April, 2008Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder“He is quite apt to spend as long as four or five days whittling away a girl’s body piecemeal, and she ordinarily dies while this cruel operation is advancing.” - The Marquis de Sade, 120 Days of Sodom On the morning of January 15, 1947, a young woman’s purposefully placed and mutilated body was discovered in a vacant lot in a residential district of Los Angeles. The body was that of Elizabeth Short, and aspiring starlet known around the clubs and cafes of Hollywood as the “Black Dahlia”, for her stunning beauty and jet--black hair. For the next few months, newspapers from coast to coast ran stories of the Black Dahlia’s flamboyant lifestyle and macabre demise, complete with crime scene photographs. Americans were transfixed with a morbid fascination regarding the heinous nature of the crime and the presumed loose morals of the girl who “got it”. The case remains unsolved to this day, but as one of Los Angeles’ most notorious crimes, it continues to fuel the public’s imagination. Dozens of books have been devoted to the topic, not to mention numerous references in pop music, television, and film. The mystery and morbidity of the case maintain the Black Dahlia’s status as a cult icon to this day. Some self-appointed Dahlia experts claim to have solved the murder, yet no two presume the guilt of the same suspect. The Murder“It was a classical Southland tableau; the Hollywoodland sign in the hills beyond, and up close the severed body” (Smith, 147). Elizabeth Short was a 22-year-old aspiring actress who, like many young people, gravitated to Los Angeles, lured by dreams of making it in the movies. Her physical beauty and friendly, outgoing personality attracted many boyfriends; she was well known among the soldiers stationed in town. She acquired the nickname of “the Black Dahlia”1 for her trademark jet-black hair and her black clothes that contrasted with her pale white skin and the large white flowers she often pinned in her hair. A drifter whose dreams were bigger than her ambitions to make them come true, she was well known around Hollywood where she frequented soda fountains, cafes, and clubs. She was rarely employed for more than a few weeks at a time, and was frequently in need of money or a place to stay. She managed to get by in no small part due to her flair for appealing to the kindness of strangers. She has been inaccurately described as a prostitute, but this does not seem to be the case. While she certainly received her share of attention from men, and had no qualms about accepting “loans” and “gifts” from her suitors, there is evidence that she rarely, if ever, “went all the way”. If anything, the Black Dahlia had a reputation for being a coquette or a tease. During the last weeks of her life, Elizabeth Short’s acquaintances noticed that she seemed nervous, distracted, and terrified of someone or some thing. On January 9, she checked her bags at the Los Angeles bus station, then spent several hours nervously waiting for someone in the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel before stepping out into the night, never to be seen again. Six days later, a young mother was out on her morning errands when she spotted what she at first thought was a discarded store mannequin. Before her a nude, bloodless body lay on the grass. It was neatly cut in two at the waist; the top and bottom portions placed about 10” apart and slightly out of alignment, as if to emphasize their separateness. The arms were arranged at right angles above the head, which was turned to face the street. The legs were bent and spread apart, revealing a nearly hairless pubic area. It was clear that the body was not dumped, but artfully placed in this dance-like posture. “No one who saw the corpse could get the pose – or its meaning, out of their heads” (Thomson). In the 1940s, Los Angeles experienced a radical social transformation as wartime industries contributed to the explosion of the female population who, with their spouses away at war and jobs in defense factories, enjoyed freedoms they hadn’t known before. Tension between genders developed when thousands of men returned home, with memories of carnage fresh on their minds, anxious to resume the domestic status quo (Smith, 147). A cruel and exploitive film industry attracted starry-eyed drifters like Short, who were vulnerable to the dramatic surge in violent crime, possibly brought about by a newly dulled sensitivity to human atrocity after witnessing the tortures