Freas's Probabilities

 

Here, probably, is The Probability Man (1972) and Kelly Frea's art thereunto. So: in Ball’s 29th century future, humanity has conquered the stars, but billions of people are extremely bored. They are entertained in ‘Frames’: not immersive virtual realities, but technology that alters actual reality, and which uses whole planets to re-stage and mash together wars from human history in which people take part, and so escape their ennui. They may die, but that's a small price to for Entertainment. Ball's premise enables a whacky mangling of human forms, different epochs, aliens, monsters and oddness.

For example: the human protagonist has been remade as a devil, with horns and a prehensile tail. The female lead has gigantic butterfly wings. There is a robot, who belongs to the protagonist. Our hero has forgotten his actual name and former life, so calls himself Springan. He is fighting in a Frame-y recreation of the 1340 Siege of Tournai when he begins to recover his memories, and realises he is far more important, and must travel to the forbidden planet of Talisker to uncover the mystery behind the Frames. Frank Kelly Freas’s cover-art faithfully reproduces these bizarrities. His cover looks like a random assemblage of surreal items, but is in fact carefully mimetic. Freas also painted the cover for Ball's follow-up novel, Planet of Probability (1973):

I don't need to dive into the hectic surrealism of Ball's storytelling (Springan prone and tied-up, the robot again, a 16th-century Conquistador, brightness falling from the air and a shapely woman scintillating into existence) to confirm thar Freas has again simply illustrated what the novel, madly, does. But this image, vibrantly rendered though it is, raises another issue. The female figure has, manifestly, been painted nude, and then a series of black-font lines, starbursts and flame-figures have been overlaid, by way of pacifying the puritanical pudeur of 1950s America. The result is a disconcerting peekaboo muddle, neither modestly decent nor honestly erotic. That Freas has evidently added letraset transfers, rubbed over the paintwork of his cheesecake nude, makes the image stranger.

Kenneth Clarke's classic study of nakedness in art, The Nude: A Study in Ideal Form (1956), makes the distinction between nakedness and nudity:

The nude gains its enduring value from the fact that it reconciles several contrary states. It takes the most sensual and immediately interesting object, the human body, and puts it out of reach of time and desire; it takes the most purely rational concept of which man is capable, mathematical order, and makes it a delight to the senses; and it takes the vague fears of the unknown and sweetens them by showing that the gods are like men and may be worshipped for their life-giving beauty rather than their death-dealing powers.

Freas, here, and elsewhere in his body of work that often incudes shapely women in states of strategic undress or barely concealed nakedness, is not putting his figures out of reach of time and desire. Indeed, it is the almost-naked status of these figures that makes them so lubricious. A straightforward total nude would be less salacious.