Books: The Fleshly Muse

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The Sunday paintings of D. H. Lawrence have long been a source of licentious but frustrated fascination because few people have ever seen them. I put a phallus in each one of my pictures somewhere," Lawrence told a painter friend, "and I paint no picture that won't shock people's castrated social, spirituality." The London police obliged by closing up Lawrence's first showing in 1929. Now, at last collected and vended by Viking Press (Paintings of D. H. Lawrence; $12.50), the long-forbidden fruit proves to have been outdated by onrushing realism. There is a sampling of candid nudes, but the approach is less pornographic or primitive than merely earnest. In the artistic output of Lawrence, 10,000 pictures would have been worth less than one word.

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