'Necessary Monsters: Lee Grandjean and David Webb', University of Greenwich Galleries (2014)
‘Necessary Monsters: Lee Grandjean and David Webb’, University of Greenwich Galleries (2014)

Before we even visit the exhibition of paintings by David Webb and sculptures by Lee Grandjean, its title immediately sets up expectations about its subject matter and references, and its attitudes and values. It is provocative. As viewers, we anticipate fearful or extraordinary creatures, yet we must accept them as an essential part of our experience. In fact, the title for this exhibition emerged relatively late in the story of this project, based on a friendship between the artists and decision to exhibit together on the basis of mutual admiration and trust.[1] It does not describe their work literally. In fact, we will not see grimacing gargoyles or fire-breathing dragons. But it is characteristic of the artists to have chosen a title which has wider references, and which deepens and complicates the approach we might take to their work individually, and to the whole exhibition.

The phrase, ‘necessary monsters’ is extracted from a famous work by Jorge Luis Borges, from The book of Imaginary Beings (1954) [2] and it is worth citing the quotation in full, as it has many layers of relevance:

‘We do not know what the dragon means, just as we do not know the meaning of the universe, but there is something in the image of the dragon that is congenial to man’s imagination….it is, one might say, a necessary monster.’

It is the metaphorical reflections here which are so pertinent to further reflections on the artists’ work, which they knew very well, and herein lie some of the values they share and the ideas which have brought them together.

Unknowing

Firstly, there is the idea of not knowing, of the essence of unknowing, and the fact that there is an enigma at the foundation even of some of the certainties of human existence.  Both artists share a desire to express ideas deeply through images, but do not want to create definitive statements. Enigma and uncertainty in the most positive sense is at the heart of their work, based on a constant quest for what has presence but is eternally unknown.

Congeniality to the imagination

Secondly, the idea of congeniality to the imagination, underlying the creation of something which both disturbs and puzzles. Their works are thought-provoking, but accessible. While they are destabilising, often juxtaposing opposing forces, or combative imagery, they are not aggressive.  They are open-ended, precisely extending a congenial invitation to the imagination to travel the journey they undertake.

Necessary monsters

And thirdly, the common need for the invention of a wild unruly creature, whether it bestows positive powers, or unleashes forces which are harmful, frightening, and destructive. Both Lee and David have their own versions of the monsters they are tackling, unleashing, laying to rest, whether these reside in their memories or their experience. But for them both, and this is another generic interest, the monsters are as much part of their formal vocabulary as their imaginary one.

Invention in surprising places

Tackling the practical business of controlling the arrangement and composition of shapes, the frame, structure, base, colour, how things fit together, whether or not they throw the image out of balance: these can be the artists’ demons. Both Lee Grandjean and David Webb have clear visions for what they want to achieve, which are nevertheless constantly adapted and adjusted as they proceed.  Their works are quite complementary, which they immediately recognise in each other. They both have a strong desire to improvise, and a talent for shifting a work through the processes of its construction; building, reworking, adapting constantly; seizing the moment to turn the accident from a potential disaster into a virtue.  Neither of them creates literal beings, however, they both employ strong humanoid, organic, anthropomorphic elements but retain a semi-abstract preference overall. They do not collaborate nor are they particularly assiduous correspondents, but they are intrigued by each other’s methods and thought processes. As David said, ‘In a way the nature of any ‘collaboration’ between us could sort of be the lack of it – such is the personal nature of our practice it’s almost forcefully non-collaborative: both are firmly within our own territory but finding a link through something un-said, subtle, playful and open – serious, but lightly-worn’. What the artists recognised intuitively and what we might appreciate most about their joint venture, is a mutual desire to be awkward, to be unexpected, to test some boundaries and, as Lee Grandjean has put it: ‘to use the world to push invention into surprising places’. David Webb has used a similar phrase ‘ a sense of something becoming in the world’.

Are they part of the same world artistically? The roots of their work differ markedly and on the face of it, so does their subject matter. However, the biggest thing which brings them together and the most intangible, is precisely how they both use their work to create a sense of being in the world through idiosyncratic composition, quirky visions and strange juxtapositions.

Lee wrote to David:

‘When I saw your paintings David, maybe you had the same sense when you saw my sculpture; there was that sense of oddity about the composition. All parts of the painting had surprising and fresh ways of organising the material within the edges of the support, and that beneath the idiosyncratic organisation lay some feeling for a unique place. There was a very specific visual poetry going on.’

