Tarr

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-desctruction. When both become interested in the same two women -Bertha Lunken, a conventional German, and Anastasya Vasek, the ultra-modern international devotee of "swagger sex"-Wyndham Lewis sets the stage for a scathing satire of national and social pretensions, the fraught relationship between men and women, and the incompatibilities of art and life.