Dimensions: support: 406 x 330 mm
Copyright: © The estate of David Jones | CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 DEED, Photo: Tate
Curator: David Jones, born in 1895, created this intriguing piece, "Exiit Edictum," sometime before his death in 1974. It's currently held in the Tate Collections. Editor: It has such an austere and monumental feel to it, despite its relatively small size of 406 x 330 mm. The letterforms feel almost carved, like an inscription. Curator: Indeed. Jones had a deep interest in the materiality of language, in how the physical act of writing or inscription connects us to historical practices of making and meaning. The layering of Latin script is meant to evoke the imperial administration, as well as recall the language of liturgy. Editor: The symbols woven throughout create a powerful cultural echo. The cross paired with the Roman text speaks to layers of meaning—the spiritual birth intertwined with the temporal power of the Roman Empire. Curator: Exactly. And consider Jones’s own complex relationship to these systems of power and belief as a working-class Welshman and a Catholic convert. Editor: There is this wonderful tension between the hand-crafted quality and the pronouncements of authority. It asks us to look closely. Curator: It invites us to meditate on how words and symbols, when made physical, shape our understanding of history and belief.
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tate 5 months ago
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Nicolete Gray was the daughter of Laurence Binyon, poet and Keeper of Oriental Art at the British Museum. She studied medieval history and in 1932 began the life long research into lettering which led to her becoming a leading historian and teacher of this subject and herself a lettering artist. In 1936, she organised a contemporary art exhibition 'Abstract and Concrete'. This included work by Ben Nicholson, Hepworth and Moore, but also introduced to the British public the work of foreign abstract artists such as Calder, Gabo, Giacometti, Kandinsky, Miró and Mondrian. Nicolete Gray enjoyed a long and fruitful friendship with David Jones. She wrote a monograph on his inscriptions in 1981 and a book on his paintings in 1989. Large painted inscriptions were an important part of Jones's later work, beginning around 1943. The Latin texts that Jones has chosen here refer to Christmas. 'Exiit Edictum' comes from the account of Christ's birth in St Luke's Gospel, and the separate line of 'Iam Redit Apollo' comes from Virgil's Fourth Eclogue, which Christian writers believed prophesied Christ's birth. Nicolete Gray stated that this inscription is innovatory in two ways; firstly that Jones's preferred coloured background and wax crayon technique have been replaced by letters in different colours on white paper; and secondly Jones introduces here his practice of combining fragments from different texts, so as to give visual form to a complex of inter-related meaning. Gallery label, September 2004
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