David’s forms, whether organic or more formalised and geometric are sharply and precisely positioned, edges are important, they are coloured layer upon translucent layer so that they both reveal and conceal their being; they float free, or cling to the sides of the canvas, confronting one another mysteriously, hesitantly, or retreating into their own security. Sometimes geometric and organic forms are combined in complex relationships, apparently in a corner of a space – one is never quite sure of the shape or the scale of the space they occupy, but somehow it is redolent of architecture, interior, contained. Lee’s sculpture stands firmly positioned, and literally might be combining elements from figures, plants, furniture, but they are confronted, confused, disturbed, deliberately made to be unsettling. What may or may not be a head might be enlarged or minimised, or facetted to face three ways; or replaced by a looping linking form. What could be an ear could equally be a leaf; a body thickens and thins, twists and dips; enormous feet carry a slender connecting ring of protuberant globules.  This is an eccentric edge world and there is a real analogy here with the imagined world’s edges, known and documented since Classical times. The world’s monstrous races had been described, among other sources, in Pliny the Elder’s Natural History (77-79 CE) [3] and their existence subsequently corroborated throughout the middle ages by alarmist and possibly fictionalised accounts by travellers. They were a collection of odd creatures, the dog-headed Cynocephali, the Blemyae with eyes and mouths in their chests, the Sciapods with one giant foot to shade their head, and many more.  According to the Classical world, they were each precisely located, Sciapods and Cynocephali supposedly in India, Blemmyae in Libya, but on medieval maps, the monstrous races were collected together to represent the world’s unknown and uncharted regions, as it were, beyond the Christian realms. [4]The idea since the middle ages that the world has strange edges has persisted. While there is not literal connection here, to my knowledge neither Lee nor David have looked at this in detail in the course of making recent work, it is very tempting to make at least a general connection with the power of oddity, and its representation in some strange hybrid humanoid form.  It is I think significant that these artists have connected, albeit instinctively, with a sensibility to represent eccentric juxtapositions as a kind of interpretation of a wider world.

For both artists the act of creation is also a process of discovery and they both have talked about the pleasure of process, the moment when the practical business of achieving balance takes over, or the puzzling over just the right shade or shape assumes control. Drawing for both of them is important to work out tentative beginnings or to plot great emergent ideas. Especially for Lee, drawing is a playful exploratory medium, for David, it seems to be more of a means of recording and analysis, but they both use drawing to establish a repertoire of forms which then get developed in form and colour.

They are both well read, well travelled and especially astute observers of art throughout history. Of course they have points of reference, artists whose work they look to as mentors and guides to inspiration, often providing the foundation from which they will expand. These figures and their works are as likely to guide them to ways of finding practical solutions, as being points of reference. David Webb spoke of trying out Braque’s method of roughing up the paint surface with ground pumice. Lee Grandjean absolutely knows the sculptural traditions, the art history of his craft. ‘You know you are in the art-historical place of the reclining figure, Henry Moore and all that’, he said of a current phase of work, ‘there is a clear structural world you are in, but it is always still a question of getting the thing to stand up.’ They are both admirers of Philip Guston (1913-1980), a New York based artist who was more strongly figurative and louder than either of them, but one can immediately see their common interests in the hybrid world of cartoons and drama, the creation of a vibrant kind of fantasy composite, combining imaginative and real experience. It is also pertinent for these two European- trained artists, that Guston so often ran counter to prevailing fashion, at odds with 1960s minimalism, too complex for Pop Art, antithetical to conceptual art, yet completely engaging, inventive and lively and drawing from a common ground indebted equally to American cartoon and Picasso.

David Webb

One of David Webb’s most recent exhibitions was called ‘Fragmentarium’ and in a sense ‘Necessary Monsters’ is continuing very much in that idiom, taking the world piece by piece, looking in from the edges. Though David uses titles to reference experience which is almost buried in his work, the monster here gives it a new edge, though that in itself might be imaginary in the mind of the viewer, expecting to see something more disturbing than before. But it is an idea he has embraced with enthusiasm, and it will give viewers a new angle from which to take stock of what they see. His work does embrace odd and uneasy juxtapositions. He supplies the elements of strange experience, enough for the viewer to be taken off guard. It borders on the unruly which itself enters territory which is also inhabited by the monstrous, but it would be wrong to over-determine an interpretation of his work, its whole point is its open-endedness and enigma. It stands for a kind of freedom of the imagination, not the constraint of an over-riding judgemental idea. He says: ‘I want my work to engage, hold attention and provoke a reading; make something ‘believable’.’

