Grippe was director of the renowned Atelier 17 print workshop in New York. His project drew on art as diverse as the juicy Expressionism of Willem de Kooning (who writes the title of Harold Rosenberg’s poem “Revenge’’ as if scrawling it with his finger in a pool of blood) and the more tailored, pared down abstractions of Ben Nicholson (who neatly builds an elegant visual scaffolding over Herbert Read’s haiku-like “Tenement’’). Poets include Dylan Thomas and William Carlos Williams.
The challenge was in integrating the text. It had to be readable and harmonize with the rest of the composition; to typeset the text would have stopped dead artists who were intoxicated with the possibilities of gesture and the artist’s hand.
They chose to print each poem in the poet’s handwriting. That’s not as easy as it sounds. Most of the poets had to write their verses backward from mirror images. Still, it’s the script that drives “21 Etchings and Poems.’’ Dylan Thomas’s “The Hand That Signed the Paper Felled a City,’’ a screed against unbalanced political power, is written in a squat, curling hand. Peter Grippe’s images spring from that gestural language. At the bottom, a giant, meaty hand prods and holds packs of small, inert bodies; a mushroom cloud rises along one margin.
It hangs beside Ezio Martinelli’s version of Horace Gregory’s “The Blue Waterfall (Hokusai 1760-1849).’’ Martinelli works delicately with Gregory’s attenuated script, conjuring an abstracted vertical landscape around it. The poem celebrates the great Japanese printmaker, but Martinelli doesn’t attempt to echo Hokusai; he’s more involved in the lines of Gregory’s letters than in illustrating his poem, although he makes the poem itself a kind of waterfall.
