“In June 1946, while staying with Brun in Revel, Bellmer filled a small pad of graph paper with sketches of violent and disturbing subjects:… Some of these sketches are inscribed ‘Sade’, and relate to a project for illustrating either Sade’s Philosophie dans le boudoir or Les 120 jours de Sodom. The drawing of a tied up woman was to be used to illustrate L’Anatomie de l’image, in connection with the passage which describes how a woman’s body which is accessible to permutations, extentions and retractions can give us positive information about the anatomy of desire. The proposed project to illustrate Sade arose out of the Bataille illustrations. Like other surrealists, Bellmer had long admired Sade: in a letter to Robert Valençay of 26 March 1946, he lists the eight works by or about Sade which he owns, and asks Valençay to look out for Justine and Philosophie dans le boudoir for him. In the following letter of April 14, he mentions etchings for Philosophie, and in July he says he is to do frontispieces for a new edition of Les 120 jours de Sodom. These projects never materialized, although a drawing was used as a frontispiece for an edition of Justine in 1950, but of course he was continuing work on the illustrations for the clandestine edition of Histoire de l’oeil. The difficulties were enormous at this time, as he explains in a letter to Valençay of 21 November 1946:
"For two months I have devoted my work exclusively to the work of de Sade. This is an important project for me, but with great risks, taking into account the surveillance of my ex-wife, and the vigour with which the state, these days (cf Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer) keep watch on such creations. That is why I ask you to observe absolute discretion about this work of mine."
The immediate results of this concern with Sade were four drawings:… and finally L’Amour et la Mort (Love and Death), a closely related composition in which the three Revel sketches are incorporated, and which shows a man crouching behind a woman as he has intercourse from the rear and bites her shoulder while his hands grasp her breasts (see illustration 182.) This last image fits a tradition of conceptions of ‘Death and the Maiden’ and ‘Love and Death’ which stretches back to Edvard Munch and Felicien Rops in the nineteen century to Hans Baldung Grien and Niklaus Manuel Deutsch in the sixteenth and to the Middle Ages; and the extraordinary way that the man is constructed out of segments of wood, which give him the appearance of a skeleton, recalls the wooden constructions engraved by Bracelli in the seventeenth century.
L’Amour et la Mort can be seen as a key image of Bellmer’s work. The drawing of 1946 inspired the original engraving issued with the collector’s edition of ‘L’Anatomie de l’image’ in 1957 and also the drawing of 1963 entitled Vanitas (‘Tête de Mort et Jeune Fille’). Is was also incorporated into one of the prints of the ‘Petit Traité de Morale’ series dedicated to Sade in 1968, one of Bellmer’s major projects in which elements of all four of the Revel Sade drawings can be found. Bellmer has built on the medieval images of ‘Love and Death’ by stressing his awareness of the body as a living organism and of man’s recognition of his mortality as a sexual being, which leads to the portrayal of the morbidity of sexual desire, of love-making as a gamble against death. Death holds the woman in his grasp as he bites into her shoulder: man eats woman to express his physical desire to possess her, to have her within himself. With her diluted eye and open mouth, the woman imitates her death agony in her orgasm, or ‘la petite mort’ as Georges Bataille calls it in his important book Eroticism of 1962 which relates so closely to Bellmer’s ideas.”