Jean Benoît  

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Jean Benoît (1922 - ) is a Canadian artist best-known for his surrealist sculptures. Many of his works include demonic figures, brutal sexual images, exaggerated phalluses, and so on.

He was born in Quebec, Canada, and studied art at the Ecole des Beaux Arts de Montréal, where he met Mimi Parent, whom he married in 1948. He met André Breton in 1959, and joined the Surrealist group that same year. In 1959, he also performed Exécution Du Testament Du Marquis De Sade, for which he made costumes. The dark, grotesque characters wore sharp, seemingly-mechanical pieces mixing biomorphic, anamilistic shapes that make the humans look like torture devices. Breton mentioned Benoit in Surrealism and Painting: "STAND ASIDE to let the Marquis de Sade pass 'in his own likeness' and reinvented by Jean Benoît with all his powers." One sculpture called "Book Cover for Magnetic Fields" features demonic figures ripping an egg from a book. Magnetic Fields was the name of the book Breton wrote with Philippe Soupault, which Breton called the first surrealist book. Many of his works include demonic figures, brutal sexual images, exaggerated phalluses, and so on.