and annihilations of the war. As the murder rate rose, people like Elizabeth Short often went unnoticed and fell through the cracks. One Los Angeles newspaper called the city “the port of missing persons” (Thompson). It was against this backdrop that Elizabeth Short’s story unfolded. The Mutilation of the Body“The murder itself may have been a surrealist act – perhaps even a session of the Exquisite Corpse game, entwining eroticism and death in the killer’s misinterpretation and distortion of artistic ideals. In other words, death imitated art” (Nelson, Mark, and Bayliss, 135). There is no doubt that the body was placed “on display” and was meant to be “discovered” by passersby, police, and the media. The arrangement of the corpse seemed to mock the power and authority of law enforcement. The police called it a “defiance killing” since the perpetrator challenged them in an act of defiance against everything that was human (Gilmore 7-8). It was a “message from 1947 to the world” meant to communicate defiance to anyone who looked, right up to the present day (Smith, 147). While some Dahlia experts suggest that “Whoever he was, she must have made him mad as hell” (Gilmore, 147), perhaps this crime was an act not of rage but of sadism, in which the infliction of pain in one leads to pleasure in the other. The body was not hacked apart as in an act of rage, but surgically cut with precision and skill that suggested both medical knowledge and an aesthetic sensibility. The killer seems to have taken his time, perhaps coolly relishing in the pleasure of every artful slice. Diamond-shaped wedges were sliced from the one breast and one leg, with the leg cut nearly to the bone. The right breast was removed completely, leaving behind a perfect circular hole on the chest. A slit across the abdomen approximated the type of incision made during a hysterectomy, and it is possible that some of the sex organs were removed. The coroner found that Short’s vaginal canal was short and under-developed, possibly making vaginal intercourse impossible. The cut that bisected the body had the clean precision of the other cuts, suggesting the use of surgical instruments. In perhaps the most gruesome act of all, her cheeks were sliced from the corners of her mouth all the way to her ears, leaving the corpse with a broad, hideous, clown-like grin. Before delivering the corpse to the display site, the killer drained it of blood and washed it clean, even taking the time to shampoo the hair. Prime Suspect - George HodelMuch evidence supports the theory that the killer had both medical knowledge and an extensive understanding of Surrealist art. In The Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder, Steve Hodel, a former L.A.P.D. investigator provides strong evidence to support his theory that his father, George Hodel, was the killer. George Hodel, a physician who served as the venereal disease officer for Los Angeles County and as Public Health Administrator for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation in China, was one of six prime suspects for Elizabeth Short’s murder. His son portrays him as a cold, brilliant man with medical training and a track record of physical and sexual abuse against women2. He could be controlling, charismatic, and sometimes exceedingly cruel. Hodel believes he may well have been the type of person to carry out a cruel, logistically complex, stylistically bizarre murder (Nelson, Mark, and Bayliss, 20). George Hodel was an art-loving intellectual and an aspiring amateur photographer who had enjoyed some local notoriety for his work. A personal friend of Man Ray, he admired and looked up to the surrealist, making efforts to mimic his photographic style. He lived in a poured concrete mansion designed by architect Lloyd Wright3 that looked like a fortress on the outside and a “Mayan Temple of Doom” on the inside (Smith, 242). Steve Hodel spent his boyhood in this landmark of Los Angeles modernism, which he calls the “Franklin House”4. The castle in the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom is described as an enclosed fortress opening into an interior courtyard that nearly matches the exact description of the Franklin House. Hodel proposes that it might have even been the reason, consciously or not, that George Hodel bought the property. It was here that Hodel entertained a circle of intellectual friends that included filmmaker John Huston, writer Henry Miller, art patrons Louise and Walter Arensberg, art dealer William Copley, surrealist painters