A gift of ten drawings by Allan Mitelman

Allan Mitelman (Polish/Australian bn. 1946) is a printmaker, draughtsman and painter who is also a major contributor to the history of abstraction in Australia. Ten works on paper by the artist have recently been gifted to the Baillieu Library Print Collection through the Cultural Gifts Program. This collection of ten drawings spans fourteen years of the artist’s career and is a window onto his life’s practice, one which has been concerned with reinventing the surface of paper.

The relationship between the artist, the paper and the layers of applied medium are vital in the production of these work of art and all of the gifted works are untitled, thereby inviting the viewer to respond to them free from constrains and conventions. Viewers may also be surprised by the small scale of these drawings which are no more than 20 centimetres in size.

Allan Mitelman, “S.T.” 1971, lithograph, image: 37.7 x 55.5cm, Baillieu Library Collection, the University of Melbourne. © Allan Mitelman

The way in which media lies on the paper is likewise key to the meaning and interpretation of the Baillieu Library Print Collection. Previously there had only been one example by Allan Mitelman in the collection: a lithograph titled “S.T.” . Therefore this gift contextualises this single abstract print and adds depth to the range of techniques in the collection. Untitled (2000), for example, incorporates a monotype print (a unique impression) the surface of which has been reworked with drawing. This is the first example of a monotype method in the collection.

Allan Mitelman, Untitled (2000), monotype and ink, sheet: 14.6 x 9.6cm, Baillieu Library Print Collection, University of Melbourne. Gift of Matisse Mitelman. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2015. © Allan Mitelman

Other drawings such as Untitled (2012) combine watercolour and pencil and they are executed in such a manner that the viewer never tires of looking at them.

Allan Mitelman, Untitled , 2012, pencil and watercolour, image: 15.5 x 9.1cm, Baillieu Library Print Collection, University of Melbourne. Gift of Matisse Mitelman. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2015. © Allan Mitelman

These works on paper offer wide appeal to students of subjects such as printmaking, art history, curatorship, history and education. They exemplify contemporary working practices, ensure that the collection is alive and relevant, and they carve a new path into its future growth.

Allan Mitelman, Untitled, 1990, pencil and watercolour, sheet: 16.5 x 13.7cm, Baillieu Library Print Collection, University of Melbourne. Gift of Matisse Mitelman. Donated through the Australian Government’s Cultural Gifts Program, 2015. © Allan Mitelman

Reference

Allan Mitelman: works on paper 1967-2004 by Elizabeth Cross; with a contribution by Terence Maloon, Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2004.

Shakespeare in Steel: exploring links between Edward Dowden’s ‘Shakespeare Scenes & Characters’ and the ‘Gallerie Shakespeare’ portfolio of engravings. Part III.

On the 15th July 2016, the University of Melbourne’s highly anticipated After Shakespeare exhibition was officially opened, in the Noel Shaw Gallery of the Baillieu Library. Marking the 400th anniversary of the year of the Bard’s death, the exhibition plays host to a number of artefacts and ephemera that highlight Shakespeare’s lasting legacy throughout the centuries, with particular focus on his reception in Australia.

Amongst the intriguing stories contained in the cases is a puzzling connection between an 1876 English book of Shakespearian commentaries and engravings, and a separately issued portfolio of 22 engravings with a French title. Helen Kesarios, a student volunteer in the Cultural Collections Projects Program, has been investigating possible connections between the two works, drawing on original correspondence located at the British Library.

Part I told the story of the Shakespearian scholar, Edward Dowden, and the publication of his exquisitely illustrated text, Shakespeare Scenes & Characters (London : Macmillan and Co, 1876). Part II explored the background to the German engravings which feature in Dowden’s text.

