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I neglected to mention yesterday that Monza incorporated flying saucer imagery into his anti-McCarthyite artwork circa 1955, when flying saucers were cool.
I also neglected to write that Monza’s truly Blakean sequence of linocuts came in June of 1969, when he was seventy-one years old.
His indignant series of allegories of Watergate, five to ten years later, have cut free from pop symbols altogether and present an archetypal vision of looming environmental destruction mirrored in the “lies lies lies” of a government covering up not only presidential misdeeds, but news of mutated, disfigured fish in the bay near Redondo Beach.
The relevant point here being Monza’s age; this was not a twenty-year-old hippie responding to the emotional currents or controlled substances of the time, but a lifelong leftist worker making very sophisticated art that incorporated deeply personal symbolism that at the same time was distinctly universal symbolism.
I’m impressed, not least because it shows that it was possible for him, as it was for Kenneth Rexroth in those years, to communicate across generations in terms of a vision of energy and resistance and spiritual transformation.
Now back to reading Against the Day. Longtime readers of this blog already know what novels I am waiting for later in 2007.
I also forgot to wish my other Orthodox friends a very happy Theophany and to re-use the image from the Hypnerotomachia Polyphili. Given the preciosity of all that, probably just as well.
I also neglected to write that Monza’s truly Blakean sequence of linocuts came in June of 1969, when he was seventy-one years old.
His indignant series of allegories of Watergate, five to ten years later, have cut free from pop symbols altogether and present an archetypal vision of looming environmental destruction mirrored in the “lies lies lies” of a government covering up not only presidential misdeeds, but news of mutated, disfigured fish in the bay near Redondo Beach.
The relevant point here being Monza’s age; this was not a twenty-year-old hippie responding to the emotional currents or controlled substances of the time, but a lifelong leftist worker making very sophisticated art that incorporated deeply personal symbolism that at the same time was distinctly universal symbolism.
I’m impressed, not least because it shows that it was possible for him, as it was for Kenneth Rexroth in those years, to communicate across generations in terms of a vision of energy and resistance and spiritual transformation.
Now back to reading Against the Day. Longtime readers of this blog already know what novels I am waiting for later in 2007.
I also forgot to wish my other Orthodox friends a very happy Theophany and to re-use the image from the Hypnerotomachia Polyphili. Given the preciosity of all that, probably just as well.