Max Ernst and Dorothea Tanning, and most significantly, Man Ray and his wife Juliette. The Franklin House was like a salon, where avant-garde artists could gather to flout convention and social mores. Hodel gave wild parties where guests could indulge their hedonistic desires for alcohol, drugs, and unconventional sex, in clear defiance of the society in which they lived. They were all sensualists who lived according to their passions and desires. To George Hodel, life itself was surreal, “a dream in which each man made up and lived by rules within in his own world; he lived his life according to the dictum, ‘Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’ “ (Hodel, 90,189, 201, 204). Man Ray and Juliette were frequent guests at Hodel’s wild parties. Their close friendship is documented in the various photographs he made of Hodel, his wife Dorothy, and Juliet together. It is likely that through Man Ray or others in the Los Angeles art venue that George Hodel gained access to the discontinued Surrealist journal, Minotaure, imagery and themes of which are clearly an influence in Hodel’s own photographs, and possibly the Black Dahlia murder. Parallels with Surrealist Art“The painter has slain his model” – Rene Char “… modern art is what did in the Dahlia” (Smith, 242) Considering the Surrealist love of violent eroticism, unexpected juxtapositions, and challenges to conventional morality, a Surrealist connection to the Black Dahlia murder seems not only plausible, but profound. In Surrealist art female figures rarely appear as fully human entities. These “damaged muses” are bisected, dissected, dismembered and endowed with geometric cutaways and fantastical reproductive organs. They are often found in a state of reverie or apparent death (Nelson, Mark, and Bayliss, 35). “Signatures” left on Elizabeth Short’s body bear startling resemblance to elements in works by leading surrealist artists of the time. For example, the dissected body is sliced in pieces in Max Ernst’s Anatomie als Braut (Anatomy as a Bride),1921. The Surrealist fascination with replacement of reproduction organs is seen and Hans Bellmer’s La Poupee and Salvador Dali’s Les Roses Sanglantes (The Bleeding Roses), 1930. In Magritte’s L’Evidence Eternelle (The Eternally Obvious), 1930, Rene Magritte fragments the female body.
The Dahlia’s torturous dissection into jumbled anatomy may also have been a reversed, yet literal game of “Exquisite Corpse”. The Surrealist parlor game consists of artists exchanging pieces of folded paper, onto which they draw parts of the body, unaware of the other artists’ markings. “The resulting fusions are startling and often seemingly disparate figures caught between high art and bloody murder” (Park). Elizabeth Short’s mutilated body bears a notable resemblance to a 1934 Exquisite Corpse drawing by Andre Breton, Nusch Eluard, Paul Eluard, and Valentine Hugo. The upraised arms, circular shapes in place of breasts, enclosed triangles, and vertical impression near the genital area echo many of the violations on Short’s body (Nelson, Mark, and Bayliss 98-99). It is horrifying to consider that perhaps two or more people played Exquisite Corpse on a real human being, taking turns inscribing their signature marks on her body, creating their own horrific masterpiece. The Surrealist fascination with mannequins and dolls suggests another possible parallel between the movement and Elizabeth Short’s body. From a Surrealist standpoint, it is significant that Elizabeth Short’s body was described by many witnesses as a “dummy”, a “disassembled mannequin”, and a “discarded marionette”. Mannequins intrigued Surrealists with the idea that a constructed woman could offer a special erotic charge. Surrealists looked back to the Galatea myth, in which a carving comes to life when a sculptor falls in love it, viewing mannequins and dolls as machine age Galateas to be willfully manipulated (Nelson, Mark, and Bayliss, 9, 13). In the 1938 Exposition Internationale du Surrealisme in Paris, Marcel Duchamp gave 16 participating artists unclothed fashion mannequins to adorn or manipulate as they wished. Some artists responded with sado-masochistic references while others rendered their mannequins to look like corpses. Andre Masson imprisoned the head in a birdcage, and silenced her by placing a pansy in her mouth. Duchamp merely took off his coat and placed it on the mannequin as though she were a human coat rack. This recalled Man Ray’s Coat Stand from 1920, where he transformed a woman into a doll-like