Gene Szafran created this surreal, bold and wildly psychedelic painting for the cover of the 1973 paperback edition of  Hermaphrodeity – An Autobiography Of A Poet, by Alan Friedman, which was nominated for a National Book Award. The novel was an early exploration of non-binary gender identity, a topic that was starting to come into public consciousnesses as the sexual revolution and women’s rights movements began opening space for conversations about previously taboo topics surrounding the body and personal identity. The artist interpreted the protagonist (a hermaphrodite/deity, as it were) as a fragmented winged nude abstracted uni-sexed figure finding divinity in a seashell–a postmodern riff on Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus.
Painting is simply framed and a copy of the paperback book accompanies the illustration.