American writer Henry Miller (1891-1980) [pictured here in the mid 30s] celebrated Bohemian ex-pat life in Paris in the early 1900’s, as deliciously depicted in such novel-memoirs as Tropic of Cancer.
Another ex-pat in Paris at the time was the Hungarian artist Emeric Timar (1898-1950) who was inspired enough by Miller’s accounts to create expressionist lithographs with a surrealist edge capturing the raw sexuality that permeates pretty well everything Miller wrote. They were made in 1949.
Presented here juxtaposed with the sombre looking Miller is Timar's “The American Girl” in water colour. Miller apparently disliked them, perhaps because for the title page vignette Timar drew Miller with a penis for a nose.
Everything is packed into a second which is either consummated or not consummated. The earth is not an arid plateau of health and comfort, but a great sprawling female with velvet torso that swells and heaves with ocean billows; she squirms beneath a diadem of sweat and anguish. Naked and sexed she rolls among the clouds in the violet light of the stars. All of her, from her generous breasts to her gleaming thighs, blazes with furious ardor. She moves amongst the seasons and the years with a grand whoopla that seizes the torso with paroxysmal fury, that shakes the cobwebs out of the sky; she subsides on her pivotal orbits with volcanic tremors. She is like a doe at times, a doe that has fallen into a snare and lies waiting with beating heart for the cymbals to crash and the dogs to bark. Love and hate, despair, pity, rage, disgust”what are these amidst the fornications of the planets? What is war, disease, cruelty, terror, when night presents the ecstasy of myriad blazing suns? What is this chaff we chew in our sleep if it is not the remembrance of fangwhorl and star cluster. (excerpt from 'Tropic of Cancer')
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