utilitarian object, a dummy’s idiotic face standing in for her own identity. Perhaps the most important parallel between Elizabeth Short’s body and Surrealism is the Surrealist fascination with the Minotaur5. Sigmund Freud, who the Surrealists revered, interpreted the labyrinth as the unconscious mind, the golden thread as psychoanalysis. The Minotaur, devourer of maidens, thus symbolized the instincts that lay beneath conventional behavior (Nelson, Mark, and Bayliss, 65-67). So important was the Minotaur to the Surrealists that they named a luxurious Surrealist journal for it. Minotaure released thirteen issues between 1933 and 1939. The magazine contained many artistic interpretations of the mythical beast. Salvador Dali’s cover for Minotaure 8, 1936 portrays a woman’s body on the head of a bull. Anatomical cutaways, such as an orifice in the stomach and sectioned areas in the thighs bear close similarities to the wounds inflicted on Elizabeth Short’s body (Bayliss 75-76). Man Ray’s photograph of a nude torso that appeared in Minotaure also resembles Elizabeth Short’s pose. In this photograph, the model’s head is cut off by the picture’s edge and the arms are raised up at angles that suggest “the horns”, while nipples are positioned so as suggest “the eyes”. One can easily imagine face of a ghoulish beast superimposed on the body of its victim (Hodel, 240). Could this suggest a desire to devour maidens? Or is it meant to suggest that women are murderous beasts? Regardless of the nuanced interpretations of this very important Surrealist image, the position Short’s arms at the display site match very closely to the angles of the right and left arms in this photograph. Additionally, the body is bisected at the waist by the picture frame, much as Elizabeth Short’s body was sliced in two. Minotaur 9 ran an art historical article that featured reproductions of works that portray female saints in their martyrdom. Antoine Laferery’s Martyre de Saint Agathe shows the saint having her breasts cut off in punishment for refusing to submit to sexual advances, while Sandro Botticelli’s The Disembowelment of the Woman Pursued shows the phantom of a woman who turned down a marriage proposal and was therefore punished by being chased, disemboweled, and chased again for all of eternity. Both narratives suggest ancient stories of women tortured for defending their virtue and refusing sex (Nelson, Mark, and Bayliss, 23-24). The similarities between these stories and the mutilation of Elizabeth Short’s body are clear. But could there be a connection between the Dahlia’s own chastity and her reputation as a “tease” who would not (or could not) submit to full sexual penetration? Of all the Surrealists who may have inspired Elizabeth Short’s murderer, the possible connections to Man Ray’s work can hardly be overstated. Some theorists believe that his work directly influenced the actions of the killer, and I find it difficult to dismiss these findings. Man Ray had an elegant way of manipulating women in his art. “It was his gift to combine compositional beauty with unsettling subject matter” (Nelson, Mark, and Bayliss, 55). His use of the women’s bodies as canvasses can be traced back to his time in Paris in the 1920s, when before going out, he shaved the Kiki de Montparnasse’s eyebrows and drew them back in as he pleased (Nelson, Mark, and Bayliss, 55-56). His obsession with Kiki as a lover is evident in the oil painting Observatory Time: The Lovers, 1934, in which a giant pair of lips, resembling a pair of entwined lovers, hovers in the sky. Could this large, wide, red configuration have been inspiration for the grotesquely similar laceration of Elizabeth Short’s mouth (Hodel, 241)? Could he have been extending her lips so that her mouth resembled the long lips that floated in Man Ray’s sky? The Marquis de Sade
Man Ray, George Hodel, and many Surrealists were great admirers of the Marquis de Sade whose transgressive writings they saw as a pursuit of total liberty. Sade and his followers saw women as objects and playthings that existed for man’s pleasure, and could be enhanced only through humiliation, degradation, and the infliction of pain (Hodel, 89, 228). He was revered by the Surrealists for his belief in the pursuit of personal liberty above all else (Nelson, Mark, and Bayliss, 25). Minotaure published excerpts from his writings, along with historical reproductions of religious and mythological scenes of torture toward women (Nelson, Mark, and Bayliss, 41). His work details specific acts