Collaboration of Two Artists, Nin and Telberg

"AND she danced; she danced with the music and with the rhythm of earth's circles; she turned with the earth turning, like a disk, turning all faces to light and to darkness evenly, dancing towards daylight."

Anais Nin's first novel, "House of Incest" (1936), ends with this verbal image of release. A later edition of the book, published in 1958, does not, however, end with words, but rather with a visual image, a photomontage by Val Telberg of Sag Harbor. The picture portrays a nude dancer, her wide-flung arms solarized into torches. Superimposed on her torso are blades of grass, and behind the dancing figure is a beckoning doorway.

Nin, who died in 1977 at 73, is best known for her seven volumes of diaries written from 1914 to 1974. When she saw Mr. Telberg's work in 1950, Nin detected a kindred spirit. "She loved his photographs and decided he should illustrate 'House of Incest,' " said Sheryl Conkelton, associate curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art.

Theirs was a remarkable collaboration of two artists from different disciplines who produced a hybrid work of art combining words and pictures. " 'House of Incest' is the best thing Nin ever did, and Telberg's photomontages really capture the dreamlike state and Surrealist mood," said Benjamin Franklin 5th, a professor of English at the University of South Carolina and an expert on Nin's work.

Nin described Mr. Telberg's photography as a "spiritual X-ray." After seeing his images for her book, she wrote, "I have a feeling you have done it, . . . captured the book's intent without illustrating." In another letter she added, "Your montages are poetic in their own terms -- in their own language." Conference and Exhibition

Mr. Telberg and Nin worked in different media, but they had much in common. Both were cosmopolitan and attracted to Surrealism.

Nin was born in France in 1903, the daughter of musicians. Her Cuban father was a celebrated pianist and composer who deserted the family when Anais was 11. She began her diary on a boat to America, in an attempt to win him back.

Mr. Telberg, was born in Moscow in 1910 before the Russian revolution, was the child of a mother who was an artist and a father who was the last prime minister of Siberia before the Bolshevik takeover. The family fled to Korea and Japan before settling in China, where Mr. Telberg grew up.

Trained as a chemist, he moved to New York in 1938 and began studying painting under artists like George Grosz in 1942 at the Art Students League. A part-time job developing photographs soon lured him away from painting.

"Photography was faster," Mr. Telberg, 84, said in an interview. "The space between conception and performance is very short in photography. Photomontage is more exciting, more immediate than oil painting, which is very laborious." Debt to Abstract Expressionists

His darkroom technique owes much to the improvisatory style of the Abstract Expressionists. "Their attitude of experimentation with new visions and new images appealed to me," he said.

Mr. Telberg created his montages from a stockpile of negatives that he sandwiched together on a lightbox, without preconceived notions of a final product. In a method akin to free association, he layered a variety of negatives in different configurations as a leaping-off point that evolves into a finished composition.

"Val works in the darkroom the way a painter works in the studio," said Jim Richard Wilson, director of the Rathbone Gallery at Sage Junior College in Albany, which originated the exhibition of Mr. Telberg's work.(1994)

Like Nin, Mr. Telberg was interested in Surrealism. "What appealed to me was magic and anything unusual," said the photographer, who was friends with surrealist artists like Pavel Tchelitchew, Salvador Dali and the film maker Maya Deren.

"Val was happy to be included with the Surrealists, because they welcome accidents, use the unconscious, and act on dreams," a photographer, Warren Padula, said.

"But he was not part of a defined group." Mr. Padula, who curated a show of Mr. Telberg's photomontages for the Art House Odeon Gallery in Sag Harbor, added. "He's an American original."

Nin was part of a Parisian literary group in the 30's that included writers like Antonin Artaud, Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. "Surrealism," she wrote, "was part of the air we breathed." In "House of Incest," Nin tried to represent the subconscious, based on Jung's dictum to "proceed from the dream outward."

"Nin's greatest contribution was to liberate women through her diary. She opened doors to let women reveal their personal lives," said Suzanne Nalbantian, a professor of English and comparative literature at the C. W. Post campus of L.I.U. "Nin was seductive, erotic, very 20th-century and expressed herself with a freedom that is liberating."

Ms. Nalbantian, organizer of the conference on Nin, wrote "Aesthetic Autobiography" (St. Martin's), dealing with Nin's work.

Nin and Mr. Telberg shared an interest in avant-garde film making. When they met in 1950, "I was yearning to become a film maker, but I couldn't afford the equipment," Mr. Telberg recalled.

Instead he adapted cinematic effects like dissolve and jump-cut to still photography. "Val's photomontages have the feeling of movement that you find in cinema," said his wife, Lelia Katayen, a dancer and choreographer. "They take you from one image in time or place to another until they blend."

"Some critics say a Telberg photomontage is like a whole movie shown simultaneously in one frame," Mr. Padula noted.

Mr. Telberg contributed to a pioneering film, "Between Two Worlds" (1952), directing a dance sequence of superimposed frames projected simultaneously. The photographer also collaborated with Nin's husband, Ian Hugo, an experimental film maker, on the multi-image film "Bells of Atlantis" (1952), based on "House of Incest" and narrated by Nin.

After their brief alliance the careers of the artists diverged. Before her first diary gained acclaim when published in 1966, Nin had great difficulty publishing her novels. Even after she bought a printing press and produced her own editions in Greenwich Village in the 40's, Nin could not persuade critics to review her books.

In the 70's, however, she became a cult figure, a frequent speaker on the college circuit. She was considered a heroine of the women's movement, even though her brand of feminism was nondoctrinaire. Cacharel named a perfume, Anais, after the writer, and a film, "Henry and June," portrayed her friendship with Miller and his wife.

The conference at L.I.U. will offer further evidence of Nin's celebrity. Scholars from around the United States and as far away as Japan will debate Nin's fiction in terms of psychoanalysis and eroticism. Her brother Joaquin Nin-Culmell, a musician, will deliver the keynote address, friends will offer reminiscences, and her husband's films will be screened.

In contrast to Nin's fame, Mr. Telberg was not widely known, even though hewas an important figure in this country for creative, as opposed to "straight" or documentary, photography. His work appears in major collections like the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty Museum, but his emotion-laden evocative montages, in which images merge like watercolor, never fit the former fashion for realism.

"I was interested in dream images," Mr. Telberg said. "I was considered crazy."

A 1983 retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Art paid homage to his montages, but difficulty in classifying his oeuvre delayed recognition. "He doesn't belong in the painter's field, and yet his work is like a painting," his wife said. "Nobody knew where to place him."

"Poets were more interested in my work than photographers," Mr. Telberg said, adding that he was friends in Greenwich Village, before moving to Sag Harbor in 1959, with New York School poets like Frank O'Hara, Kenneth Koch and John Ashbery and the musician John Cage.

O'Hara, an art critic as well as poet, called Mr. Telberg "a painter who turned to photography in order to accomplish the pictures he could not find in paint."

"I try," Mr. Telberg said 40 years ago, "to invent a completely unreal world, new, free and truthful."

source: NY Times archive, museum of New Mexico/fine art, MOMA's web site