[Visual Arts] Hosoe, Eikoh. (b. 1933). Untitled, from Ordeal by Roses #12. Gelatin silver print, 1963, printed 1976. 20 x 24 inches. Signed lower right. Literature: Aperture, BA-RA-KEI Ordeal by Roses, Photographs of Yukio Mishima by Eikoh Hosoe, ‘5: Retribution of the Rose’, New York, 1985. The print in overall presentable condition, but with several significant surface scratches and one small dark area retouched. Please note that this will be shipped UNFRAMED.

Eroticism and sadomasochism permeates the entire photographic series known as Bara-kei or Ordeal by Roses, a collaboration between Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima and the experimental photographer Hosoe. Fantastical, dramatic, rococo, and self-indulgent, as Mark Holbern observes, this series “begins where Mishima’s writing ends.” An outspoken nationalist, in 1970 after failing to incite a coup to re-establish the emperor, Mishima committed ritual suicide.

"The world to which I was abducted under the spell of [Hosoe’s] lens was abnormal, warped, sarcastic, grotesque, savage, and promiscuous…It was, in a sense, the reverse of the world we live in, where our worship of social appearances and our concern for public morality and hygiene create foul filthy sewers winding beneath the surface. Unlike ours, the world to which I was escorted was a weird, repellent city—naked, comic, wretched, cruel, and overdecorative—yet in its underground channels there flowed, inexhaustibly, a pellucid stream of unsullied feeling." - Mishima Yukio (1925-1970), preface to Ordeal by Roses, 1982