The third instalment in this three-part story continues here, investigating links with a separately issued French portfolio of the engravings…

Part III – The French portfolio of German engravings

Also in Case 6, and accompanying Dowden’s text is a selection of loose prints from Australian composer and pianist Percy Grainger’s “Gallerie Shakespeare”, a red folio of twenty-two steel engravings identical to those contained in Dowden’s text, but bearing no publisher’s imprint. It is unknown how they came to be in Grainger’s collection, but their existence therein is unsurprising, given the strong affinity Grainger had with literature from a young age, particularly Nordic literature. As John Bird notes in his biography:

‘From the time Percy was four or five years old a certain period each day was set aside for reading out loud. The writings of Hans Christian Andersen were the first pieces of literature which he thus encountered. Later came the Icelandic Sagas of Njal and ‘Grettir the Strong’ and he was determined that one day he would learn a Scandinavian language so that he could read the Sagas in their original form. From the Sagas he turned to early English history with a strong emphasis on that period when the Nordic influence was greatest due to the Viking invasions. By the age of ten he had devoured a huge array of literature which included such material as Freeman’s History of the Norman Conquest and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles’.[i]

In correspondence with Macmillan and Co., Dowden repeatedly makes reference to a “Shakespeare-Galerie” or “Shakespeare Gallery”, which provided the prints for use in his book. As exciting as it may be to assume that Grainger’s “Gallerie Shakespeare” is one and the same, such a conclusion is found to be highly unlikely. Upon returning to the Preface, we learn that in fact, the “Shakespeare-Galerie” Dowden refers to is Friedrich Pecht’s “Shakespeare-Galerie: Charakter und Scenen aus Shakespaere’s Dramen”, a publication containing the Dowden prints with accompanying text in German by Pecht, what Dowden refers to as ‘a pleasant and cultured little causerie on each of the plays illustrated by the designers’.[ii] In selecting the text for his own book, Dowden decided ultimately that the essays by Pecht, ‘though bright and genial, seemed more suitable to the German than to the English reader, and it was thought that their place could with some advantage be supplied by a select body of extracts from the best writers, English, American, French and German, who have contributed to the criticism of Shakespeare’.[iii]

Thus, there still remains no definitive answer for how Grainger’s loose prints in the “Gallerie Shakespeare” portfolio came into being, how they fell into his hands, and their exact publication relationship with Dowden’s Shakespeare Scenes & Characters. Throughout my research, I have heard numerous theories on the matter, for example, that the prints actually belonged to Ella Grainger (Percy Grainger’s wife), as they were found in her belongings. Alternatively, it has been suggested hat they may have been a gift to Percy from his father. While we may never know for certain their origin, both they and Dowden’s Shakespeare Scenes and Characters remain two wonderful pieces of Shakespeariana that are definitely worth viewing in person.

Helen Kesarios, Research Assistant – After Shakespeare exhibition

[i] John Bird, Percy Grainger, Elek Books Ltd, London, 1976, p. 11.

[ii] Dowden, Shakespeare Scenes and Characters, p. viii.

[iii] ibid.

Mirror mirror on the wall, whose was the most influential encyclopaedia of them all: the story of Diderot’s radical Encylopédie of sciences, arts and technical crafts

The heroic task of bringing together and documenting the vast canon of human knowledge in written form, has been accomplished by a select number of individuals and publishing houses over time. One of the most extraordinary of these achievements was the publication between 1751 and 1772 of 27 large folio-sized volumes of the Encyclopédie, ou: dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, a complete edition of which is housed in the Baillieu Library’s Rare Books Collection.[i]

Financed by subscription and issued in serial form (including 10 volumes of illustrated plates), this enormous compilation of more than 70,000 articles was at once a technical manual, a highly political and philosophical work, and an entrancing written and visual commentary on 18^th century French society. Such was its popularity and influence that by 1789, 25,000 copies were in circulation in several editions across Europe.

