Throughout his retiring life, Pierre Molinier had a reputation for being a person with a violent, irascible temper. Apart from this characteristic, his sexual behavior, far removed from the moral hypocrisy and customs of his time, was the object of equivocal reports. He came from a modest family in which his mother made him feel the weight of religion, while his father developed an interest in painting in him when he was still a child. Various fragments of his intimate biography have doubtless provided a heterodox aura with respect to a sexuality, in which fetishism focused on legs, calves and the media enveloping them—stockings, high-heeled shoes, etc.—played a primordial part.

In the fifties there was a shift in his pictorial work, with the introduction of an erotic iconography in which the woman’s body was seen as a territory of masks and artifices. Accompanied by allusions to religion (the divine and the diabolical), Molinier’s women exhibit a self-sufficient, narcissistic sexuality, self-absorbed in a decadent pictorial atmosphere. During this period there was a distancing from the art community of the city where he lived, because of the rejection produced by one of his erotic paintings, Le grand Combat (The Great Combat). In 1955 he contacted André Breton, who helped him to exhibit in Paris at the gallery À l’Étoile Scellée, and he contributed to the magazine le surréalisme, même. But the friendship with the guru of Surrealism did not last long; the reason for their disagreement was the painting Oh! … Marie, Mère de Dieu (Oh! … Mary, Mother of God).

In the reclusion of his small flat in Bordeaux, Molinier concentrated on painting and photography, using the presence of male and female friends and cross-dressing: a velvety atmosphere in which the search for pleasure became the central focus of his existence. Sexual ambiguity became more prominent in the photographs and photomontages of the sixties and seventies, in which Molinier dressed as a woman, manipulated a huge number of objects and accessories, which he used to create a fetishistic, onanistic view of sexuality (continued in his work with Thierry Agullo and Luciano Castelli).

Pierre Molinier committed suicide in 1976, aged at 75. On his door he wrote in chalk the following words: "Je prends ma vie. La clef est avec le concierge". ("I'm taking my life. The key is with the concierge.")