Realms of the Unreal, BAM!

High brow culture awaits the common man

on free admission day at the Berkeley Art Museum

Shall we stroll through the mind of Charles Howard

then plunge into the absolute Bardo

Ladies and Gentlemen

hold on to you flip flops

On an earlier visit

I remarked that my impression

of Howard was Surrealism

with the nightmare removed

unconscious drives and anxiety resolved

into decoration

This was to the illustrious Mr Selz

 a founder of the museum

and to a gentlemen who assisted him,

We happened to coalesce in conversation,

But I realized upon closer inspection

that an anguished central portrait

is discernible in several works

He got better when he discovered

Noir

Otherwise one is inclined to view him

as a gifted illustrator

and something of a pasticheur

It's not difficult to identify ideas and motifs

from the European artists whose work

represented one of the more significant

revolutions in art or ant-art

They recall paintings seen as set design

in films of the period

dealing in psychoanalyzed chic,

Dali's dream sequence

for Hitchcock's Spellbound,

In advertising and in book design,

Painters studios in b-movies

and in Video Noir TV

Inescapable

religious suggestion

a Roualt crucifixion

the corpse

removed from the cross

Echoes of Man Ray

and Dali's May West couch

foretells Wessleman

A nice economy to this

a chance meeting of an umbrella

and a sewing machine

on a dissecting table,

illustration for a soigne

affluent ladies magazine

This work suggests

Hieronymus Bosch

familiar surational

figure as landscape

in Garden of Earthly Delight

Sexual symbolism

rears its torso on the left

A pierou cartoon figure

at center

Son of the patriarchal architect

of Berkeley's university

He seemed to have led a charmed life

with study in Paris,

He looks jolly in photos

Early work

Cubist-surrealism

The cigar

if it is only a cigar

was unfortunate

di Chirico would know

Ernst comes to mind

look into the glass onion

Slapstick pareidolia,

I'll add this thrift store find

not to embarrass Howard

but to shame BAM,

That cartoon face might

have evaded detection

in simpler times

Suppose it's his version

of the Giaconda

Few Surrealist artists could pass Andre Breton's

 theoretically rigorous identification process,

Howard surely would not

and perhaps would be

more accurately described

as a fellow traveler

Non-Euclidian

EXIT

sign

The mind's eye

made visible

a terrible vision

 the clear light of

the void

O I dig the skulls

Conch

they have elaborate

life-long rituals

in which step-by-step

they methodically

blow their minds

I twig

I tag along

absorbing by osmosis

Charles Howard

as Bodhidharma

How

I see myself

sometimes

Tibetan ritual items

bell and double dorge

Two-faces have I

7 September 2017