The Encyclopédie was edited by the philosopher and writer Denis Diderot (1713-1784) and, for the first eight years of its conception, in collaboration with the mathematician Jean d’Alembert (1717-1783). The two had been commissioned to translate the two-volume Chambers’ Cyclopaedia, or Universal Dictionary of the Arts and Sciences (1728) into French but were greatly dissatisfied with the scope of the English compendium, and urged their publishers to embark upon a much improved and comprehensive French production.[ii]

More than a mere factual encyclopaedia, the work was in itself an instrument of the Enlightenment, promoting in its text and pictures the power of reason and the individual over that of divine order and centralised control. Diderot was motivated to share human knowledge and ideas freely with an emerging reading public, as a means for inspiring technological improvements, and to promote economic and political progress.[iii]

At first the French officials tolerated the sometimes radical views espoused in the text but as new volumes were released the Encyclopédie became increasingly controversial: the publication licence was withdrawn in 1757, and the work was added to the Catholic Church’s list of banned books. During this period the editors moved production over the border to Switzerland, focusing their outward attention on the engraved plates, whilst burying the more revolutionary opinions deep in the text or by using irony as a means for masking the censor’s eye.

Mirror making

The Encyclopédie included a strong emphasis on the manual arts and technology, the processes and tools of many of which had been hitherto kept secret to protect individual cartels. One such example was the craft of mirror making, the techniques of which are illustrated in Volume 8 of the plates in a series of charmingly rendered engravings.[iv]

Mirror making has a fascinating history and in late 17^th century France mirrors had become a luxury import, with the vogue for reflecting hallways and rooms attaining craze proportions amongst the aristocracy.[v] Mirror manufacture was the sole monopoly of the Venetian state, with the exact process remaining highly classified information, the release of which was punishable by death and the imprisonment of family. By report mirror making was:

‘a law unto itself. It had its own rules and customs, and a separate language too, handed down not only from father to son but from master to apprentice…Theirs was a closed community, with every man, woman and child knowing his place within the walls’.[vi]

The French Finance Minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683), introduced extensive internal reforms to promote French manufacturing in many closed industries, and lured a few renegade Venetian mirror makers to Paris to divulge their secrets. In response the Venetian authorities despatched emissaries who it is thought succeeded in poisoning some of the dissenters, though not before the French workers had obtained sufficient information to replicate the manufacturing process.

Using the newfound knowledge the French mirror making industry made further technical advances, and by the time of the publication of the Encyclopédie mirrors were ‘sparkling’ in a multiplicity of roles in fashionable society. Mirrors were embroidered into clothes, worn as jewellery, incorporated in hair accessories and makeup, decorated furniture, and were used in mantelpieces and other architectural devices to lighten rooms. The vogue for reflection demanded larger, full length mirrors, in which the viewer, dressed in the style of Madame de Pompadour (herself a subscriber to Diderot’s multi-volume work) could view her bouffant wig and dress in their entirety.

Mirrors, and their reflected realities, also appear in the world of books and literature, in the Brothers’ Grimm tale Snow White, Shakespeare’s Richard III, Tennyson’s The Lady of Shallot, and Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, and feature in many paintings and artworks, such as the medieval The Lady & the Unicorn tapestries and Van Eyck’s the Arnofoldi Marriage[vii]. Thanks to Diderot and the contributors to the Encyclopédie we also have a wonderfully evocative insight into the mirror making mind-set and manufacture of pre-Revolutionary France.

My thanks are extended to University of Melbourne lecturer Emeritus Professor Peter McPhee and history student, April Hamill, for their inspiration for this post.

Susan Thomas, Rare Books Curator

Endnotes

[i] Diderot, Denis. (ed) Encyclopédie, ou : dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. 3rd ed. Livourne: de l’Imprimerie des Éditeurs, 1770-1776.

[ii] Pannabecker, John. ‘Diderot, the Mechanical Arts, and the Encyclopédie: In Search of the Heritage of Technology Education’, Journal of technology education, Vol. 6, no. 1, 1994, http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/jte-v6n1/pannabecker.jte-v6n1.html

[iii] Pannabecker, John, Ibid.

[iv] Diderot, Denis (ed). Recueil de planches, sur les sciences, les arts libéraux, et les arts méchaniques, avec leur explication… 3rd ed. Livourne: De l’imprimerie des éditeurs, 1771-1778.

[v] Prendergast, Mark. Mirror, mirror: a history of the human love affair with reflection. New York: Basic Books, c2003, pp.148-149.

