Art: Blood and Valves

Visitors at Manhattan’s Perls Galleries last week walked into two small rooms full of blood. Blood trickled over bare bosoms and in a pattern of veins up & down the stomach of a lady, whose only leg was a gigantic sausage that tapered off into a yawning volcano. Blood also oozed from the terrifying eye of an outsize male head. Blood was conspicuous in nearly all Painter Frederick Haucke’s 20 nightmarish oils.

Son of a diamond mining engineer, Painter Haucke was born in Kimberley, South Africa, in 1908. He came to the U.S. as a child, later studied psychology in New York University. He was preparing his doctor’s thesis at Yale, on a teaching fellowship, when he decided to marry one of his former pupils and to abandon psychology for painting. Yale objected to both decisions. Result: Mr. and Mrs. ‘Haucke rented a cottage near New Haven, lived on home-raised vegetables and $5 a week. When war came, Haucke thought he ought to take some part in it. So he got a job with Bethlehem Shipbuilding’s Staten Island Yard, now works ten hours a night repairing valves on torpedo-gashed ships. Valves stimulate Haucke so much that he paints whenever he is not working, sometimes sleeps only two hours a night.

Haucke has never had a painting lesson. Constantly referred to as a surrealist, he points out: “The difference is that I paint the things I know, while they paint only the things they read.”