Customer Reviews

Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

This unusual book argues that the killer of Elizabeth Short aka the Black Dahlia was a Surrealist who worked on the Hollywood scene. It does provide a surprisingly convincing case that the killer was a member of a particular artistic school that had a particularly strong influence on the movies of the time.

The book is very well illustrated with ghastly photos from the crime scene and is recommended to all true crime buffs.

The book attempts tie together surrealistic art and the death of Elizabeth Short. It does an ok job of that. The book seems to be more about the art work created by people like Man Ray then it is about the murder of Elizabeth Short. It offers loose comparisons of death portrayed in art. The book gives examples of many Surrealistic artists of the day and a short biography of their work for those who aren't familiar with their work. It also attempts to familiarize people with the idea of surrealistic art. The book is less about the details of the murder and more about the theory of surrealism in the thought process of the murderer and the possible artistic motivational factors behind it.

The mystery's behind the death of Elizabeth Short have been who killed her and why was she posed in that position, was it to imitate art perhaps so otherwise why cut the body the way it was and position it in that manor. The book does go into some detail about the art Scene in Los Angeles at the time of the murder and it's influence on the art scene afterwards. It asks questions like why was the body cut in half, perhaps to imitate existing pieces of art work including Man Rays Minotaur.

The book is nicely put together there are a lot of photos that I had not seen before and a lot of comparison artwork to support the books theory. It's a quick read but interesting read if you buy into the theory that Elizabeth Short died so that a macabre art work could be created.

If you like Crime scene photography or photos of the Elizabeth Short murder then this is a 4 star book. It you are looking for the facts behind the murder then this is about a 2 start book. If you are looking for surrealistic art then it's also about a 4 star book.

I am not a true crime buff, however this was a fascinating presentation of art and life intersecting. Recommend reading "Black Dahlia Avenger" by Steve Hodel prior to reading this book.

I have read the other book called, "Black Dahlia Avenger," and then read this book. This book is big and slightly heavy. It has lots of pictures of surreal arts including the Black Dahlia. After reading this book, I come to concluded that Dr. Hodel might be the killer of the Black Dahlia. Man Ray's work and others like him look similar to way of her body was arranged on the ground. It is eerie similar to the surrealism arts. It made my hair stand up on the back a little bit. If you are a Black Dahlia fan, then this is a book to read.

Wow. This is a great book for anyone who's interested in 20th-century art, especially in how it can inform real-world events. The interplay among artists, their work, and the people and culture around them makes for a fascinating story, even without the proposed revelations about this particular murder. Before reading the book I thought it might be only for those who already had an interest in the Black Dahlia murder, but it turns out to be a much richer experience than that. It also vividly captures a certain milieu of mid-century Los Angeles, which usually gets lost in the larger story of Hollywood's development. I recommend this book for even casual readers of art books, because even though it's scholarly in its research, it's also simply a great read.

Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss, Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder (Bulfinch, 2006)

The unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short, also known as the Black Dahlia, is one of America's most obsessively worked-over crimes. Hundreds, if not thousands, of true-crime writers, armchair detectives, forensic anthropologists, serial killer fans, mystery novelists, and other folks have read everything there is to read about the case, formulated hypotheses, and written about them. Some of these are scholarly works, some little better than porn. Nelson and Bayliss, of course, slot into the former category, and have come up with something that's actually original in a much-picked-over field: a connection between surrealist expatriates in America (and some of their colleagues still living in Europe) and the crime scene.

While I'm a bit uncomfortable with some of the postulates the authors begin with (especially that that the violence against women commonly depicted in surrealist art is to be taken literally, rather than as symbols for various cultural markers, and for that matter, that some of the themes Nelson and Bayliss examine constitute violence at all), it's impossible to argue that they take these postulates and build a solid foundation over them; beginning with an exhaustive overview of symbolism in surrealist art and a less exhaustive history of the movements of various surrealist artists, Nelson and Bayliss proceed to an examination of the Black Dahlia crime scene, and a comparison of the arrangement of the body with a number of surrealist artworks. From there, they dovetail both forward and back in time to examine a few suspects with ties to the surrealist movement. While this rather slim (and quite lavishly illustrated) volume certainly doesn't take into account all the suspects whose names have been advanced over the years, leading the reader to not be able to put this together with the many other hypotheses advanced over the years without doing a great deal more research, within the scope of this particular book Nelson and Bayliss put together a very strong case for the guy they finger as the killer. (Which makes sense; why release a book when you figure your suspect has, say, a 30% chance of being the actual perp?) If you're a longtime fan of the Black Dahlia mystery, or just a casual acquaintance who's gotten wind of the case through James Ellroy's recent, wonderful novel The Black Dahlia (or Brian DePalma's even more recent, and terrible, adaptation of it), Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder is worth checking out. *** ½

