Word: starfished
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Kupferman's new paintings tell very little about their squirmy wet subject matter; they jumble and reassemble it to make complex and technically brilliant designs. The abstractions had started with careful drawings of shells, starfish and seaweed that he and his five-year-old daughter found on the beach at Provincetown. He took to thumbing through scientific books illustrated with diagrams of tentacled polyps, and the nervous systems of sea worms and cross sections of jellyfish, because his wife made him throw out all the sea life he had brought home. "The house smelled like low tide," she complained...
Even though not as many acquisitions as usual were made, the museum maintained its leading position, and its collection of starfish, sea urchins, and other echinoderms is now the most extensive in the world. After the war, when the museum is back at full strength and conditions are favorable, great progress in collecting is expected...
...such scenes as a brawl in a Coney harem. Here all the succulent paraphernalia of 1905 eroticism get heaved about in fearful confusion-carved brass hookahs caught in ripped gauze, brocaded draperies from the mysterious East, feathers and chandeliers, pillows of plush and satin, even one or two preserved starfish...
...soon as a starfish attaches itself to an oyster the latter closes its shell, and (as already has been demonstrated) because of a powerful system of interlocking muscles, it is then able to withstand the application of a pressure greater than any commonly attributed to the strength of a starfish...
...allowed to remain undisturbed, however, the oyster will relax its muscles slightly, opening the shell and drawing in some of the surrounding water. The starfish, in the meantime, has been secreting an acid digestive juice in large quantities from great glands which fill all of its five arms. This fluid acts as an "anesthetic" on the muscles of the oyster, rendering them flabby and useless, after which it becomes an easy matter for the starfish to devour its prey...