Synopses & Reviews
Three hundred years ago, an unprecedented explosion in inexpensive, disposable print--newspapers, pamphlets, informational publications, artistic prints--ushered in a media revolution that forever changed our relationship to information. One unusually perceptive man, an obscure Dutch/British still life painter named Edward Collier, understood the full significance of these momentous changes and embedded in his work secret warnings about the inescapable slippages between author and print, meaning and text, viewer and canvas, perception and reality.
Working around 1700, Collier has been neglected, even forgotten, precisely because his secret messages have never been noticed, let alone understood. Until now. In Mr. Collier's Letter Racks, Dror Wahrman recovers the tale of an extraordinary illusionist artist who engaged in a wholly original way with a major transformation of his generation. Wahrman shows how Collier developed a hidden language within his illusionist paintings--replete with minutely coded messages, witty games, intricate allusions, and private jokes--to draw attention to the potential and the pitfalls of this new information age. A remarkably shrewd and prescient commentator on the changes unfolding around him, not least the advent of a new kind of politics following the Glorious Revolution, Collier performed a post-modernist critique of modernity long before the modern age. His trompe l'oeil paintings are filled with seemingly disconnected, enigmatic objects--letters, seals, texts of speeches, magnifying glasses, title pages--and with teasingly significant details that require the viewer to lean in and peer closely. Wahrman does just that, taking on the role of detective/cultural historian to unravel the layers of deceptions contained within Collier's extraordinary paintings.
Written with passionate enthusiasm and including more than 70 color illustrations, Mr. Collier's Letter Racks is a spell-binding feat of cultural history, illuminating not only the work of an eccentric genius but the media revolution of his period, the birth of modern politics, and the nature of art itself.
Review
"It is difficult to find a book that has been so brilliantly researched; hard to match a scholar who has reconstructed so fine a web of influence. Mr. Collier's Letter Racks makes an exceptional if idiosyncratic contribution to understanding the mentalite of the later Stuart age." --David Howarth, American Historical Review
"has the intricate cleverness of a Borgesian fable and the biographical originality of A. J. A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo. It carries the reader on a most unexpected, entertaining journey" Marina Warner
"Wahrman's enthusiasm and his revitalization of a neglected artist is to be commended" Library Journal
"Dror Wahrman has identified a considerable body of work by a hitherto unremarked but consummate illusionist painter. His detective work is playful, and his multi-faceted arguments compelling, especially about forgery, censorship, textual representation, and painterly inscription. Mr. Collier's Letter Racks has the intricate cleverness of a Borgesian fable and the biographical originality of A. J. A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo. It carries the reader on a most unexpected, entertaining journey."-Marina Warner
"Dror Wahrman's superb sleuthing has uncovered scores of trompe l'oeil letter racks painted by the Dutch artist Edward Collier in late seventeenth-century England. Packed slyly into these pictures are unsettling questions about the printing revolution and politics of the day and the nature of artistic creation itself. Wahrman holds us in delightful suspense as he unravels this tale with humor and learning and reveals surprising precedents for the web revolution of our own time."-Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds
"In Mr. Collier's Letter Racks, Dror Wahrman forensically reconstructs the secret mental world of Edward Collier, an obscure Anglo-Dutch painter specializing in trompe-l'oeil canvasses in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Writing with his customary brio, panache, and chutzpah, and following as much in the footsteps of Umberto Eco as of Sherlock Holmes, Wahrman also shows how Collier's paintings stand as witness to artistic, political, and media revolutions taking place around him at the dawn of the modern era."-Colin Jones, Queen Mary, University of London
"An invitation to look closely at an extraordinary set of paintings, this study retrieves Edward Collier from the margins of art history and asks that we take seriously his immensely clever and witty letter-rack pictures. Dror Wahrman brilliantly positions the paintings in relation to Anglo-Dutch relations of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while keeping a sharp eye on the period's 'media revolution' and its explosion of inexpensive printed materials. As the riddles abound, readers are in good hands with these two expert puzzle-masters: Wahrman and Collier are here perfectly matched in this captivating story." -Craig Ashley Hanson, author of The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism
Review
"has the intricate cleverness of a Borgesian fable and the biographical originality of A. J. A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo. It carries the reader on a most unexpected, entertaining journey" Marina Warner
"Wahrman's enthusiasm and his revitalization of a neglected artist is to be commended" Library Journal
"Dror Wahrman has identified a considerable body of work by a hitherto unremarked but consummate illusionist painter. His detective work is playful, and his multi-faceted arguments compelling, especially about forgery, censorship, textual representation, and painterly inscription. Mr. Collier's Letter Racks has the intricate cleverness of a Borgesian fable and the biographical originality of A. J. A. Symons's The Quest for Corvo. It carries the reader on a most unexpected, entertaining journey."-Marina Warner
"Dror Wahrman's superb sleuthing has uncovered scores of trompe l'oeil letter racks painted by the Dutch artist Edward Collier in late seventeenth-century England. Packed slyly into these pictures are unsettling questions about the printing revolution and politics of the day and the nature of artistic creation itself. Wahrman holds us in delightful suspense as he unravels this tale with humor and learning and reveals surprising precedents for the web revolution of our own time."-Natalie Zemon Davis, author of Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim Between Worlds
"In Mr. Collier's Letter Racks, Dror Wahrman forensically reconstructs the secret mental world of Edward Collier, an obscure Anglo-Dutch painter specializing in trompe-l'oeil canvasses in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Writing with his customary brio, panache, and chutzpah, and following as much in the footsteps of Umberto Eco as of Sherlock Holmes, Wahrman also shows how Collier's paintings stand as witness to artistic, political, and media revolutions taking place around him at the dawn of the modern era."-Colin Jones, Queen Mary, University of London
"An invitation to look closely at an extraordinary set of paintings, this study retrieves Edward Collier from the margins of art history and asks that we take seriously his immensely clever and witty letter-rack pictures. Dror Wahrman brilliantly positions the paintings in relation to Anglo-Dutch relations of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries while keeping a sharp eye on the period's 'media revolution' and its explosion of inexpensive printed materials. As the riddles abound, readers are in good hands with these two expert puzzle-masters: Wahrman and Collier are here perfectly matched in this captivating story." -Craig Ashley Hanson, author of The English Virtuoso: Art, Medicine, and Antiquarianism in the Age of Empiricism
About the Author
Dror Wahrman is Ruth N. Halls Professor of History at Indiana University and at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the author of
The Making of the Modern Self and of
Imagining the Middle Class.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Puzzles
Chapter 1: Print 2.0 c. 1700: A New Media Regime
Chapter 2: Life Not Still
Chapter 3: The Nature of Print
Chapter 4: Marking Time
Chapter 5: Monarchy in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Chapter 6: Eye Con
Chapter 7: A Man with an Impossible Temper
Chapter 8: Tom, Dick, and Henry
Chapter 9: The Collier Club?
Chapter 10: Death of the Author?
Chapter 11: Which Revolution? Or the Memory of Mr. Lory
Chapter 12: A Signature Gone Wild
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index