I've always been fascinated with the Elizabeth Short murder, aka The Black Dahlia. I read Steve Hodel's book, The Black Dahlia Avenger, and felt as if the murder had finally been solved. His connection of his father's love of surrealistic art and the posing of Miss Short's body was an interesting theory to me. When I read Exquisite Corpse, this theory became more valid in my mind. The authors have presented many examples of corresponding items between various artworks and the murder, so much so that it seems difficult to not believe Mr. Hodel's father was the murderer of the Black Dahlia. If you only read the book for a better understanding of this art genre, it is worth it. I'll never look at surrealism again without the shiver of chill bumps.

KUDOS TO MARK AND SARAH. As relates to the Nelson/Bayliss EXQUISITE CORPSE: SURREALISM AND THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER, I would like to add my heartfelt appreciation and high praise for their outstanding research, dedication and documentation. I believe their independent and academic investigation, adds mountains of evidence to my original lay/foundational thesis that suggested surrealism and its art were the key to the DAHLIA crime signatures. Mark Nelson and Sarah Hudson Bayliss have connected the dots and the people and presented them for all of us to see. They have taken the long silent voices of those who knew (or suspected) and by holding up their works (riddles wrapped in mysteries)--HAVE MADE THEM SPEAK!

Steve Hodel
Los Angeles

Books about art and murder have been fairly wide-ranging - from The Da Vinci Code to Patricia Cornwell's Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper--Case Closed. In Exquisite Corpse, the authors make an eminently readable and pretty convincing argument about the intellectual motivation behind America's most bizarre unsolved crime, the Black Dahlia murder. The killer was a debonair, high-IQ womanizer who took a twisted turn and tried to create an artwork out of a human body. That's one of the main points, but the book is more nuanced. It looks at how ideas about psychoanalysis, dreams, and death were getting into pop culture during World War II and after (think Hitchcock's Spellbound), and how all this could have worked on the mind of a killer. If you're an L.A. buff, there's a cool chapter on the nascent L. A. art world in the 1940s, when the city was loaded with stars, aspiring stars, ex-servicemen, and European expat intellectuals, all mixing at art openings, and sometimes ending up on the blacklist. It's filled with fascinating, page-turning stuff.

There's some fairly interesting visual analysis here, but it's all but buried in overstatement and unsupported innuendo. Similarly, one can also see fragments of a fascinating story, though it, like the stronger visual arguments, tends to get lost.

This is not a true-crime book, and anyone who purchases it expecting one will be disappointed. It's a book about the similarities between the Black Dahlia crime scene and works of avant garde and surrealist art that were made both before and after the murder. Some of these suggested commonalities feel like quite a stretch. (Man Ray's reclining nudes are nearly all corpses to the authors; a 1961 William Copely picture of a long-haired female nude, a doctor, and a set of surgical tools is cited as proof that the murder continued to haunt the artist for a decade and a half.) Others, especially those having to do with Marcel Duchamp's late work, are better supported, and genuinely interesting.

With regard to the personal relationships between the book's principals, the arguments are often much weaker. (The authors spend the book's entire first half establishing surrealism as a bloodthirsty aesthetic whose proponents were entralled with violent criminality and the sliced-up forms of women. Then, after claiming Duchamp for the surrealist movement, the authors suggest that his apparent continuing fascination with the Black Dahlia murder would likely have been the result of a "personal connection" with the killing.) They do, however, do a fine and interesting job of documenting involvement between their suspect and Man Ray.

The most compelling parts of the book are the ones that deal directly with their suspect, George Hodel. His life and predilictions recall Anton LaVey in some ways. Hodel's son, Steve, has also written a book about the Black Dahlia killing. That, I'd like to read.