TASCHEN Gallery announces the opening of Bizarre Life – The Art of Elmer Batters and Eric Stanton, a controversial, and essential, exhibit that traces the artistic struggle of these two pioneers of fetish art, from the gritty post-war streets of Times Square to their position today as cultural icons. The show opens on Friday, March 27 at Taschen Gallery in Los Angeles.


If not for the moral chaos of World War II, Eric Stanton and Elmer Batters might have sublimated their indecent obsessions and spent lives illustrating catalogs, or photo- graphing weddings. But after the clarifying effect of near death, each embraced his difference, and returned home to hack a heroic creative path through contemptuous and villainous publishers, multiple arrests, loss of family, and occasionally, freedom, to be who he had to be.

Eric Stanton known as The Rembrandt of Pop Culture, was an inspiration for artists such as Richard Lindner, Allen Jones and Helmut Newton. He created thrilling panel stories and colorful pulp fiction covers of voluptuous, demanding women overpowering uppity males. Today, his work is defined as female empowerment, and as caricature of female-dominance fantasy – a dichotomy that delights contemporary culture, but initially forced him into abusive underworld partnerships in a pre-feminist society averse to female strength. “A woman has to be strong. The bigger the better,” was his motto.

Bizarre Life: The Art of Elmer Batters and Eric Stanton @ Taschen Gallery, LA (NSFW) article image 1

Elmer Batters was dubbed the Dean of Leg Art for his unique approach to photo- graphing women’s legs and feet, but while his work brought solace to legions of foot fetishists, the courts called it dangerously perverse and hounded him his whole life. “I felt that people almost saw me as un-American for not mooning over large mammaries,” he said.

In over 200 original works Bizarre Life showcases these artists together for the first time, creating a forum to explore the origins of our current sexual autonomy while raising questions of power and dominance, sexual freedom and sexual repression, while examining their far reaching effects on contemporary art.

Bizarre Life is curated by Dian Hanson and Benedikt Taschen in collaboration with Richard Perez. TASCHEN published Elmer Batters: From the tip of the toes to the top of the hose (1996), and The Art of Eric Stanton: For The Man Who Knows His Place (1997) and returned these singular talents to fashion and recognition.

Taschen Gallery
8070 BEVERLY BLVD, LOS ANGELES, CA 90048