of sexual depravity and his advocacy of the infliction of pain and torture upon women. His imagery was surely meant to disgust and outrage his contemporaries (Hodel, 228). Man Ray in particular held a reverence for Sade, which was documented in a number of his works. His 1933 photograph titled Monument a DAF de Sade shows a woman’s buttock framed within the shape of an inverted cross in reference to Sade’s preference for sodomy and his disdain for the church (Hodel, 228). Hans Bellmer’s photographs of violated puppets and dolls celebrated Sade’s penchant for the disfiguration of the female form. Sade represented complete freedom from convention, from the morals of society, and from the constraints of literary taste (Hodel, 88). A comparison of Sade’s infamous work, 120 Days of Sodom with the coroner’s findings after Elizabeth Short’s death goes a long way toward explaining her killer’s intent. The dissection of her body seems to follow Sade’s details of sexual atrocities closely, with his prescriptions for humiliation, sodomy, defecation (and subsequent ingestion of excrement), bloodletting, dismemberment and disemboweling followed and carried out. Coroner’s reports suggest that the killer(s) may have used her rectum and the incision in her abdomen for sexual penetration, possibly in defiance of her underdeveloped genitals, that would have rendered vaginal intercourse difficult or impossible (Gilmore, 125). A primary difference between Surrealists and Elizabeth Short’s murderer(s) is that the Surrealist interests in sadism, crime, and subversion were mostly theoretical. Their actual conduct bore little resemblance to their fascinations with Sade and their proclamations of lawlessness. They were intrigued by true crimes and murders whose actions they viewed as acts of transgressive valor. In their art and intellectual activities they expressed and glorified perverse appetites, but “as for emulating the fantasies of Sade’s personae, they didn’t even try” (Nelson, Mark, and Bayliss, 41-43). Could this have been the killer’s way of upstaging the artists and getting their attention by going one step further than he knew the Surrealists would take? After the Murder - Marcel Duchamp“Macabre inspiration flows from art to death and to art again. Like the Surrealist parlor game in which discretely drawn segments unfold into weird chimeras, (we see) startling fusions between seemingly disparate figures between high art and bloody murder (Park, 48). In the years after the killing, artists intimate with the Los Angeles art scene may have concealed references to the Short murder within their work. Considering the Surrealist penchant for violent crimes, we can say with near certainty that the Surrealists were at least as fascinated with the Black Dahlia case as was the rest of the country. It hardly seems coincidental that Man Ray’s 1933 Juliette on the Couch at 1245 Vine Street features Juliette draped, corpselike on a sofa, her arms arranged in a manner nearly identical to that of his Minotaur and Elizabeth Short’s body. Similarly, in July 1947, Duchamp collaborated on a deluxe edition of a catalogue for a Paris exhibition called Le Surealisme en 1947 in which he made 999 hand made book covers, each subversively sporting three dimensional foam rubber breast surrounded by black velvet. Titled Prier de Toucher (Please Touch), it required that one must cradle the breast in one’s hands to read the book. Subsequently, the breast would grow dirtier and more worn with repeated handlings. Could this be a reference to Elizabeth Short’s missing breast? It is entirely conceivable that Marcel Duchamp, who had just returned to New York from Europe one week after the crime, would have had inside knowledge, and possibly even access to un-retouched photographs from the crime scene, through his friend Man Ray. While newspapers across the country published censored accounts and airbrushed photographs of the crime scene, a close connection in Los Angeles, especially one who might have inside connections to crime scene photographs taken by reporters who circulated throughout the Hollywood community could provide valuable inside information. Additionally, Man Ray, like Elizabeth Short, likely frequented some of the same popular bars and clubs in Hollywood, possibly knowing some of the same people. This would have made Man Ray privy to a great deal of Hollywood gossip, which he could in turn pass along to his friend. With all this considered, we should now turn our attention to Duchamp’s final masterwork Etant