Dante Rediscovered opens on the 15th August 2007 at Dove Cottage in Grasmere and runs until 18th November 2007. Though largely confined to the 18th and 19th centuries two works by Tom Phillips will be exhibited; a portrait drawing and a copy of the Talfourd Press Inferno. The exhibition will also include works by Blake, Fuseli and Rossetti as well as Byron and Shelley manuscripts.

Three works by Tom Phillips will appear in Eye-Music: Klee, Kandinsky and all that Jazz,

an exhibition about music in art at Pallant House 30 June - 16 September 2007. The exhibition will then tour to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Art from 2nd October to 9th December 2007.

To anon & Mike C : Feel free to talk on this blog however critically (or opaquely).

Re the Summer Exhibition I hung rooms I & II & can't answer for anything else. I don't really like to comment on another artist's work unless I am really excited by it as I am with the whopping Kiefer in Gallery III.

Lots to report but I've been more than a little fêted for the amazing achievement of reaching the age of seventy on May 24th or, according to my mother, May 25th, a date which Birthdays of the Famous tells me I share with Cilla Black & Dante Alighieri, in that order.

TP's works this year are congregated in Gallery 2. No coincidence since this was one of the rooms he was responsible for hanging. As mentioned they feature The Library at Elsinore and the pair of Periwinkle weeks. Also Superjew, a collage from American comics. The three prints are together in the left hand corner of the adjacent print room. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is open from Monday 11th June until 19th August.

Superjew, comic collage, h43.5cm x w35cm, 2007

The Tom Phillips Dante Archive is featured both in the Bodleian Library's 2007 summer exhibition, Italy's Three Crowns: Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio and the accompanying publication of the same name. The exhibition will be open from 19 June to 31 October in the Exhibition Room, Old Schools Quadrangle, Catte Street, Oxford. Admission is free.

Another Dante exhibition opens in August 2007 at Dove Cottage in Grasmere, entitled Dante Rediscovered: Blake to Rodin. Though largely confined to the 18th and 19th centuries it will show two works by TP; a portrait drawing and a copy of the Talfourd Press Dante edition. The exhibition will also include works by Blake, Fuseli, Rossetti and Byron and Shelley manuscripts.

Recent prints by TP appear in an exhibition of work by Royal Academicians at the 108 Gallery in Harrogate 23rd June to 14th July 2007.

This year TP has designed the cover of the Garsington Opera programme and a limited number TP's prints will be available for sale at the box office tent during the Garsington Opera Season from the 9th June to the 9th July 2007

Works by TP will appear in Eye-Music: Klee, Kandinsky and all that Jazz, an exhibition about music in art at Pallant House 30 June - 16 September 2007

TP will be speaking at the British Library on Monday 24th September 2007 on the subject of Wagner and Popular Art. This is the first event in a special season at the British Library accompanying the Ring Cycle at the Royal Opera House.

An exhibition of new works by Tom Phillips will open at Flowers New York in the autumn.

Here is an illicit sneak preview of The Library at Elsinore as it appears in Gallery II of the Royal Academy's Summer Exhibition. The mock bookcase contains real books overpainted in grey with titles borrowed from Hamlet in black. These are titles of actual books by actual authors in order of the apprearance of their words in the play. There must of course be more no doubt being borrowed as I write but these are all that my research has turned up. Most are (rightly I presume) obscure but others are by known writers from Lloyd George to Graham Greene with, most recently, Alan Bennett's Single Spies (Simon Callow suggested, he claims, this brilliant choice of title).

 

>There is in fact a real library at the real castle of Elsinore. Its curator has shown an interest in exhibiting this phantom work.

 

Shandy Hall is in prospect and who knows but that the Folger may live up to its name and follow suit.

The Library at Elsinore (Fragment), 2006.

Shakespeare on a visit to the castle at Elsinore is to have an audience with the King. He is set to wait in its ample library for the summons into the royal presence. He finds himself alone there except for two rather overdressed courtiers who seem already to have been waiting for some time. He idly scans the shelves and takes down a book whose nicely ambiguous title, A Show of Violence, intrigues him. Its contents, however, seem of little interest. Replacing it he notices that the subsequent books on the shelf all have titles equally suggestive of emotion, escapade and death. So is it also on the shelves below. As if in a dream the titles conjure up, one after another, a sequence of speeches and events in a play.

As he reaches for the last book on the fifth shelf, Casual Slaughter, the door of the library opens. The courtiers look hopefully up but it is Shakespeare that the steward invites to follow him.

After his audience with the King, Shakespeare is returned to the library to await the coachman. He eagerly makes for the same shelves only to find that they contain a dull series of tracts and biblical commentaries...

Some such scenario or dumb show is the conceit behind a long planned installation, The Library at Elsinore, whose bookcase Andy has just finished constructing. I have been loading its shelves with the books I have prepared over the last few months and which have been lying in rows and piles around the studio.

Last year at the Ashmolean Museum I showed a maquette of a single shelf which contained all the titles (of actual books) that derive from Hamlet's speech, To be or not to be.....

Now the whole play is covered and next week as one of the hangers of the Summer Exhibition at the RA I hope to find a nice corner for it.

Periwinkle Diaries I & II will be shown as a pair in this year's RA Summer Show (11th June - 19th August) together with five other new works including the installation The Library at Elsinore and new prints South London Dreaming, The Autumn Arrested and a new Humument print.

South London Dreaming, Silkscreen ed 25, 65cm x 74.5cm, 2007.

In Israel, Epson and silkscreen ed 100, 34cm x 30cm, 2005.

The Autumn Arrested, Epson & Silkscreen, ed 25. 2007, 81cm x 81cm

Next year if eyes and hand allow I'll try again if only to relearn the artist's first lesson, so well and so long ago laid down in Plato's theory of forms. The classic periwinkle flower is an amazing construction. Designed (if one may still use that word without prejudice) like a ship's propellor: it is full of energy yet with only wilting and withering in prospect, full of movement but with nowhere to go.

   
Friday/Diary title, 5" x 5" 2007.

I should explain here that these flower drawings, although I have eagerly chosen to do them, are not really what I am doing. They are, as I think of them, what I am doing before what I am really doing. And what is that? What I am really doing is what I do instead of what I am not doing. And what is that? What I am not doing and really should be doing, and presume myself to be failing to do (either through ignorance of what it is, or lack of courage to embark on it) is what Henry James calls the real, right thing. It is that which should be done, or tried for, before there is an end of doing altogether.

This is not some riff of sophistry but an attempt to verbalise those churnings of daily doubt which I have known all my working life; ever since I entered the garden of forking paths presented to the artist by the twentieth century. Somewhere half formulated has been an idea, itself a guarantee of failure, of making that garden not of forking but rather of converging paths.

Mentioning Henry James reminds me that one of the things I really am doing is drawing (for wire sculpture) the quotation from James that I made a pastel version of last year. 'We work in the dark. We do what we can. We give what we have. The rest is the madness of art.' Perhaps as I allow myself to think, albeit briefly, and only from time to time, it might be a real, right thing.

  
Wednesday/Thursday 2007, 5" x 5"