The Hulbecks

     The sight that Charles R. Hulbeck displays before our eyes is a
somber one: cosmic fruits that bear their skeletons on their peel,
  stones that think strenuously, covered with yellow, blue, and green
scars, wartlike protuberances, umbilical craters,
  demoniacal globes with beating gray-leather wings that will never
escape rebirth, samsara,
  cubist clouds with enormous black eggs for hearts,
  stars very different from Anaximander's stars and which Aetius says
are nailed to the ice of the heavenly vault,
  stars which, restless and immortal, drift forever through infinity.
  These are the playthings in an enigmatic world that Hulbeck, the
neomelancholic, spreads before us.

  As long as he has lived on our earthly pastures, Hulbeck has led a
far from monotonous life.  He made his debut as a dada herald and poet,*
accompanying his Fantastic Prayers with a loud booming on a bass drum.
As a ship's doctor and reporter, he sailed around the world.  With the
advent of Hitler he was forced to flee with his wife and his child to
the United States, where he lived a novel that is the stuff best sellers
are made of.  Eventually he devoted himself to poetry again, wrote The New
York Cantos, and founded the "Hulbeck" dynasty of painters.

  Beate Hulbeck tears up silk paper, multicolored paper, water colors,
colored pictures in magazines.  The light and the dark, peace and agi-
tation, color and pallor supply join forces just as nature weaves itself
a wreath of seashores, mountains, rivers, rubbish, decaying matter, 
flowers, and forests.
  It all seethes beneath the skin of the landscape.
  White serpents drip.
  The train of a miracle worker's robe becomes phosphorescent.
  The papier déchiré is a passage from art to nature.  Art exists in it
only by a light touch of the hand.  The papier déchiré is as beautiful
as nature, and as perfect.  Birth and disappearance are natural to it and
devoid of tragedy.  An infinite largeness is contained in an infinite
smallness like a bouquet gathered by a child of man.

  Tom Hulbeck changes Archimedes' warning "Don't disturb my compasses"
to "Don't put away my glasses, my saucers, my plates with which I trace
out my circles and draw my constructions!"  Crystals delight in his work
and the serene spirits of the Lissitzkys, the Moholys, the Sophie Taeubers
flirt gently with him.

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