Is this interminable winter getting to you? Are you looking for a great new book to sink your teeth into? Check out the full list of titles that are currently available for sale from the William Morris Society in the United States through the following URL:
www.morrissociety.org/ahobooks.pdf
Life member Gary L. Aho, professor emeritus of English at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, generously gave us a portion of his library, with the wish that the books be sold to benefit the Society. The books are offered through the Kelmscott Bookshop, 34 West 25th Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, (410) 235-6810, info@kelmscottbookshop.com.
To order contact the bookshop directly and cite the author, title, and inventory number. You will be informed of availability and told the cost of ship- ping. Payment may then be made via check or credit card. Please do not send orders or payment to the William Morris Society.
08 February 2011
Happy Birthday Ruskin!
07 January 2011
Collecting Kelmscott and William Morris on ABE
More than 100 years after his death, William Morris – founder of the Kelmscott Press – remains an influential figure in design and art, and his Kelmscott fine press books are highly prized.
The textile designer, author and artist founded the Kelmscott Press in 1891. Morris (1834-1896) published his own work as well as translations and reprints of mediaeval writing he believed should be read. A traditionalist in every sense of the word, Morris wanted to preserve the relationship between art and books. He detested the mechanisation of art during a period when the western world was embracing mechanisation.
Morris was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, an organization that strived to produce art reminiscent of the romantic, medieval eras. These ideals were instrumental in everything that Morris did from the initiation of the Arts and Crafts movement in late 19th century England, the design and decoration of his famous Red House, his design and manufacture of textiles and, of course, the Kelmscott Press.
Kelmscott Press was founded in a cottage where Morris set up three printing presses that he used to print books by traditional methods. To maintain the traditional feel, Morris designed two typefaces based on 15th century fonts. He also made his own paper to complete his handmade books. Despite the painstaking effort put into each publication and the fact that Kelmscott was only in operation for seven years, the small press managed to produce more than 18,000 copies of more than 50 different works.
In true fine press tradition, the Kelmscott print runs were short and the books were not cheap, but they were beautiful and exemplified the Arts and Crafts movement. Kelmscott's finest achievement is probably its edition of Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. The books were designed by Morris himself and illustrated by fellow Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones. It was the finest and most beautiful book of its day, containing 87 woodcut illustrations to accompany Chaucer’s masterful tales.
It doesn't take an expert to point out the errors here (Morris was more than a "textile designer, author, and artist"; he was not a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; Burne-Jones did not illustrate al the Kelmscott books)—the point is that Morris and Kelmscott continue to interest people and are, if not actively collected, then actively offered by the booktrade. Case in point: the Kelmscott Works of Geoffrey Chaucer pictured here is priced at just over $95,000. More modest Kelmscott titles are considerably less expensive, in the $500 to $7,500 range; first editions of Morris's writings are listed for as little as $100. If one had the money it would seem possible to amass if not a complete, well then a very extnesive, Morris collection in a matter of a few clicks of the mouse.
Announcing—The Victorian Poetry Network
The organizers are looking for interested colleagues and students to contribute to the website (writing blogs posts, commenting on the poem of the month, joining us as researchers for the periodical poetry database, and contributing teaching resources and star student essays to the virtual classroom). Please contact Alison Chapman or Meagan Timney for more information. Membership details can be found in the "Join VPN" page.
Illustration: Oscar Wilde, The Sphinx. London: Elkin Mathews and John Lane, 1894 (Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, on loan to the University of Delaware Library).
18 December 2010
Special William Morris Society Tour of The Pre-Raphaelite Lens Exhibition at the National Gallery
SPECIAL WILLIAM MORRIS SOCIETY EXHIBITION TOUR
The Pre-Raphaelite Lens:
British Photography and Painting, 1848–1875
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Saturday, 15 January 2011
Members and friends are invited to a special tour with the exhibition’s curator, Diane Waggoner. Join us for lunch after.
The Pre-Raphaelite Lens is the first survey of British art photography focusing on the 1850s and 1860s. With 100 photographs and 20 paintings and watercolors the exhibition examines the roles photography and Pre-Raphaelite art played in changing concepts of vision and truth in representation. Photography’s ability to quickly translate the material world into an image challenged painters to find alternate versions of realism. Photographers, in turn, looked to Pre-Raphaelite subject matter and visual strategies in order to legitimize photography’s status as a fine art. Lewis Carroll, Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton, Oscar Gustave Rejlander, and many lesser known photographers had much in common with such painters as John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John William Inchbold, who all wrestled with the question of how to observe and represent the natural world and the human face and figure. This rich dialogue is examined in thematic sections on landscape, portraiture, literary and historical narratives, and modern-life subjects.
Diane Waggoner is associate curator in the department of photographs at the National Gallery of Art. She received a PhD in art history from Yale University. Prior to joining the department, she held positions at the Yale University Art Gallery and at the Huntington Library, where she was the curator of The Beauty of Life: William Morris and the Art of Design (2003). Since joining the NGA, she has co-curated many exhibitions. Her co-authored catalogue for The Art of the American Snapshot was the 2008 winner of the College Art Association’s Alfred H. Barr, Jr., Award for distinguished museum publication. A specialist in the nineteenth century, she has also published on the photographs of Lewis Carroll.
