NYAB Event - "Poetic License" Exhibition

"Poetic License" Exhibition

First Street Gallery

This event has ended.

First Street Gallery presents Poetic License, an exhibition of artworks inspired by pieces of poetry. Poetry and Painting have much in common and a rich history of cross-inspiration. The poet artist is a well known figure in Eastern and Western art. To name but a few: the Chinese painter, calligrapher, poet and dramatist, Xu Wei; William Blake (whose paintings and etchings are inextricably linked to his poetry); Victor Hugo (known mostly for his poetry and prose, who produced more than 4000 'very modern' pen and ink drawings); Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who influenced the European Symbolists and foreshadowed the Aesthetic movement); E.E. Cummings (whose little known oils and watercolors led to his experiments with poems as visual objects on the page).

Other poets who were very closely allied with visual artists though they did not paint themselves – and many of whom were important art critics of their time – call to mind Charles Baudelaire (a precursor of the Symbolist poets Paul Verlaine and Stephane Mallarmé whose work inspired the Nabis and later Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism); Guillaume Apollinaire (who collaborated with Picasso, Derain, Chagall, and Duchamp, among others, joined the Puteaux branch of the Cubist Movement and coined the term Surrealism); and the poet, critic and former Assistant Curator of Painting and Sculpture at MOMA, Frank O'Hara, whose poetry was heavily influenced by Pollock and Kline and de Kooning and the 'imaginative realism' of Freilicher and Rivers.

Beyond the individual poets and painters lies a fundamental objective which poetry and art share. To paraphrase Mallarmé, the poet suggests and evokes rather than describes. In much the same way, the collector and critic Leo Stein described the artist as "he who deals with imponderables." Both the poet and the artist concern themselves with composition, in which, Stein noted, "There is a kind of fusion, an interpenetration, an action at a distance, and not merely a neighborhood relation between the words of a poem or the colors of a picture."

The works in this show do not seek to translate the lines of poetry which appear on the wall beside them. Rather, they are autonomous, self-contained visual poems.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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