While there is something deeply autobiographical at the root of the artist’s work, a rethinking of very concrete experiences, family memories, evocations of momentous and critical incidents, it is hardly visible to an external observer. He is acutely aware of the environments in which he has lived and worked and these feature powerfully as guides to him to create atmospheres, using a balance of colours and shapes in his paintings, but again, it is not overt. Nor is it always the obvious features that strike him or find a visual expression in his work. The sparkling water of Deptford Creek outside the interior formality of his studio might inform a painting, but the gaps between buildings are just as likely to lodge themselves as part of an image, or a bulging amoeboid shape placed to create , contrasts, or indeed harmony. But it is unlikely that any of these forms will be any longer readable as anything specific. Likewise, there will be fleeting and fragmentary references or tributes to his mentors and visual memory. Influences range from things lodged in his mind like painted tables, Parcheesi boards, to formative viewing experiences, paintings by Simone Martini or Lorenzetti, Paul Klee or Matisse.  As with most artists some of these become especially significant from time to time, in shifting major ground in his thinking. One can see, for example, what the organisation of space, the outlining of figures and their apparent floating against backgrounds, the balancing of extremely subtle pale washed colours with deep indigos and soft reds might owe to Simone Martini. Paul Klee is a particular inspiration, an artist who gave intense scrutiny to the minutiae and infinitesimal phenomena of life, but to substantial effect.  A famous remark, made by artist Hugo Ball in 1917, while Klee was a teacher at the Bauhaus, came up in our conversation, ‘….In the age of the colossus, Klee falls in love with a green leaf, a star, a butterfly’s wing and since the heavens and all infinity are reflected in them, he paints those in too….[5] David discussed it as an example of a lack of interest in great power, ‘the colossus’, yet, an ability to see and portray equally significant things through the unexpected, even the most humble and overlooked subjects. Travels, and wider experiences of the world run deep as influences for David, and continue to lead from time to time to major new episodes for his work. It was a visit to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin with its enormous collections of Classical and Middle Eastern sculptural fragments which inspired the ‘Fragmentarium’.

The most important reference for his work, which he has written and painted about repeatedly, was a journey of migration from Tanzania to England in 1955, undertaken by his grandmother, and his mother when she was still a child. It was a big family story. Following the collapse of his grandmother’s marriage, the two returned home, away from an exotic other place, travelling by steam liner. He has researched the journey meticulously, reading letters, poring over photographs, reading around the subject. Imagining that experience with all its hope, uncertainty, sadness has been a strong motivation. But his paintings occupy a parallel existence.  He is using his art to try to do what everyone would like to achieve, to empathise with past moments, to make them live, but to give them new life in a way that has current meaning.  There is almost nothing literal remaining from these specific references in David’s work. His concern is a poetic reflection of mood and balance, but it is an aesthetic and formal one as much as it is a lyrical exercise in remembering.  His paintings are almost still lives, constructions in the shadows of memory and imagination.

He found that the ship, ‘The Uganda’, owned by the British India Steam Co. has become something of a cult design classic. Its modernist spaces, furnishings, nursery, Parcheesi game boards, has provided the inspiration for subject matter, colour, balance and design in his paintings. The Parcheesi board, seen in the distance, obliquely in pictures of the ship, has been the inspiration for colour and structure in a whole series of abstract paintings with an intuitive geometry and soft, dark colours. Echoes of the ship’s furniture, as well as specific details of its wall hangings, colonial decorations such as mounted elephant tusks, have appeared in a series of paintings entitled ‘Tourist Smoking Room’, with numerous variations. Subsequently he discovered a colour picture of this room, which showed the furniture to have been upholstered in the same vivid blue he had imagined for his paintings. Now that blue has taken on another level of importance as a reference in his work. But it has done so as an independent element from the specifics of the furniture. Equally, the Tourist Smoking room has broken free from its origins, as if it has served its purpose, it no longer needs to be a specific place. It is a reference point which has adopted its own persona as a character, a series of shapes, an emphasis of colour, a formalised evocation of memory, almost independent of experience, or a new experience in its own right. ‘Tourist Smoking Room (Red)’, is its own being. It is almost held back from developing its own identity by retaining the original reference, still, as it were, anchored to that ship.

