A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel

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A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel

Artist Tom Phillips (British, 1937 - 2022)

Date1987 (originally published 1980)

DimensionsPage: 6 7/8 x 5 in. (17.5 x 12.6 cm)

MediumOffset lithography

ClassificationBooks

Object number

1993.19

Not on View

Label TextTom Phillips, A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (1980) In the 1960s Tom Phillips discovered a Victorian novel called A Human Document by W. H. Mallock. Since then, the novel has been a source for many of Phillips’ own art projects; he considers its use to be inexhaustible. The first direct result was The Humument (the title combines “human” and “document”), which he worked on from 1966 to 1975. Mallock's text became a backdrop for Phillips’ own artwork, in which snippets of the actual text are highlighted and the rest obscured. Phillips explained his methods this way: “When I started work on the book late in 1966, I merely scored out unwanted words with pen and ink. It was not long though before the possibility became apparent of making a better unity of word and image, intertwined as in a mediaeval miniature. This more comprehensive approach called for a widening of the techniques to be used…. Thus painting…became the basic technique, with some pages still executed in pen and ink only, some involving typing and some using collaged fragments from other parts of the book….”Published Referencescf. Drucker, Johanna, The Century of Artists' Books, Granary Books, New York, 1995, pp. 109-110 cf. Glasmeier, Michael, Die Bucher der Künstler, Stuttgart, 1994, no. 472 cf. Lauf, Cornelia and Clive Phillpot, Artist/Author: Contemporary Artists' Books, New York, 1998, no. 107