Beyond Nightmare

Beauty has never been the exclusive subject of artists, or even their aim. As poets and painters have discovered over the centuries, hell is far more dramatic than heaven. Most painters look with an equal eye on both, as the fancy moves them. But some few, and among them some of the great, have had an ob session for the ugly, and seemed intent on making it uglier. Like T. S. Eliot's Webster, they always saw the skull be neath the loveliest skin. In a time when many artists have become so detached that they try to banish the figure al together, and sculptors can order their works from the nearest hardware store, a growing number of gifted artists are deeply and emotionally committed to ex pressing their distaste for the world, embodying their rage and resentment in powerful if often ugly images.

Many of these new "horror" artists have been well received in gallery exhibitions during the past year or so. Manhattan's Whitney Museum is planning to put together an exhibition of the work of a number of them in the autumn, although Associate Curator Robert Doty does not regard the show as a trend setter. "There's been a continuous stream of this kind of expressionistic art from the Romanesque period on ward," says he. "Look at Goya. Look at Bosch." For that matter, look at Chicago's Ivan Albright, California's Edward Kienholz, or New York's Lucas Samaras.

Fantasy Window. One outstanding member of the "new grotesques" is Gregory Gillespie, 32, a native of New Jersey who now lives in Rome and shows at Manhattan's Forum Gallery. Gilles pie, who first went to Italy on a Fulbright in 1963, paints with tempera and oil on wood panels, as did Bellini and Giorgione, and loves Renaissance perspective. He limns tiny images of skinned-looking women or bloated, lecherous men as zestfully as Bosch him self, and sets them against the wall of a squalid Roman slum. Surrealistically oozing globules and pustules contrast with saints' pictures and comic-book illustrations. The result is an emphatically modern version of everyday hell, but it is more than merely nightmare for its own sake. The squalor usually serves to set off the loveliness of some ver dant Tuscan mountain landscape, distantly viewed. Of Exterior Wall with Landscape, he observes, "One might say that the window is the fantasy and the wall is reality. Every idyllic vision is out of the window and far away."

Nancy Grossman, 29, a petite (5 ft., 95 lbs.) bundle of compressed fiber, is an other leading member of the new horror school. Her specialty: wooden heads, tightly leather-wrapped. She came to this image when she returned to New York City after the family tried farming in upstate New York. "I noticed how fragile people are. I saw how the human animal has to limit himself to live in our society--how he has to tie up any feelings he has that might upset the applecart."

She went to Brooklyn's Pratt Institute, won a Guggenheim for travel abroad, enjoyed a healthy success this season at Manhattan's Cordier & Ekstrom Gallery. She considers her heads, among other things, a kind of social commentary. "Look at the censored faces in the street," she says. "You can almost see people saying, I'm not going to be caught feeling.' My figures feel right because they're all tied down. They may look frightening at first--after I had done a few, I ran out of my studio. Then I began to see how defenseless they were."

Underwater Prophet. Brooklyn-born Paul Thek, 35, was an early member of the Grand Guignol club. He showed exquisitely molded wax sculptures of raw gobbets of flesh ;n 1964 and 1965. In 1967 he expanded his repertory to display a full-sized cast of himself at Manhattan's Stable Gallery dressed -as a dead hippie and laid out full length inside a pink ziggurat-shaped tomb. The cadaver was a huge success; it toured to London and the Kassel Documenta. For his show at the Stable this spring, he chose a far subtler and less sensational idea: a latex cast showing himself as an underwater swimmer with shoals of delicate small fish clinging to his sides. It was suspended from a tree in the backyard, seeming somehow both pathetic and portentous, like a drowning prophet. Says Thek: "I didn't make it to be beautiful or ugly, or bad or good. I just do it because I like it. It doesn't matter how the public reacts."

Miriam Beerman, 46, lives in Brooklyn, where her husband teaches high school. She paints such pretty topics as shrieking faces, jackals and concentration-camp victims because, as she says forthrightly, "I've always been furious at the world." Born in Providence, Mrs. Beerman studied under Yasuo Kuniyoshi at Manhattan's Art Students League before taking off to France to immerse herself in Goya, the German expressionists, and (as her painting style shows) Britain's Francis Bacon. She is fascinated by the "natural world," and has done a series of paintings on fish, bats, owls. At the moment, she is preoccupied with lizards, which, she says, "look like man in certain stages. The drippings you'll find in my paintings are characteristic of the mire men and animals find themselves in." She quotes Flannery O'Connor to the effect that "what people consider grotesque is really reality, and what they think is reality is grotesque." Adds Mrs. Beerman: "I'm in full agreement. I really feel that I'm depicting reality. People ask me if I have bad dreams. No. These paintings that I do are my bad dreams."

Extra Ear. Of all the grotesque artists at work today, perhaps the ones with the soundest and most logical reasons for being angry at the world are Vienna's five "Fantastic Realists": Rudolf Hausner, Erich Brauer, Ernst Fuchs, Wolfgang Mutter, Anton Lehmden. All underwent the real enough traumas of World War II. By what may or may not be coincidence, their admirably precise diableries are also gentler, more conventional, more philosophical, more ethereal than their American counterparts'. Though all are firmly established in their native Vienna, none had made much of a splash elsewhere until London's Marlborough Gallery mounted a show for Erich Brauer this spring.

A sometime poet who plays a mean folk guitar in his spare time, Brauer, 40, considers his paintings essentially literary. As often as not, they depict bizarre updatings of Biblical themes: Jacob in the khaki of a kibbutznik, Noah's ark floating through the air like a UFO.

Looking Back, Brauer explains, deals "again with the problem of digesting the past. The red shape is a gas chamber, but in order to live with it, I paint it beautiful. The green man looks back at it indirectly, through a mirror. The little monsters are like the people who seemed to me monsters when I walked the streets of Vienna as a boy during the war." On the other hand, the green man has holes in his shoes simply because "it makes the feet more interesting." The folds of his trousers swirl into an extra ear. "Why not have an extra ear in one's trousers, to hear better and different things?" Brauer's point is that any man may feel green from time to time. When he does, an extra ear would be a help--but probably not enough.

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