[vi] Prendergast, Mark, Ibid, p. 153

[vii] Mullen. John. ‘Ten of the best mirrors in literature’, The Guardian, 30 October 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/30/john-mullan-mirrors-literature-review

Bibliography and further reading

Bates, Brian with John Cleese. The human face. London : BBC Worldwide, 2001.

Diderot, Denis and Jean d’Alembert (eds). Encyclopédie, ou : dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. 3^rd ed. Livourne : de l’Imprimerie des Éditeurs, 1770-1776.

Diderot, Denis (ed). Recueil de planches, sur les sciences, les arts libéraux, et les arts méchaniques, avec leur explication… 3^rd ed. Livourne : De l’Imprimerie des Éditeurs, 1771-1778.

Donato, Clorinda and Robert M. Maniquis (eds). The Encyclopédie and the Age of Revolution. Boston : G.K. Hall, 1992.

‘Encyclopédie’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A9die. Accessed 5 August 2016.

Miller, Jonathan. On reflection. London : National Gallery Publications, 1998.

Mullen. John. ‘Ten of the best mirrors in literature’, The Guardian, 30 October 2010. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/30/john-mullan-mirrors-literature-review. Accessed 5 August 2016.

Pannabecker, John. ‘Diderot, the Mechanical Arts, and the Encyclopédie : In Search of the Heritage of Technology Education’, Journal of technology education, Vol. 6, no. 1, 1994, http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/JTE/jte-v6n1/pannabecker.jte-v6n1.html. Accessed 5 August 2016.

Prendergast, Mark. Mirror, mirror: a history of the human love affair with reflection. New York : Basic Books, c2003.

Select essays from the Encyclopedy : being the most curious, entertaining, and instructive parts of that very extensive work, written by Mallet, Diderot, d’Alembert, and others. London : Samuel Leacroft, 1772.

Shakespeare in Steel: exploring links between Edward Dowden’s ‘Shakespeare Scenes & Characters’ and the ‘Gallerie Shakespeare’ portfolio of engravings. Part II.

Part I told the story of the Shakespearian scholar, Edward Dowden, and the publication of his exquisitely illustrated text, Shakespeare Scenes & Characters (London : Macmillan and Co, 1876).

The second instalment in this three-part story continues here…

**Part II – The German engravings: Shakespeare Scenes & Characters selected and arranged by Edward Dowden**

Despite Dowden’s intentions that the criticism and images be appreciated as a whole, the interest of readers often focuses on the latter. As Kathryn R. Ludwigson notes:

‘The book is unusually interesting not so much for Dowden’s presentations of Shakespearean criticism, which are, after all, available more fully elsewhere, as for the collection of German engravings, which are governed by concepts of art that contrast with those of the English of the era’.[i]

Given that steel engraving was already a well-established art form in Great Britain, it is important to consider some of the factors which might have influenced Dowden to choose German artists and engravers over English ones for his book. Perhaps the most striking piece of evidence is contained in the opening to the Preface, where Dowden pays homage to ‘Germany, which has so largely contributed to the scholarly study of Shakespeare, [and which] has also made some remarkable contributions to the pictorial illustration of his plays’.[ii] Dowden was no stranger to German criticism of Shakespeare having, after all, included German criticism in the text, (the works of Friedrich Pecht in particular). He also notes his studying endeavours in a letter to Aubrey de Vere on March 6th, 1875:

‘These miscellaneous little activities of mine are: (1) An article for the Fortnightly Review, to be by-and-by written on “Wordsworth’s Prose Works.” (2) The Quarterly Review on “German Shakespeare Literature”…’[iii]

It is also worth noting that the relationship between Germany and Shakespeare is an historic one, and its significance is embodied in the sentiments of German romantic writers such as Goethe (of whom Dowden was particularly fond), who saw in Shakespeare a revolutionary mascot of the times:

‘These authors rebelled against the bureaucracy and despotism of the German states, particularly Prussia; and against the passivity and optimistic contentment of the earlier generation…these “intellectuals”, members of the professional class, applied themselves to an intellectual revolution, a war of liberation of the senses, feeling, imagination. Shakespeare became their most challenging and inspiring slogan…on reading Shakespeare [Goethe] feels his “Existenz erweitert”; Shakespeare, he says, illustrates always the struggle between our presumed freedom of will and the necessary process of the world. For all these writers Shakespeare offered a world of vast activity and experience, in which they felt themselves transported beyond the barriers and restrictions of contemporary German life’.[iv]

