Word: surrealist
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...cornet), a bus boy (French horn), a girl in evening dress (violin), and a child perched in a potted shrub, tapping on a drum. A scattering of vacant chairs inhabiting an empty, silent landscape marks the spot where a party died. Philip C. Curtis, 63, is possibly the only Surrealist now living in Arizona. But Surrealism is a term he uses "quietly, incidentally, to express my ideas. Most Surrealists are on the brutal side. I always have a note of tenderness...
Curtis' paintings have none of the conceptual density or revolutionary aims of surrealist imagery; they are gentle, mannered, elegiac, peopled with doll-like Edwardian women and dandified men. These ghosts, thin and sharp as memory in the preservative desert air, flit through empty, curlicued facades or congregate amid their elaborate furniture, radiating a wistful chic; as image maker, Curtis is more elegant than challenging. His objects do not confront one another in shock, like Lautréamont's famous sewing machine and umbrella on a dissecting table-they nod, as it were, with mild and civil assent...
Shady Ladies. Still, he put in a stint as a cub reporter on his father's San Diego Tribune, first took up painting while reading Ulysses "as an exercise for my perception." He decided to open a gallery in Beverly Hills devoted to the then avant-garde Surrealists, but the venture fell through when he made no sale for six months. "Since I guaranteed the artists that I'd sell 10% of their works, I almost had to start a collection," he says. He took off for Paris, where the artists whose works he had bought-Max Ernst...
...paint the body because it has great possibilities for interpretation," Wunderlich says. That much he shares with the German expressionists. But his dry wit and typically surrealist delight in visual and verbal puns provide ample comic relief. He titled a portrait of a woman with five breasts Very Décolleté. As for interpretations of his paintings, he leaves that to others. "I refuse to try to explain everything, because if you know too much about yourself, you become impotent. Better not to know what it is that makes you tick...
Much of what Starusch thinks, feels and seems to dredge up from his memories and fantasies occurs in the form of a surrealist TV show glimpsed past his tormentor's ear. Meanderings into Starusch's early love life, barely suppressed feelings of violence and real or imagined career in reinforced concrete multiply, not always fruitfully for the reader. Grass, who has long admired Herman Melville, sometimes seems bound to do lightly for dentistry what the author of Moby Dick did for whaling. Symbols clang. Tartar on the teeth, one gathers, is Evil?"calcified hate." Parallels are drawn?and stretched?between...