The nearest the general run get to art is Action: sex is their form of art: the battle for existence is their picture.'Tarr tells the blackly comic story of the lives and loves of two artists, played out against the backdrop of Paris before the start of the First World War - the English enfant terrible Frederick Tarr, and the middle-aged German Otto Kreisler, a failed painter who finds himself in a widening spiral of militaristic self-destruction. When both become interested in the same two women - Bertha Lunken, a conventional German, and Anastasya Vasek, the ultra-modern internationaldevotee.… (more)