Nightmare Alley

A crucified man whose body had been pierced again and again by long knives and large nails hung last week on canvas in Beverly Hills' Frank Perls Gallery. Near him, in another painting, a green nude was trussed up and suspended like a sheep being carted off to slaughter. Equally ghoulish was the subject matter of most of the pictures in the exhibition--but undeniable power showed in their uninhibited color and eerie distortions.

The paintings were the work of tall, gaunt James Strombotne, 26, one of the most promising of the young figurative artists now working around Los Angeles. Such Hollywood-type collectors as Otto Preminger, Andre Previn and Billy Wilder own canvases by him, and so does Manhattan's Whitney Museum. Strombotne is featured in Art in America's annual "New Talent, U.S.A.," and the Pasadena Art Museum is planning the most precocious honor of all--a full-fledged retrospective next fall.

In person Strombotne (his paternal grandparents were Norwegian) is mild enough, a considerate father (two small children) who starts each day with the sports section. But on canvas he becomes something else. He describes himself as "angry or outraged, either word will do," and, like most angry young men, shoots his outrage off in all directions. His hero is the persecuted individual, his villain the persecuting mass; he senses "instances of inhumanity all around me." A newspaper story, a political campaign, a photograph in a book--anything may trigger a painting. Says Strombotne: "I react violently to practically everything."

An apparently innocent and light-hearted scene called Yo-Yo turns out to be quite sinister: the Lolita-like girl with the Yo-Yo flaunts her body seductively while an old man with chalk-white face and sunburned bare legs leers and chortles. In The Bath, an orange-colored woman sits by a potbellied male whose nude body has the color of death and whose face is covered with purple squiggles suggesting decay. Even Strombotne's self-portrait--an elongated figure with beard and dark glasses--seems tortured. The wrists are crossed as if waiting to be manacled; the stance is stiff and tense. "This," says Strombotne, "represents the tension that is in me and the strain that flows through every man."

At times, his canvases seem to be the work of one motivated more by a desire to shock than by compassion for suffering mankind. But at their best they have, even in their sledgehammer bluntness, a rare subtlety. "What I want in my work," says Strombotne, "is beauty, power and mystery. Each word in capitals. Real beauty, real power--plus mystery. I want my pictures to be specific as hell, but enigmatic too."

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