David Webb’s images are flattened, elusive, sometimes in cartoon-like communication, poking one another. There is no sculptural roundness or illusionistic depth, but there are overlapping planes creating layers of space, time, order. What is important is the absorption of references, a shade, a shape, a balance, a tension. It is not crucial that the viewer sees what the artist sees or even that the viewer knows any aspect of the original stories and settings. David tells funny stories of people’s odd interpretations of shapes, as woolly mammoths and loaves of bread, about which he is more than tolerant, which he actually seems to enjoy. What is important is that his work holds people through its underlying force, that it keeps people engaged and intrigued, and that they appreciate the subtlety of his handling of the paint and the building of composition.  Colour is tremendously important and his palette to date has been soft and muted, sometimes monochrome. The precise shade of a deep indigo blue becomes the main point of a work and what happens to it as he paints can change everything. Indeed a constant transformation from an idea to an image, is an important part of the thinking, developing process. A painting might undergo numerous processes and layers. Accidents along the way, a drip, a rethought and half excised passage, can become a major player in the transformation.

While there is no narrative specificity in his work, there is strong emotion behind it, relating to memories, love and losses, and now his relationship with his partner and the birth of his first child. The new relationships and experiences are discernible only obliquely, the baby being carried around by the father might be represented as two shapes closely intertwined in interdependency, the one smaller than the other. As he paints and thinks and adapts and nurtures the image into a satisfactory completion, new interpretations may occur along the way, adding to those which were intended at the outset, as he explains: ‘I do often have an idea at the outset, then it’s open to bending, bold changes, and in some (maybe rarer cases) complete revision of the idea’.  He searches in his paintings for an equivalence, a visual language that will do justice to the power of feeling, expressed through relationships between forms, which, depending on the mood of the painting, exist in balanced intuitive geometry, or interfere with each other in enigmatic, sometimes disturbing ways.  The new body of work marks two momentous departures, and it looks as though the artist’s development is taking a more radical shift. Firstly it is with a new context of this exhibition a different overarching theme to be considered a new exhibiting relationship with Lee Grandjean. The colours are becoming stronger, sharper, more vibrant and shapes more confrontational, definitely assuming a more organic character and even a darker kind of underlying aggression, or at least a hint of a lurking threat, it might be read as anger, or fear, or mischief. It is an opportunity for the familiar themes to be rethought, refreshed and reinterpreted. Possibly the monsters might bring out some darker aspects of the memories and experiences which he is constantly interrogating.

Lee Grandjean

Lee Grandjean talks engagingly about cartoons, He grew up with them and never lost the wonder at their inventive ability to combine violence, impossibility, and humour. For example, a 3D figure will run headlong into the path of a steam-roller, be squashed flat, yet still pick itself up and run off in its newly flattened shape.  That kind of magic of transformation, and the suspension of disbelief is deeply current throughout his work. While Lee’s work is less specifically autobiographical than David’s in the sense that he does not have over-riding narratives, there are underlying ones; it is nevertheless absolutely governed by his experience. He lives in the country surrounded by barns, open fields, dark skies at night, and the peace and space of that environment are immersive. But he has always had a parallel city existence, from teaching or travelling for other reasons.  This has led to a particularly sculptural and phenomenological way of interpreting this contrasting experience which Lee has written about:

I do think about more general fundamental states, made more real to me when making the move out of the city to this landscape. That is: what is the condition of standing? What is the difference between a built standing and a grown standing. The whole life and presence of the upright. Consequently there is also the fundamental of the horizontal, ground, and what falls into it and what rises up.’

There was a phase of his work in the 1980s which explored the city-country relationships, dichotomies and pressures. That was the beginning of his interest in opposites.  Gradually this has matured in his work into the development of dual characters and hybrid forms.

