Eugène Bataille
Eugène François Bonaventure Bataille, better known by his artistic name Arthur Sapeck, was an important figure in the intellectual movements of the emerging French Third Republic, an emblematic figure of Les Hydropathes, then the Fumistes, Hirsutes, and Incohérents movements.
Education
Bataille was a lawyer by training and professionCareer
According to Michel Dansel, Bataille demonstrated a certain talent that manifested itself, notably, through his gifts as a musician, caricaturist, and illustrator, but also as a ventriloquist. His hoaxes and mystifications made him more famous than his work as an illustrator. From 1881 to 1883, he published with Jules Jouy L'Anti-concierge, a satirical review in defence of tenants and criticism of janitors, to which Alphonse Allais contributed.For the Arts Incohérents exhibition in 1883, he created Mona Lisa Smoking a Pipe, which directly prefigures L.H.O.O.Q. by Marcel Duchamp in 1919.
He became a prefectural councillor in the Oise in 1883.
Personal life
He married in 1888 and quickly had two children.He suffered from psychiatric disorders that led to his internment in the asylum of Clermont, Oise, in 1889, where he died on 20 June 1891.