Prints and Drawings Room
View by appointment- Artist
- Ivor Abrahams 1935–2015
- Part of
- E.A. Poe: Tales and Poems
- Medium
- Screenprint on paper
- Dimensions
- Image: 196 × 140 mm
- Collection
- Tate
- Acquisition
- Presented by Evelyne Abrahams, the artist's wife 1986
- Reference
- P11147
Catalogue entry
Group of ninety-eight screenprints, lithographs and etchings, various sizes [P11099-P11196; incomplete]
Presented by Evelyne Abrahams, the artist's wife 1986
This group of prints was bequeathed to Evelyne Abrahams by the artist's parents, Harry and Rachel Abrahams, on the understanding that she would present it to the Tate Gallery on their behalf. It represents the greater part of the artist's printmaking to date. Other works by Abrahams in the collection are a sculpture entitled ‘Lady in a Niche’, 1973 (T03369), a work on paper entitled ‘Winter Sundial’, 1975 (T02330), and a small number of prints: ‘The Garden Suite’, 1970 (P04001-P04005), ‘Sundial I (Summer)’, 1975 (P07384) and ‘Untitled’ [from the artist's book Oxford Gardens: A Sketchbook], 1977 (P08150).
Abrahams is primarily a sculptor, and many of his prints relate to particular sculptures. In the period 1967–79 Abrahams focused on garden imagery, exploring the relationship between art, artifice and nature. Many of the images used in early prints were based on small, relatively poor quality photographs of gardens reproduced in gardening magazines, such as the weekly Amateur Gardening and Popular Gardening, or, less frequently, better quality illustrations found in the series of volumes on gardens published by Country Life in the 1920s. This use of second-hand source material gives much of his printed output a conceptual quality, and links his work to Pop art. Abrahams has presented a large amount of source material relating to his printmaking of this period, including magazine clippings, photographs and sketches and acetate stencils, to the Tate Gallery Archive (TGA 8315).
The critical and commercial success of ‘The Garden Suite’ (P04001-P040054), published in 1970, helped establish Abrahams' name internationally, and in the following decade he went on to produce a significant body of prints, making approximately one print a month. The dealer Bernard Jacobson published many of his portfolios, and the Mayor Gallery organised a series of touring shows of prints and sculptures. In this period Abrahams was based in London, working at a studio in Leonard Street, EC2, from 1969 to 1982, and at the A & A Foundry in Bow from 1982 to 1992, with a second studio at Butler's Wharf from 1974 to 1979.
In 1979 Abrahams abandoned the garden theme for which he had become well known and focused instead on water-based imagery, using bathers and nymphs which were inspired in part by the landscape, myths and folk customs associated with the South of France. Abrahams and his French wife bought a home in Pézenas, in the Languedoc, in 1973, where he used the cellar as a studio. In 1988 they bought a house in the small village, Castelnau de Guers, in the same region, and have lived there on a full-time basis since 1992.
Unless otherwise stated, all quotations by the artist in the following entries are taken from a taped interview with the compiler held on 18 August 1994. The entries have been approved by the artist.
[from] E.A. Poe: Tales and Poems 1976 [P11135-P11154]
Portfolio of twenty screenprints, some with embossing and/or varnish, various sizes, on wove Crisbrook paper 495 × 362 (19 1/2 × 14 1/4); printed by Bernard Culls at Advanced Graphics and published by Bernard Jacobson Ltd in an edition of 100 plus 10 sets of artist's proofs of which this is one
Each inscribed ‘Ivor Abrahams 76’ below image b.r. and ‘AP’ below image b.l. (except P 11135 which is inscribed ‘Ivor Abrahams 76’ below image b.r. and ‘A.P.’ below image b.l. and P 11143 which is inscribed ‘Ivor Abrahams 76’ below image b.r. and ‘AP.’ below image b.l.); each stamped with the printer's stamp ‘ADVANCED GRAPHICS LONDON’ in circular device b.r.