Lee Grandjean is an incessant innovator. Never content to repeat the same idea in the same way, or pursue the same solution to its execution for long, he is constantly questing for new means of expressing a whole range of widening thoughts. The thinking proceeds in parallel with the making and the two expand symbiotically. So, from 2008, he had a phase of experimenting with decomposing forms constructed from squashed and altered plastic, from melted milk containers, and from polystyrene which was cut, stuck and assembled.  These were fixed on armatures, some combined with domestic furniture, and painted to become somewhat violated characters, quite grotesque, but still never far from the world of humour. These were part of several exhibitions, one in Eindhoven, Holland in 2009. and one joint exhibition with Desmond Brett, called ‘Banter’ at the Cut in Halesworth, Suffolk in 2011. This was an important and inventive  phase in his work, taking him physically and metaphorically away from the world of the countryside, to the mess and waste of urbanising detritus. It happened to coincide with the final phase of his full-time teaching career, and without over-interpreting the autobiographical element, it was a period in which he was particularly alert to the disintegration of one aspect of his existence and responsibilities. Translating that into forms that had an ambiguous message really exemplifies the way in which Grandjean is able to combine life and art in tune with whichever mood he is currently experiencing.

The Cut exhibition, introduced one new singular breed of character, and another, a pair of figures, which were more of a residue from his earlier countryside themes. The countryside ones were tall branched oak trimmings, carrying strange fruit in the form of squashed red-painted tin cans. It brought together the world of the forest, the kitchen and the waste-bin, and was subsequently multiplied and given a dramatic painted mis-en scène, at the Sainsbury Centre. Rethought as an installation and called ‘From the Deep Woods’ it was created as an atmospheric commission for a specific context at an exhibition, ‘Changing Landscapes’. However, it was a bit of a diversion from the other new character ‘Blue Legs’, who showed quite a different way forward, and has ultimately brought us to the figures which form the principle part of the installation for ‘Necessary Monsters’. ‘Blue Legs’ is a bound figure, with one giant foot fixed like a bridge or buttress to its supporting member, its inner construction materials disguised by its taped wrapping.  Its blue colour is both pale and bright, a particularly sharp blue, which manages to look both artificial and plastic, and still be reminiscent of unfeasibly bright skies and seas. The form is part architecture, part human, part organic, a creature as he said which is ‘stumbling into form’. Around it, a whole host of other hybrid forms have emerged, variously coloured and scaled. Some are strong tall, arched and architectonic like Blue Legs, but more drably coloured, some are bright skinny streaks with globular heads, and a whole group are squat with handles like cartoon luggage or giant padlocks. These are called ‘Worldly Goods’, and are strongly symbolic, representing as much, as Lee says: ‘perhaps buried memories layered over with muddy accretions’. The reference to the material as both practical element and metaphor is characteristic of his knowing and analytical approach to the stuff of art and how meaning is constructed by the complex of its associations, which includes its materiality. The cement coating is ‘urban mud, or silt’, significant also in that the whole collection of some twenty of these forms was first shown in an extraordinarily un-urban setting in Norfolk at the outdoor amphitheatre at Gresham’s School in Holt. The exhibition was called ‘Weights and Measures’ and seen in the stepped theatrical environment, hidden in the woods beyond the playing fields, the figures were both audience and actors, strangely communicating with each other and both in harmony and distinct contrast with the woodland context.

The squat ‘Worldly Goods’ figures, Lee has multiplied since, and each one has a specific sub-title, relating to the burden of possession. They are notionally goods in transit, such as handbags, luggage, but they are stolid, held firmly to the ground, more indeed, like weights. They almost mock the thing they purport to be. They have the anchoring firmness of an object which stays put yet is suggesting at possible portability and transit. The ‘handbags / padlocks’ form part of the range of figures destined for ‘Necessary Monsters’ and with their sham function, and in their metaphorical connecting role, they are analogous to the corbels of a medieval building. Corbels are situated at the top of a wall or monument, usually carved in stone as heads or crouching figures, and are made to look, often humorously, as though they are carrying weight, but of course they are not, they have only a symbolic function. Yet they are part of an entire repertoire of forms and beings which exist at the edges of monuments, buildings, or painted in the margins of manuscripts, which notionally comment on, moralise about, mock and subvert the authority of the Centre. They perform a function both as decoration and as representatives of a critical edge and are often hybrid creatures combining human, animal, serpent, grotesque: indeed they are necessary monsters. The work of both artists in the exhibition, but especially Lee Grandjean’s is very much attuned to this world of the puzzling edges where curious things happen in funny ways, but which are actually deadly serious.

