Mixmaster

Berlin-born Karl Zerbe, who dislikes oils, has painted with egg yolk, casein, fig milk, wax soap, Duco auto enamel and hot beeswax. His wax technique--a revival of the ancient encaustic method in which colors are mixed with hot wax and afterwards cooked into the canvas--brought him critical acclaim. But in 1949, things began to go wrong. Zerbe started suffering from asthma, found that he was allergic to beeswax.

Painter Zerbe set out to find a new medium. The answer was polymer tempera, a plastic mixture developed by one of Zerbe's former students at the Boston Museum's art school. Polymer tempera is made by mixing polyvinyl acetate, a bland white plastic (which is also used as a binder for paper diapers), with softener and ammonia. The result is a fast-drying medium as easy to handle as gouache but with as much body as oil. Last week 16 of Zerbe's new plastic paintings were on view at Manhattan's Alan Gallery. Painter Zerbe, 50, had changed more than his medium.

The new paintings were markedly more abstract than his earlier work. There was an architectural quality about most of them, expressed in long, vertical-lined backgrounds that gave a skyscraper dimension to his compositions. In Janitor, one of the show's best items, Zerbe set an old man with vertically furrowed face and sharply structural features against a background of high buildings. The man's face seems to be made of the same rough masonry as the building; Zerbe mixes mica, sand or flint with his plastic to give a rougher surface. Three Doors is a semi-abstraction in quiet reds, mauves and greens which conveys the dilapidated dignity of the hallways of old brownstone tenements.

The critics were pleased, and so was Zerbe. He has not yet tried mixing his paints with rose water, uranium or pate de foie gras, and, for the time being, at least, he intends to stick to polymer tempera.

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