Donnes also known as Given: The Waterfall; The Illuminating Gas, an enigmatic three dimensional tableau that he worked on in secret for over 20 years, between 1946 and 1966 in his New York apartment. In 1968, the work was installed as per his instructions, posthumously in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, near his other famously enigmatic work The Large Glass, 1915-23, also known as The Bride is Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even6. This installation bears such a striking resemblance to crime scene photographs that one can only assume Duchamp must have been inspired by this crime. In this tableau, the museum workers followed Duchamp’s instructions to install a heavy, rough wooden door, surrounded by bricks that Duchamp brought with him from Cadaques, Spain, where he once spent his summers. Two small peepholes were placed in this door, and it is only by peering through one of them that a viewer may see the shocking tableau. In the foreground, a ghostly pale sculpture of a nude woman appears, her head and body partially concealed by a broken wall of bricks. She is sprawled on a bed of long twigs, with her left leg bent awkwardly to reveal an overt view of her hairless genitals, that appear underdeveloped, incomplete, and gash-like. Her bent left arm is upraised to hold a gaslight that illuminates the scene. A serene landscape fills the distant plane, its source being a photograph of a small waterfall that Duchamp shot while in Switzerland during the summer of 1946. The body appears pale and dead, yet fresh and dew covered, as Elizabeth Short’s body appeared when it was discovered on that January morning. This work has baffled scholars ever since its discovery in 1969, in part due to Duchamp’s secrecy7. Most viewers make a connection between the figure and either a dead female body or a mannequin, and most regard it as a suggestion of criminal activity and violence that has been imposed on the eroticized. With its obvious parallels to the Dahlia murder, it is easy to assume that Duchamp had seen the crime scene photographs and attempted to imitate them. It is tempting to consider that he knew something he was keeping secret but hinting to in Etant Donnes. Could Duchamp and Man Ray have known who the killer was (Blanches)? Like much of Duchamp’s work, the meaning to this piece is perplexing. Is the lamp illuminating the scene, and providing clues to an unsolved murder? What accounts for the peephole suggestion of voyeurism on such a public murder (Park, 46)? The parallels between the Black Dahlia crime scene and Etant Donnes are numerous, but the most forceful formal similarities between the Black Dahlia and the figure in Etant Donnes relate to pubic area. Did Elizabeth Short’s undeveloped genitals excite the Surrealist fixation with the androgynous femme enfant? Or did it make her simply appear doll-like and appeal to the surrealist fascination with mannequins? It has been suggested that this work is a more straightforward version of the Large Glass, a confounding narrative seen from the viewpoint of male sexual frustration with a woman who is a tease (Bayliss, 123). Certainly the completion of the sexual act would be impossible with the doll-like genitals. If this figure is Duchamp’s “bride” literally stripped bare, is it any wonder her bachelors must “grind their chocolate” in sexual frustration (Blanches)? These questions will forever remain unanswered, leaving Etant Donnes with the same status as the Black Dahlia murder: open and unsolved. Duchamp’s final work defies solving this riddle, and in doing so, he manages to defy death. Conclusion
There is a sad irony to the fact that Elizabeth Short did not gain the fame she so desperately desired until after her hideous death. As one of the most notorious and fascinating unsolved murders of the 20th century we remain transfixed by the Black Dahlia, largely because her story remains a mystery. So little is known about her that we project our desires, our fears, and our subconscious longing onto her (Smith, 239). Considering the Surrealist imprints left on her body, we must assume that these similarities are not coincidental. Whoever committed the crime had to have been well versed in the arts. It therefore is plausible that whoever committed the act was trying to impress or out-do the Surrealists. While Surrealist art depicts fantasies of female dismemberment, the artist/murderer takes it a step further, and literally acts on this fantasy, thus beating the Surrealists at their own game. If the killer was not George Hodel, it must have been someone who knew him and Man Ray and ran in his social circle. To date, the killer committed the “perfect crime”, perplexing three generations of investigation. Like Duchamp’s Etant Donnes, the Black Dahlia murder still remains “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” (Hodel, 245).
