Although Les seins torturés (Tortured Breasts) had been announced for publication as early as 1978 in Humiliations, it did not see the light of day for another decade, much to the impatience of Farrel’s many afficionados. With its twenty drawings, it was accompanied as before with texts dictated by Farrel, this time to his friend Bernard F. 

As Dominique Forma writes in The Farrel Artbook, ‘The breast, more than the mouth, the vagina, or the bottom, is Farrel’s symbol of womanhood. He likes to inflate it, pierce it, or even cut it: the breast is one of his passions. He preceded the fashion for breast implants, his silicone injections being accompanied by manual labour, where experts knead, grind, stretch, and twist the breasts to deform them and increase their size. The needles planted in their flesh are just a little extra that the torturers allow themselves as they work. It’s not uncommon to see, in the same image, two or three generations of women with distended and swollen breasts. In this way Farrel summarises the different phases of this physical transformation. His women become less and less women, becoming more and more cows with swollen or anaemic udders, the essential thing, always, being that they are degraded.’

Les seins torturés was published by Roger Finance for Delta Plus, Montpellier.

If you are interested in reading the texts as well as seeing the drawings, a complete online version of Les seins torturés with texts in French and English can be found here.