Art: Master Machinist

In a machine age, few artists have found inspiration in the machine. Some, seeing it only as cold and impersonal steel, portrayed it with stark realism; others, fearing it, blew it to pieces in abstracts and cubes. Russian-born Boris Artzybasheff brought the machine to life, endowed it with personality, sex—and even ulcers.

This week Artzybasheff publishes his first book of drawings and paintings, As I See (Dodd, Mead; $7.50). With good-and ill-humored grotesqueries, he pokes at modern man’s neuroses, pretensions and follies. But the hard core of his book is a gallery of his humanized turret lathes, planers and millers. Looking at his portrayal of dutiful monsters, complete with attentive eyes and busy hands, laymen as well as engineers usually can understand at a glance what both Artzybasheff and the machines have on their minds.

Artzybasheff, who was born in Kharkov (1899), the son of a well-to-do Russian author, began to doodle with grotesque and weird creatures as a schoolboy. He had. just entered law school—to round out his education—when the Communist revolution caught up with him. Escaping to a Black Sea port, he signed on a ship that he thought was bound for Ceylon, but ended up in New York with 14¢ worth of Turkish money in his pocket, spent his 20th birthday on Ellis Island.

In Manhattan he served a rigorous apprenticeship, drawing border ornaments for a printer, even did some house painting. In 1922 he got a commission to do the murals for a Russian nightclub, and his fiery red devils and blue Byzantine angels created a mild stir. Soon he was in demand as a designer and illustrator. Once established, he began to try out some of the ideas defended from his old grotesque doodles, and caught the eye and fancy of the critics. Among his commissions: charts and graphs for FORTUNE, cover drawings for TIME, and a famous series of drawings of World War II weapons for LIFE.

Today Artzybasheff divides his time between his own advanced doodling (i.e., more grotesqueries) and the heavy demands of clients who believe that he is the machine age’s best interpreter. Success has brought one particularly vexing headache: inevitably, some of his sexier animations and distortions have offered a field day for amateur psychoanalysts. Says he: “I get irritated with those damn Freudians. They try to see something in everything. I think there is something wrong with their minds!