AddendumIn November 2008, I was contacted by Steve Hodel, the son of primary suspect George Hodel and the author of one of my primary sources for this essay, Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder. He provided me with the following corrections: "My only real criticism would be that your article seemingly endorses the long perpetuated John Gilmore myth that I had used a 2003 edition of Hodel's book in the preparation of this paper and was unaware of his added chapters in the 2006 edition that provided additional insight into the case, as well as debunking the myth of Elizabeth Short's "infantile vagina". I asked Mr. Hodel if he could shine any light on the origin of myth of Short's "infantile vagina," and also on his thoughts on Marcel Duchamp's Etant Donnes and proposals by various theorists that he referenced the unformed genitals in the mannequin-like figure of this tableau. I asked him if he thought Duchamp knew of and believed the reports. Mr. Hodel responded with the following: "The origin of the Elizabeth Short "infantile vagina" myth appears to have started with an admitted lie made by newspaperman, Will Fowler (son of famed screenwriter Gene Fowler) who was one of the first newspapermen to arrive at the Black Dahlia crime scene. Will Fowler, in a letter to Mary Humphrey Pacios (who was in the 1980s a co-Dahlia researcher with John Gilmore) wrote the following: If Duchamp was not aware of any questions regarding the normalcy of Short's genital area, it contradicts any theories that Duchamp references them in Etant Donnes. It cannot be denied, however, that Etant Donnes presents a doll-like figure with inpenetrable sex organs that may still be regarded as a sequel to the sexual frustration referenced in Duchamp's earlier work, Large Glass. WORKS CITEDBelton, Robert. “Speaking with Forked Tongues: ‘Male’ Discourse in ‘Female’ Surrealism?” Surrealism and Women. Caws, Mary Ann, Kuenzli, Rudolf, and Raaberg, Gwen, eds. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991. Blanches, Ombres. “Duchamp’s Dahlia or The Man Ray Mystery”. Weblog archives, June 20, 2007. http://ombresblanches.wordpress.com/2007/06/20/duchamps-dahlia-or-the-man-ray-mystery/ Caws, Mary Ann. “Ladies Shot and Painted.” The Expanding Discourse: Feminism and Art History. Broude, Norma and Garrard, Mary D., eds. Harper Collins Publishers, Inc. New York, NY. 1992. Caws, Mary Ann. “Seeing the Surrealist Woman: We Are the Problem”. Surrealism and Women. Caws, Mary Ann, Kuenzli, Rudolf, and Raaberg, Gwen, eds. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991. Gilmore, John. Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia. Amok Books, Los Angeles, CA. 1998. Hanson, Sarah P. “Body of Evidence” ArtNews September 2006. p. 44. Hodel, Steve. Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder. Arcade Publishing, New York, NY. 2003. Hoy, Pia. “Marcel Duchamp - Étant Donnés, the Deconstructed Painting”. Tout-fait: Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal. http://www.toutfait.com/duchamp.jsp?postid=4310# Kuenzli, Rudolf. “Surrealism and Misogyny”. Surrealism and Women. Caws, Mary Ann, Kuenzli, Rudolf, and Raaberg, Gwen, eds. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991. Nelson, Mark and Bayliss, Sarah Hudson. Exquisite Corpse: Surrealism and the Black Dahlia Murder. Bulfinch Press, New York, NY. 2004. Park, Ed. Raaberg, Gwen. : “The Problematics of Women and Surrealism” Surrealism and Women. Caws, Mary Ann, Kuenzli, Rudolf, and Raaberg, Gwen, eds. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991. Sade, Donatien Alphonse François. 120 Days of Sodom. 1785. Smith, RJ. “Living with the Black Dahlia: The Murder that Changed Los Angeles”. Los Angeles Magazine. September 2006. pp. 144, 242 – 243. Thompson, David. “Death works” The New Republic Online. Thursday, September 21, 2006. http://www.powells.com/review/2006_09_21.html Thompson, David. “Film Studies: Who Killed the Black Dahlia?” The Independent. Sunday, September 10, 2006. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/film-and-tv/features/film-studies-who-killed-the-black-dahlia-415428.html
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