It was at the seaside resort of Les Sables d’Olonne that philosopher, Georges Bataille began Les larmes d’Eros (The tears of Eros) in the summer of 1959. Ambitiously conceived as an illustrated history of eroticism, this book was to have been, in Bataille’s words, “more remarkable than any I’ve published so far.” It was his last, completed against the odds of illness in April 1961. Three decades later, Les larmes d’Eros has literally become a kind of “pre-text” for this two-part artistic homage, aimed at tracing the echoes of “Bataillian thought” in the visual arts of his time and ours.

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