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'The nearest the general run get to art is Action: sex is their form of art: the battle for existence is their picture.'Tarr tells the blackly comic story of the lives and loves of two artists, played out against the backdrop of Paris before the start of the First World War - the English enfant terrible Frederick Tarr, and the middle-aged German Otto Kreisler, a failed painter who finds himself in a widening spiralof militaristic self-destruction. When both become interested in the same two women - Bertha Lunken, a conventional German, and Anastasya Vasek, the ultra-modern international devotee of 'swagger sex' - Wyndham Lewis sets the stage for a scathing satire of national and social pretensions, thefraught relationship between men and women, and the incompatibilities of art and life.In his introduction and notes Scott W. Klein explores Lewis's stylistic experimentation within the context of avant-garde movements in painting, and offers new insights into Tarr as a work of mordent wit and enduringly ferocious irony.… (more)
Media reviews
Human beings are enjoyed as the dangerous animals who are determined - whatever fairy tales they may tell themselves or others - to have their cake and eat it. They are dangerous because they dream, and dreams create an inflated physical world. Human nature is disgraceful; the only thing to be said for it is that it may produce a little, a very little, Art... In Kreisler cadging, scrounging, loving, fighting, crawling back, breaking up parties and ending in murder and suicide, he has created a permanent character. (The fact is he created Hitler.) It is a strange experience to put down a masterpiece in which one has had the impression of not only knowing the characters but of giving them a pinch all over to see if they were ready for the comic pot of life on earth.
User reviews
In plot, it deals with a group of four characters – two male, two female – in what Lewis coins as the Bourgeois Bohemian set. As an exemplar of the abstract geometrical principles of Vorticism, their actions over the course of the novel have a quasi-symmetrical rhythm, changing, maintaining balance, and yet going nowhere. With the Vorticist manifesto being a structured rebuttal to the Futurist manifesto, it is interesting to see here Lewis embodying on occasion the two different styles in his characters. He does this both through their actions, and more cleverly in his style of language when describing them, achieving with some success a parallel to the techniques of painting or visual representation. It is also partly meant to be a discussion on the incompatibility of art and life, but is at least as much a social satire and black comedy.
As a novel that was written over a hundred years ago now, it still feels experimental and modern. This is perhaps because not much quite like it has been written since, with contemporary culture never quite absorbing his style in the same way it did with that of better-known modernist writers. There are various reasons for not liking this novel, which have probably prevented its wider popularity, including brutal elements, and generally unlikeable characters. Thankfully this edition was well-footnoted, which helped a lot with the anachronistic references that have not aged well.