"...and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."
Ulysses is an enduring testament to everyday life and its travails and it still stands as one of the greatest novels in the English language today.
To celebrate this year's Bloomsday, our bookseller, Anna has decided to share a rare collaboration between Joyce and one of the 20th Century's most iconic artists, Matisse. Here, she shares six plates which comprise the artist's illustrations for the first illustrated edition of James Joyce's Ulysses.
While Joyce was delighted with the idea of Matisse illustrating his masterpiece, he was apprehensive that the artist might not have read the book. Matisse had been given a copy of the French translation by Joyce scholar Stuart Gilbert, but his neighbour, the writer Dorothy Bussy, remarked that he was "in a complete fog about it". She lent him a copy of Gilbert's seminal James Joyce's Ulysses: A Study (1930). It was after reading Gilbert's book that Matisse decided to depict the episodes of Ulysses with the most Homeric parallels.
Matisse produced etchings for six of the eight episodes of Ulysses that have their counterparts in Homer's Odyssey: "The Calypso Episode"; "Aeolus, Cave of the Winds"; "The Cyclops" (described by Aragon as "the only true image of pain in Matisse's work"); "The Episode of Nausicaä"; "The Circle Episode"; and "Symbolic Landscape: Ithaca".
Regardless of whether Matisse read Ulysses in its entirety, Joyce approved of his decision to emphasize the classical source text: "I telephoned Joyce and spoke to him. We are in complete agreement regarding the character that I want to give to the illustration".
Links:
Matisse Ulysses Etchings:
www.peterharrington.co.uk/six...
First Edition Ulysses:
www.peterharrington.co.uk/uly...
Literature:
www.peterharrington.co.uk/boo...
What's New:
www.peterharrington.co.uk/boo...
Peter Harrington - The Journal:
www.peterharrington.co.uk/blog/
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