Art: Picture Cooker

Most artists are fussy about their paints, but few go to such lengths as Berlin-born Karl Zerbe. His pictures, which hang in 21 U.S. museums, are painted in colors mixed with hot beeswax over a stove, and afterwards cooked into the canvas with an electric heater. The Greeks had a word for it: encaustic. The Egyptians and Greeks liked encaustic for its permanency, used it for murals and mummy portraits. But since the 10th Century few painters had bothered with it.

Zerbe, 43, never liked the paint that comes from tubes. Since his student days at Frankfurt (where he studied chemistry), he had tried all the usual mediums, as well as egg yolk, casein, fig milk, wax soap and Duco automobile enamel. Zerbe got around to encaustic six years ago. He liked its fast-drying, refulgent surface. In 1934 Zerbe moved to the U.S.—out of Hitler’s way. The Boston Museum school of art made him a teacher.

Last week 21 Zerbe paintings were on view in a Manhattan gallery, and a Boston gallery displayed the work of 31 Zerbe students and twelve of his admirers. Manhattan critics went overboard for Zerbe’s crisp, quiet cityscapes, still life jam-packed with unlikely objects, sombre circus pictures, and portraits in costume such as Aging Harlequin (see cut). According to the New York Times, the show was like “a crescendo roll of drums . . . puissant, clear, resourceful, uncluttered.” As technical fireworks, each painting had proper sparkle. Did any of them also “mean anything”? Said Zerbe complacently: “If you are bright you can also enjoy the symbolism.”