataille wrote Les Larmes d'Éros in 1959. The work was published in 1961. Bataille is more than sixty years old, he is aging, he is sick. Yet he embarks on a work full of jubilant health, these Tears of Eros, a history of painting under the patronage of Eros and Thanatos, love and death, linked since the original times, from cave paintings to surrealist introspections. Bataille unveils another history of painting. Each civilization, each artistic current tries to overcome the contradiction of the enjoyment and the death, the idea that the amorous discharge is cousin of the death. Among the primitives, the Greeks, in Renaissance Mannerism, Classicism, Romanticism, and again among the moderns - Picasso, Masson, Delvaux, Balthus - the obsession with love and death is there, present in the very heart of man. Bataille invites us to look at these paintings for what they are: abrupt and sharp reflections on the essence of man that, better than words, reveal our greatness and our tragedy.

Jean-Jacques Pauvert, éditeur, 1961
Text in French
Soft cover
18 x 18 cm
250 pages
ISBN: 978-2-37367-016-5