A to Z of Artists Writing and Writers in Art Part III

Earlier this year, the Nottingham based Staple Magazine published an issue on the theme of writing in relation to visual art, with writings by artists (including Mik Godley, Simon Withers and Errol Lloyd) set alongside artworks by Ellen Bell, an interview with Cornelia Parker, and poetry and short fiction on themes connected to visual art by Mark Czanik, Mel Fawcett, Peter Porter, Robert Vas Dias and Fawzia Kane, among many others. This is the third installment of the 'A to Z' which attempts to fill in some further background to that issue’s interests, expanding the territory beyond the pages of the magazine, and deliberately avoiding any attempt at comprehensiveness. Many key names are omitted (how can it be otherwise when ‘B’ alone could have been Breton, Bourgeois or Barthes?) and many minor and lesser known figures included in the hope that the range and richness of the field is somehow represented in a relatively small space. More information on Staple 71: The Art Issue, and future publications, can be found at: www.staplemagazine.bigcartel.com

L is for…Life, or Theatre? 

Born in 1917 and killed in Auschwitz as a young woman (probably in 1943, but the exact date is unknown) Charlotte Salomon’s autobiography Life, or Theatre? was created during two years of intense work between 1939 and 1942. The completed series consists of 769 gouache paintings and a slightly smaller number of painted texts in German, and together these tell the story of Salomon’s upbringing in Berlin’s interwar Jewish intellectual circles, her problematic relationship with an artist, and her own experience of the changes within German society during the years covered by her narrative. The work survives only because its 1,325 pages were passed for safekeeping to a village doctor in 1942, and kept by him until the material was finally brought to wider public attention in 1971. Published with English translations a decade later, Life or Theatre? (the title comes from Salomon’s conviction that her art elevates her life into a kind of dramatic performance) is now acknowledged as a unique and largely unclassifiable enterprise, standing somewhere between a prototype graphic novel, a compelling work of historical witness and a hand-made film storyboard.  

M is for…Michaux 

Henri Michaux (1899 - 1984) was a French artist and writer whose works frequently blur the distinction between written and visual creation, as the writings eschew conventional narrative and poetic form in favour of statements, abstraction and visual imagery, and the paintings - sometimes executed under the influence of mescalin - take the form of illegible calligraphic texts. One of the keys figures bridging pre-war Surrealist automatism, the materialist l’art informel of postwar Europe, and the gestural Abstract Expressionism of the New York school during the 1950s, Michaux remains as distinctive and singular a figure in painting as his contemporary Jean Dubuffet, and his many writings have been championed and translated by such notable American experimental poets as Ron Padgett and John Ashbery. 

N is for…Nadja  

Andre Breton’s best known book appeared in 1928, and presents a reflective account of Breton’s encounter with a woman now formally (if only partially - her surname remains elusive) identified as Leona Camille Ghislaine D, who adopted the name Nadja as “it is the beginning of the Russian word for hope”. Following her initial meeting with Breton in 1926, she made drawings, some featured in the book, wrote around 20 letters, and briefly participated in surrealist activities, but was finally incarcerated in a mental institution by her family the year before Breton published his account of the challenge that her unconventional spirit posed, and his own failure, in the end, to adequately meet it. The account of this woman’s electrifying effect on himself and other early surrealists (he describes himself as “like a man struck by lightning lying at the feet of a sphinx”) suggests that she, like Breton’s earlier mentor Jacques Vache, was one of the earliest exemplars of surrealist liberty, though Nadja herself remained confined in an asylum until her death in 1940. The book combines anecdote, philosophy, photography and a mapping of psychic experience onto the Paris landscape that collectively ensure Nadja reads like an early precursor of psychogeography, and it concludes with one of the best known of all surrealist statements: “Beauty will be CONVULSIVE, or will not be at all”. 

O is for…Olalquiaga  

The Artificial Kingdom: A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience by Celeste Olalquiaga was published in the UK in 1999, and comprises a series of essays on various aspects of kitsch aesthetics and their history. Olalquiaga suggests that the appeal of corals, crystal palaces, fossils, seashells and taxidermy animals arrayed in human clothing and situations during the nineteenth century fed into a strain of ‘artificial melancholy’, often coloured by the sense that living things were reduced to the status of precious objects, anticipating certain undercurrents within contemporary consumerism. The text and selection of plates draw heavily on Walter Benjamin’s unfinished study The Arcades Project, in which the historian collated a vast archive of texts relating to the emergence of consumption as a cultural force after the industrial revolution, an emergence that he saw most potently expressed in the enclosed, self-contained shopping arcades that took root in many European cities during the 1850s, but seemed especially emblematic of Parisian modernity. The qualities of melancholic nostalgia that these arcades evoked by the 1920s - when their juxtapositions of random objects such as glass eyes, porcelain dolls and walking sticks began to appeal to the Surrealists and their associates - are given concrete form in Olalquiaga’s book with a series of eccentric passages exploring her feelings about a paperweight on her desk, which holds a long-dead hermit crab in a state of apparent but permanently stalled life.  

P is for…Paul Klee  

Best known as the supremely inventive painter behind such works as The Twittering Machine, Flower Myth and Death and Fire, the Swiss-born Paul Klee (1879 - 1940) was also one of the most influential teachers at the Bauhaus between the wars. His compositional and teaching methods are preserved for posterity in Pedagogical Sketchbook and the notebooks gathered in The Thinking Eye. Klee’s full range only became clear with the many documents published by his son during the 1950s and 60s, when extensive diaries, accounts of his musical interests, puppet-making and other activities came to light, and within the Klee diaries a small but significant gathering of poems were found. Published in the UK alongside works by Hans Arp and Kurt Schwitters in the anthology Three Painter Poets in 1974, Klee’s poems revealed themselves to be verbal equivalents of his paintings, combining their aphoristic and proverbial qualities (“The happy man, a half idiot/for whom everything flourishes”) with the same superficially naïve surfaces, underwritten by precisely balanced ironies and immediacies: “water/topped by waves/topped by a boat/topped by a woman/topped by a man”.