In terms of the prints’ aesthetic value, Dowden writes in a letter to Macmillan and Co. on July 21st, 1875, that ‘the illustrations are in part interesting to me as a German art-comment on, or interpretation of Shakespeare, and each has made me feel something new about the play to which it belongs’. They were generally well received by the public, with critics noting the skill employed by the German artists and engravers in executing each design:

‘As a whole the series of pictorial illustrations of Shakespearean scenes is strikingly good. Some of the designs are too Teutonic in character, perhaps, but commonly the artist has been successful in the interpretation of character and incident… “The Merry Wives of Windsor”…is one of the best in the series, the artist having caught the individuality of the actors and the spirit of the incident with decided success…Taken as a whole, as we have said, it is an excellent Shakespearean gallery, and shows that German artists are not inferior to German scholars in Shakespearean lore’.[v]

If the reader wishes to know more about each featured artist, Dowden provides a brief ‘curriculum vitae’ in the Preface.

Helen Kesarios

Research Assistant, After Shakespeare exhibition

Cultural Collections Project Program, University of Melbourne

HELEN KESARIOS WILL CONCLUDE THE STORY OF THE ENGRAVINGS CONTAINED WITHIN THE DOWDEN VOLUME IN HER FINAL INSTALMENT NEXT WEEK.

WATCH THIS SPACE FOR PART III – The French portfolio of German engravings

[i] Kathryn R. Ludwigson, Edward Dowden, Twayne Publishers, New York, 1973, p. 28.

[ii] Dowden, Shakespeare Scenes and Characters, p. v.

[iii] Dowden, Letters of Edward Dowden and his Correspondents, p. 72.

[iv] R. Pascal, Shakespeare in Germany: 1740-1815, Cambridge University Press, London, 1937, p. 12.

[v] Brooklyn Museum, ‘Recent Art Publications’, The Art Journal 1875-1887), vol. 3, 1877, p. 31.

Percy’s tobacco-box contraption: an ingenious experiment for recording musical notation using repurposed materials

This contraption, ostensibly a small wooden tobacco box, is actually an experiment in musical notation hand-made by Percy Grainger. Mounted through the lid of the box is a small cotton reel, around which is wound a long strip of paper ruled with 5 musical stave lines to make a continuous blank ‘score’. This strip of musical score is fed through a slit in the side of the box, then under a cotton “now-line” string nailed to the side of the box.

Presumably, the paper strip is to be pulled past the string at a steady speed, while the composer jots down musical pitches on the score paper in real-time, marking each as the paper passes the string. In much the same way as a pianola roll records the action of piano keys as temporal events on a strip of paper, here the composer is able to do away with traditional temporal nomenclature, such as bar-lines and time signatures, instead arranging the pitch markings in a kind of graph. For a musician with a keen ear like Grainger, this would be a much more effective system of notating the highly irregular rhythms of birdsong or the whimsical nuances of folk singers’ performances.

Grainger frequently tested the limitations of conventional notation when trying to capture such irregular rhythms, as is evident in his almost comical use of constantly changing time signatures in some of his scores, such as the 5th movement of the Lincolnshire Posy (where at times he abandons time signature designations entirely). This contraption illustrates beautifully his frustration with established musical conventions, but also his determination and ingenuity in taking readily available materials and creatively transforming them into forward-thinking (if not entirely practical) solutions to such problems.

‘Tobacco-box notation experiment. Probably London, c.1900-1901′ (taken from cataloguing notes prepared by Ella Grainger)

Jon Drews (Exhibitions Officer) – Grainger Museum

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A gift of ten drawings by Allan Mitelman

Shakespeare in Steel: exploring links between Edward Dowden’s ‘Shakespeare Scenes & Characters’ and the ‘Gallerie Shakespeare’ portfolio of engravings. Part III.