Lit: Norbert Lynton, ‘Ivor Abrahams/Edgar Allan Poe’, in Ivor Abrahams: Sculptures and Prints, exh. cat., Bernard Jacobson Gallery 1976, [pp.15–17], entire suite repr. pp.16–20 and on inside of back cover, no numbers (unspecified impressions). Also repr: Ivor Abrahams: Edgar Allan Poe, brochure, Bernard Jacobson Gallery 1976, entire suite, no numbers (unspecified impressions)
Abrahams was commissioned by Bernard Jacobson to illustrate a volume of selected tales and poems by the American author Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49). It took two years to complete the proofing stages of the twenty prints, which were first exhibited in 1976. It was the artist who suggested making the prints available as a portfolio. The portfolio proved popular, and the project of publishing a book (announced in the 1976 exhibition brochure as scheduled for the following year) lost impetus. The book was due to be published in an edition of 500, with four loose prints per volume.
Norbert Lynton wrote an extended essay on Abrahams' illustrations which was intended for publication in the book. Unfortunately, the manuscript cannot now be traced, and only part of the essay was included in the 1976 Bernard Jacobson Gallery catalogue. Lynton ([p.15]) wrote: ‘I suspect that Poe's popularity through text, illustrations and films is part of his attraction for Abrahams. Yet, unlike all the films and most of the illustrations, his images show little desire to profit from the more thrilling aspects of Poe laboured by Arthur Rackham and the film directors.’ He continued ([pp.16–17]):
Abrahams un-Hollywoods Poe but uses some of Hollywood's tricks to do so. His other means are astonishingly un-period, un-hagiographic, ahistorical - in short, devoid of nostalgia. He is a plastic artist, a sculptor whose primary means of expression are form and interval. His images show a marked response to the constructive artist in Poe and much less attachment to the incidents that others focused on.
In conversation with the compiler Abrahams said he had admired Poe's writings since a teenager. He also emphasised that illustrating the text had given him the opportunity to address figure-ground relationships, the underlying theme of all his subsequent work. For the portfolio he chose to illustrate those stories or poems he felt he ‘could put an image to’. Although some of the stories and poems are among Poe's most famous writings, others are quite obscure. Abrahams commented that he had some difficulty in finding a truly complete edition of Poe's writings. The edition he finally worked from was the three-volume Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge, Massachusetts, I, 1969, II–III, 1978).
In 1976 Abrahams began work on a film on Poe with two friends, the painter Chris Battye and Richard Roberts, a cameraman and editor. Some of the film, which was never completed but was titled ‘The Sphinx’, after a Poe tale, was shot at Coalbrookdale, Ironbridge and Kensal Green (TGA 8315). A still from the film was used as a basis for the last print in the portfolio, also titled ‘The Sphinx’.
P11147 The Raven 1976
Screenprint with embossing and varnish 196 × 140 (7 3/4 × 5 1/2)
A dark blue raven sits on a bust representing the classical goddess Pallas Athene. Its profile, however, is reminiscent of a number of works by Picasso, inspired by the face of his young mistress Marie-Thérèse Walter, in the early 1930s (see, for example, ‘Still Life: Bust, Bowl and Palette’, 1932 (Musée Picasso, repr. Picasso: Sculptor/Painter, exh. cat., Tate Gallery 1994, no.95 in col.). The bust in P11147 is depicted as being made from black marble, and is both embossed and varnished. On the left side is an indistinct shadow of a moulded plinth.
The image was inspired by the famous 1845 Poe poem of the same title. In this the narrator tells how he was disturbed one bleak December night by a knocking sound:
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door -
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door -
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
The raven, who replied ‘Nevermore’ to the narrator's questions, was a portent of death:
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamplight o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!
(Mabbott, ed., I, 1969, pp.366, 369)
Published in:
Tate Gallery: Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions 1986-88, London 1996
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