The newest work Lee has created specially for the exhibition is clearer and cleaner in form than the ‘Weights and Measures’ group. A series of characters have emerged, starting out of complex drawings and developing through construction, following a period of full time work in the studio. They are even more cartoon-like than before, reaching out, almost dancing, lolloping and galumphing. They are humanoid only in scale and reference, not in the literalness of representation. They are looping, curving forms, ripe for animation. They have residues and references to heads, arms bodies, eyes, mouths, as attributes of movement and communication. Sometimes they are related to a  drawing which becomes a kind of pattern from which shapes are referenced and then cut out of plywood, like the cutting of parts of clothing by a tailor. This is how ‘Red Crow’ began, but as it grew as a construction in space, the shaping of its form acquired another momentum to give it a balance between graphic clarity, lightness and substance. What in the original drawing was a beak-like protuberance at the top, has become a risky lurch at the head of the figure, almost over-balancing it and creating much more tension.

The paint on the new figures is more matt and chalky in surface and very much brighter in colour than any of Lee’s former work. The choice of colour is pertinent of course – the bright yellow ‘Oh Girl’ is a tribute to his three baby granddaughters – but sometimes the colour also contributes to the titles, emphasising the abstract ‘thing-ness’ over the anthropomorphic. ‘Cerulean Loops’ is like the others, created from plywood forms, which are then covered with scrim and slurry to pad certain areas, and then coated with cement, again picking up the idea of ‘urban silt’, which as Lee says, is  ‘more gritty and real than plaster with all it’s art history’. Then the paint is applied to mask the construction. The figures grow out of the accretion of elements which shift constantly as the form becomes more complex.  As he builds, Lee is editing the space they occupy, balancing positive and negative. For only one work, entitled ‘Decoy’ this became a literal part of its development, as a figurative being was created on top of a plinth, formed from the residue of shapes cut out from its base, so it will become a positive being made out of negative space. In its unfinished state it was becoming a statement about the machinations of making, the evidence of its origins and workings, ‘part of the dance of it’.  He has described as ‘a homage to Mr Moore’.

Planes of engagement

The phrase ‘planes of engagement’ is the overall theme under which this exhibition is taking place, and David pointed out how it is a good headline for describing the ways in which the two artists approach their relationship with each other and with their viewers. They both have a side-long way of taking an image from one realm and putting it into another, to an end which is enigmatic, oblique, yet very to the point. They are acutely aware of how they are creating layers of meaning and enabling different levels of interpretation. At the outset Lee wrote to David:

‘There was obvious common ground, but we would only know more about it when we brought our work together in a show…….How to make something we haven’t seen before? We both use subject matter and narrative to initiate composition. This offers us the particularities of the observed world, which gives us an objectivity that pushes beyond ourselves as it were. Nevertheless we do not want to illustrate but wish the forms to speak for themselves, the work is the ‘real’ thing; ‘it’ is to be the first experience. Maybe one can think of it as an odd kind of formalism that has the ring of an empirical truth about it; looking odd but feeling right, a formal artifice that has the conviction of nature.’

The fact that they have chosen to show together demonstrates a particularly generous and receptive attitude by both of them to a stimulus from another artist, and a desire to use the exhibition itself as a means of developing new planes of engagement with each other and with an audience. Both artists are making work specially for this exhibition, and are each planning to take along a range of different works to see how they seem to co-exist. They are taking a calculated risk: as they have not shown together before, the whole thing will be a surprise. This approach, improvisatory, experimental, open-ended, is entirely consistent with their means of creation. But it also sets a challenge to their viewers. We will have work to do to come to terms with this new and experimental juxtaposition. The necessary monsters are unlikely to leave us feeling detached or complacent. They might enable us to understand the world in new ways through the visions they offer. They might disrupt our world.

Veronica Sekules

March 2014

Acknowledgements

This was written on the basis of studio visits and interviews with the artists. I am very grateful to them for their generous and lucid discussions.

[1] They had met through a series of exhibitions called ‘Uncaught Hares: Painting and Sculpture at Greenwich Studios 1974-1994’, which David curated for the Stephen Lawrence Gallery in 2011.

[2] The Book of Imaginary Beings, Jorge Luis Borges, Vintage Classics, London,  2002, 12 (slightly different translation).

[3] Pliny’s Natural History, ed & transl. John Healey, Penguin Classics, Harmondsworth, 1991.

[4] Medieval Maps, PDA Harvey, British Library, 1991; Michael Camille, Image on the Edge, The Margins of Medieval Art, Reaktion Books, London,1992.

[5] Quoted in a review of Tate’s exhibition in 2014 by Alex Danchev, Times Higher Education, http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/culture/paul-klee-making-visible/2008214.article Accessed March 2014.