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PCS (not metro)
May. 4th, 2008 11:52 amI have taken to blogging over on counterforces.blogspot again, to which I refer the interested reader for how I came to spend a day tracking down the neglected career of Pamela Colman Smith. Okay, the short of it is that I saw her work in the "Georgia O'Keeffe and the Women of the Stieglitz Circle" exhibition at the High Museum of Art and felt that the curator of the show had done Smith an injustice in a rather fragmentary and slighting biographical note about someone who seemed much more interesting than most of the artists of the symbolist generation, having lived in Jamaica and collected folk tales which she compiled in a published volume, then designed the cards of the A. E. Waite Tarot in 1909, then been an active feminist and a recognized illustrator and oh, lots of other things, but subsequently disappearing from view for the last 35 years of her life and dying in poverty in 1951, when her paintings and other possessions were auctioned off to pay her debts.
My counterforces entry lists the biographical page that amplifies on this (more so than the Wikipedia entry)...it requires a bit more effort to locate the best of her art, which included illustrations for Baring-Gould et al. --- her original watercolors are better than her illustrational work, but the ones included in the exhibition are not reproduced in the book associated with the show. In other words, we are overdue for a re-evaluation with numerous illustrations.
However, Melinda Boyd Parsons, who seems to be the world's sole Pamela Colman Smith scholar, is proving as invisible as Smith herself. Parsons has seemingly been working on her Smith biography for the past three decades and was last identified as teaching at the University of Memphis (prior to its 1993 name change). Now she doesn't show up in any web searches except on the Tarot-related sites that quote from her research.
A forgotten symbolist painter whose sole researcher seems to be equally elusive, and one whose work is seen by millions of people each year who have no idea that it is her work...my kind of artist, obviously.
I don't quite know why I find myself repeatedly enmeshed in the history of the Tarot these days...I left my Waite Tarot deck behind years ago because it dated from the days when I wrote a freshman independent study paper on The Waste Land and I wanted to forget those years.
Eliot didn't know anything about the Tarot either, and made up some cards that aren't in the actual deck.
My counterforces entry lists the biographical page that amplifies on this (more so than the Wikipedia entry)...it requires a bit more effort to locate the best of her art, which included illustrations for Baring-Gould et al. --- her original watercolors are better than her illustrational work, but the ones included in the exhibition are not reproduced in the book associated with the show. In other words, we are overdue for a re-evaluation with numerous illustrations.
However, Melinda Boyd Parsons, who seems to be the world's sole Pamela Colman Smith scholar, is proving as invisible as Smith herself. Parsons has seemingly been working on her Smith biography for the past three decades and was last identified as teaching at the University of Memphis (prior to its 1993 name change). Now she doesn't show up in any web searches except on the Tarot-related sites that quote from her research.
A forgotten symbolist painter whose sole researcher seems to be equally elusive, and one whose work is seen by millions of people each year who have no idea that it is her work...my kind of artist, obviously.
I don't quite know why I find myself repeatedly enmeshed in the history of the Tarot these days...I left my Waite Tarot deck behind years ago because it dated from the days when I wrote a freshman independent study paper on The Waste Land and I wanted to forget those years.
Eliot didn't know anything about the Tarot either, and made up some cards that aren't in the actual deck.