Saturday, 15 January 2011
11.30 a.m. (meet at entrance to the East Building)
National Gallery of Art
Fourth St. NW
Washington, DC
www.nga.gov
RSVP to Mark Samuels Lasner
marksl@udel.edu
(302) 831-3250
Limited Edition Artwork to Benefit Historical Materialism
The artwork is available for purchase at the price of £75 (unframed, postage not included) and can be ordered from www.historicalmaterialism.org/news/mabb-print. ;The print has already been bought by museums in the UK and America including the Victoria and Albert Museum. We hope you will see this as an opportunity to acquire a fascinating artwork.
Mabb regularly reworks the artistic imagery of Marxism to produce startling new configurations. In this print he combines William Morris?s hand-made natural imagery with the abstract machine aesthetics of the Russian Constructivists. In their own time, Morris and Popova were thwarted by economic realities; Morris?s designs proved too expensive for the working people he wished to reach, while the fledgling USSR proved unable to support the transformation of everyday life envisaged by Popova and her fellow Constructivists. Mabb reanimates these remnants of Marxist history, fusing the legacies in lively and beautiful images for our time.
David Mabb is a widely exhibited artist and Reader in Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. He regularly exhibits at the Leo Kamen Gallery, Toronto and in 2004 he curated William Morris?ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich? at the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. Recent exhibitions include: The Decorating Business, Oakville Galleries, Ontario; The Hall of the Modern, The Economist, London; Morris in Jaipur: The work of Art in the Context of Hand-made Reproduction, Mandawa Haveli, Jaipur, part of Jaipur Heritage International Festival, touring to The British Council Gallery, New Delhi; Art into Everyday Life, Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; and A Miniature Retrospective and Rhythm 69, Jugendstilsenteret/Kunstmuseet Kube, Alesund, Norway. During 2010 he exhibited The Morris Kitsch Archive at Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts.
20 November 2010
Fancy and Imagination: Beardsley and the Book Illustrators Exhibition at the University of Leeds
Two concurrent exhibitions at the University of Leeds, one of drawings and prints, the other of illustrated books, include work by William Morris and his contemporaries. Fancy and Imagination: Beardsley and the Book Illustrators is on at the Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery, while the book show is being held across the street in the university library. Both run from 16 November 2010 through 12 February 2011.Aubrey Beardsley, one of the most celebrated and controversial book illustrators of the Art Nouveau era. The exhibition presents Beardsley’s black and white world—at once wondrous, monstrous, and exotic—in context, celebrating the richness and variety of the medium of book illustration in Britain during the period between 1890 and the 1920s. The exhibition showcases works by other major illustrators of the era, including Arthur Rackham, Harry Clarke, Edmund Dulac, Walter Crane, Kate Greenaway, Kay Nielsen and Jessie M. King. Morris's Kelmscott Press is also represented. The works exhibited alongside Beardsley’s illustrations and sketches provide an illuminating backdrop to the unique collection on display at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, a fine Art Deco setting within the landmark Parkinson Building of the University of Leeds. The artworks and books displayed come from the University of Leeds collections as well as from private collections.
The tragically short-lived Beardsley was born in Brighton in 1872; he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25 in 1898. He was a musical prodigy among other artistic talents, and at the age of nineteen he was warmly encouraged by the Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. His career as a book illustrator was first supported by publisher J. M. Dent. Dent commissioned the young artist to illustrate an edition of Malory’s Le Morte Darthur in neo-Kelmscott style; a massive and sometimes tedious task. While Beardsley found increasingly boring, his technique matured in the process, and the result brought him fame.
One of the rare treasures on display is an early sketch in a letter of 1892 to a school friend. Writing excitedly of being advised by Burne-Jones and starting work on Malory, Beardsley ends his letter with a self-portriat as a stick-man striding up the dark side of a mountain, on the other side of which is the sunny destination “Art.” Despite the few brief years he had ahead of him as an artist, he made it to the other side: at the peak of his career, he was the art editor of the iconic 1890s magazine, The Yellow Book. Here, he worked with well-established writers and artists like Henry James and Sir Frederick Leighton, as well as figureheads of the avant-garde, such as W.B. Yeats and Max Beerbohm. This side of the mountain, however, proved to be less idyllic than he had imagined as a young aspiring artist.
Most of the items in the present exhibition are drawn from the Fay and Geoffrey Elliott Collection, a generous gift to Leeds University Library in 2001. One of the most important motives for this gift was Fay and Geoffrey’s wish that their outstanding collection of manuscripts and printed works should become available to a substantial body of young people. Fancy and Imagination: Beardsley and the Book Illustrators makes a significant part of this collection accessible for wider audiences for the first time. A complementary display, exploring the publishers and printing methods of the 1890s and including further Kelmscott Press examples, is open to the public during the exhibition run in Special Collections at the University of Leeds. A catalogue related to the main exhibition and this complementary display will be available for sale.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a full programme of related events, including the recently launched Saturday Club, offering creative activities suitable for all ages.
16 October 2010–12 February 2011
Stanley and Audrey Burton Gallery
Parkinson Building
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT UK
0113 343 2778
gallery@leeds.ac.uk
www.leeds.ac.uk/gallery/exhibitions.htm
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