Beauty in the Bizarre

Paul Wunderlich by any other name would be extraordinary, but the fact that in German wunderlich means strange, wondrous, bizarre is a stroke of poetic justice. More elegant than Beardsley, more graphic than Gruenewald, more phantasmic than many of the Surrealists, his work is at once sensuous and intellectual, erotic and macabre, pungently realistic and wickedly funny.

He has long been recognized as one of the greatest graphic artists Germany ever produced; yet his reputation in New York and Paris has been largely underground, as if knowing collectors and cognoscenti loathed sharing his limited output. In any case, Wunderlich's fame has now risen above ground and is spreading fast. Aquarius Press in New York has just published a suite of his lithographs based on Solomon's Song of Songs. Next week his first U.S. exhibition of paintings opens at Manhattan's Staempfli Gallery. In June he will be accorded a retrospective in the Print Biennale at Paris' Musee d'Art Moderne.

Calculating Man. At 43, Wunderlich acts more like a successful stockbroker than a bizarre artist. He wheels around Hamburg in an expensive British car, wears imported shirts and shoes, often paints wearing a necktie. He likes money and does not hesitate to say so. He declares with a playful glint in his eye: "I am accused of being a calculating man, and I am. I know that there are very few graphic artists in the world who are as good as I am."

Born in Berlin, the son of a Luftwaffe colonel, he was drafted at 17 and sent to Denmark. Back in Hamburg after the war, he entered the Academy of Fine Arts. There his gift in graphics was quickly recognized, and he was invited to stay on and teach. In 1960, he became something of a cause celebre when Hamburg police found his "qui s'explique" lithographs of lovemaking couples too explicit and closed the show. Undaunted, Wunderlich set off for Paris to work with the master lithographer Jacques Desjobert.

In 1966, Wunderlich began collaborating with Karin Szekessy, a professional photographer of fashions and nudes. Surveying a mass of Karin's nude blowups, he found that there were usually one or two that fascinated him, and he began using them as a point of departure. The dramatic metamorphosis may often be traced from photograph to print to painting in such works as The Red Flower and Interior. A brunette model in an easy chair is likely to wind up as a tangle-haired Medusa, just as thoroughly transformed as the two lovelies waltzing through colored smoke rings in The Chase, which is purest fantasy.

Death in Life. For all the velvety opulence of his colors, it is the human figure that stands at the center of Wunderlich's art. In his earlier works, it was tortured and twisted, shorn of limbs, reduced to a skeleton, provoking comparisons with Duerer and Cranach, Redon and Bellmer. Death, he seemed to say, is in all life, deformity in all beauty, and behind the erotic daydream is the ever-present nightmare of flesh doomed to decay. Today, his figures appear more whole, more sensuous, more magnetic. Love has banished dreadful death.

"I 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 Decollete. 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."

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