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This is a review of the Tom Phillips "A Humument" exhibition at the Kamin Gallery, Van Pelt Library of the University of Pennsylvania. The Sackner Archive lent the works to this exhibition. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Bluebeard's Castle by Ronald King, "Ein Deutsches Reqyiem - After Brahms" by Tom Phillips, "S.M.S." Issues No.1,3,4,5, "De Morandi" by Ian Tyson, and "Selected Shorter Poems" by Emmett Williams, which were exhibited, are held by the Sackner Archive. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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The catalogue, "Human Documents: Tom Phillips's Art of the Page" curated by Daniel Traister, preface by Marvin Sackner, from the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, won an award from the Association of College and Research Libraries. Marvin Sackner also participated in the Awards presentations. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This exhibition "Africa: The Art of a Continent" at the Guggenheim Museum was curated by Tom Phillips and was a much smaller version of the show initiated at the Royal Academy in London. The Archive holds the RA catalog. The Sackners attended both the London and New York exhibitions. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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The cover self-portrait is also depicted in a print published by the Welsh Council and held by the Sackner Archive. The content of this exhibition deals with masks and found objects on walks near Phillips' studio. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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In his introductory essay, Robert Hall writes, "Tom Phillips' first one-man show with Angela Flowers was an instant hit that has led to an astonishing, abundant variety of erudite and imaginative creation, not only of figurative paintings and treated books, but (among others) tapestries, calligraphy and manuscripts, of which 'Palimpsest' (1987), worked over in 2004) is an intriguing and beautiful example." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This booklet was written for a workshop in a grade school class and is a second edition of the book. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This issue includes an essay on book collecting and dealing in Russia. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Three of the cards were designed by Tom Phillips with two of them based upon " A Humument" imagery. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This version is actually unique because the final version was entirely printed. It has been designated as Opus 13. In addition, it includes Phillips' handwritten notations. Depicted in Tom Phillips: Works Texts To 1974, page 259. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Notes read "Motto variation on Christian Wolff's 'Stones' (from Prose Selection). Little drops of water bore holes in stones. OP. XIII. / Stage proof [silkscreen with gouache] / Aquae guttae saxa excavant. / (Little drops of water bore holes in stones.)" Added: CEND.

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Article (pp 35-63) titled "Art and Artifice describes Phillips' new studio in Camberwell, London, designed by Eric Parry Associates. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This is the archive for the publication "Ginger Snaps," edited by Gibbs and Guthrie. It includes some of the original submissions as well as correspondence from the poets about their works and comments after the book was published. The contributions focused heavily on Gysin and Burroughs' cut-up techniques. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents Canto I/1 Phillips comments: The dense, direct and haunting opening to Dante's Comedy: Just halfway through this journey of our life I came awake to find myself inside a dark wood, way off course, the right road lost. shares immediately with the reader that claustrophobia of accumulated habit and error which reveals to human beings in middle life that they have been building a trap around themselves, which, having had no formal entrance, offers no apparent way out. In this image I have further developed a procedure used in several paintings from 1969 on (cf. Works/Texts to 1974 pp 74 & 184) involving stencilled letters. With the title phrase Una Selva Oscura (a Dark Wood) I have made a linguistic thicket by superimposing letters of different height so that this phrase crosses and cancels itself over and over again. Thus the title, moving in and out of phase, becomes the picture, in the manner of a fugue or canon in music. The motif, and variations on it, reappears throughout...

Scope and Contents Canto 1/3 Phillips comments: Like all great literature Dante's Comedy grows from the body of literature that precedes it. The illustrations here frequently emphasise the fact that Inferno is a book that contains books; books that it models itself upon (the Aeneid) and books that it transcends (the Tesoro of Ser Brunetto; cf. Canto XV/2). Virgil is here represented in the form in which Dante first knows him, his work, and in particular the Aeneid of which this is perhaps the first page of a sumptuous illuminated manuscript; hence the initial `A' for the opening of the epic, Arma virumque cano (Arms and the Man, I sing. . .). Dante would have seen such volumes in the mansions of his wealthy patrons: we do not however know how many books the peripatetic exile actually owned; books at that date are handwritten, huge, heavy and very expensive. It is doubtful that Dante owned a complete Bible even: he probably owned fewer than Chaucer's scholar with his 'twenty books clad in black and...

Scope and Contents Canto II/1 This companion-piece to Dante in his Study shows Virgil in a similar room. The positions of the figure and the book derive also from Signorelli, but more remotely. Since no authoritative image of Virgil exists he is pictured without features. As with Dante the hands are my own and drawn from life. He is poised over the book of his Works. It is open at the Sixth Book of the Aeneid, the principal source for the Inferno. A bookmark indicates the Fourth Eclogue in which Virgil (as it seemed to the mediaeval world) prophesied the Coming of Christ. The Eagle of the Empire signifies Virgil's allegiance to the other Rome (a separation much to Dante's political tastes). In the left hand corner a distorted star with seven points and inscribed with alchemical devices is falling from the framework of the picture. This refers to Virgil's role in the mediaeval thought as a Magus (his book was used as a work of divination in the manner of the I Ching), a reputation Dante is eager to...

Scope and Contents 11/2 Phillips comments: The lily, as well as being the emblem of Dante's native city, is the flower of the Annunciation, and a traditional attribute of the Virgin Mary. The speech of Beatrice to Virgil, entrusting him with the mission of saving his fellow poet, is a cryptic parallel to the Annunciation: thus Beatrice (also of course a Florentine) is associated with the Virgin Mary and this is the spiritual counterpart of her role in Dante's life, as the Lady of his love and art. The enclosure, here represented as a lawn surrounded by a triangle of walls, is part of the standard iconography of the Annunciation (hortus conclusus) as is the locked entranceway which symbolises virginity. The three steps prefigure those of the Angel in Purgatorio. In the sky above are the nine circles of Paradise of which the nine rings of Hell are the infernal counterparts. The lily itself is constructed (cf. notes to the frontispiece) according to the Golden Section and derives from a wall-painting...

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II/4 Dante likens his renewed morale to the opening up of flowers which close at night. The various stages of the daffodil (chosen as a flower of this season of pilgrimage) as it unfolds were etched from life in 1978 and formed part of one of the first images to be tackled. The rising sun, also an emblem of renewed vigour, pictured over the sea, echoes two of Dante's images for Virgil as well as contrasting with the twilight opening of the canto. The Virgin Butterfly, her mission fulfilled, departs. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Canto III/1 A portfolio of etchings that I worked on in 1979 appeared under the title 'I had not known death had undone so many', T. S. Eliot's beautiful translation of a line from this canto. The heads here are much in the same vein and similarly influenced by African Art (notably some rock drawings I studied in Namaqualand) and the appearance of diatoms under a microscope. They are similarly used in that certain of them are chosen to be hugely enlarged to make stylised masks of characters in the Inferno as with Homer in Canto IV, Aristotle in Cantos XI and XXX etc. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.