Peter Milton

Available Works

Peter Milton is a major force in the printmaking world. Using etching and engraving techniques, Milton often spends a year or more to create his large and complex images. At Yale University under Josef Albers, Milton developed a concern less for the surface appearance of objects, but rather for the explication of their underlying, substantive qualities. Milton conveys meaning through a contextual environment of people, places, and moments in time.

Milton’s imagery frequently draws on elements from the late 19th and early 20th century English and French literary world. Rendering such imagery in a rich tonal scale of black and whites, Milton manages not only capture the mood of another era but also mid-century cinema. He sites among his major influences Ingmar Bergman and Fellini. With time and reflection, a narrative in Milton’s densely symbolic and historically referential images unfolds. Milton has received numerous awards for his prints, has a published book titled Peter Milton: Complete Prints 1960-1996, and is in every major museum collection.

• Recent Exhibitions: Hidden Cities III: Continuum, September 2006; Hidden Cities & Master Works 1965 – 2004, September 2004

The complete Hidden Cities Suite
& Visions and Revisions (In Search of Lost Time) 2nd state

This suite includes subjects which feature many of the interests Peter Milton has persued for the last 30 years. The Ministry provides a strong architectural context for new and familiar associations. Embarkation for Cythera gives full play to a dramatic and expansive view with rushing perspective. In Continuum, the final work of the suite, the glorious architecture both borrowed and imagined, dominates the image.

All three of the works in the Hidden Cities Suite sell individually for $3600.
The special price for the complete suite of three prints is $8500.

ministry

Hidden Cities I: The Ministry (First State). 2003. Etching and engraving. 24 x 37 inches. Edition 140.

Paris, 1922. The year Marcel Proust died. The year Sylvia Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses. The year also of the two writers’ only meeting - at a soiree to celebrate a Ballet Russe performance of an Igor Stravinsky piece.

Proust and Joyce shared a taxi home. Their friends had expected an encounter of the gods. What the gods talked about was their health: Joyce was half-blind and Proust could hardly breathe. When Joyce flung down the window to smoke Proust was convinced Joyce was trying to kill him. Joyce thought Proust was a snob. Reporting on this great literary event, Joyce claimed that Proust was only interested in duchesses while he (Joyce) was more interested in the chambermaids. No account of the meeting by Proust has survived - nor did Proust. He died a few months later.

Joyce was surprised at his death and said Proust had looked just fine that evening. The comment would not have surprised Proust, who was said by observers to be less than thrilled by Joyce’s state of insobriety and to be just trying to get away from him as quickly as possible.

The image began with Joyce and Proust in the taxi. 1922 is also the year Marcel Duchamp, another progenitor of the 20th century sensibility, left Paris for New York to finish his twelve years of work on The Bride in Search of Her Bachelors. The Bride was painted on glass, and its transparency began to inform the print’s structure. I wanted Duchamp’s painting to be visible through the window of Shakespeare & Company (Sylvia Beach’s bookshop) and the taxi, with Proust and Joyce apparent through the cab’s windows, would be seen through the painting. Transparencies behind transparencies. Like many brilliant ideas, in the execution, it was simply a mess.

But its remnants endured. And, echoing Duchamp’s rather perverse pleasure when his large glass was broken in shipping, I was quite pleased with the resulting shards I was left to work with. Reflections replaced transparencies. For instance, the great art dealer, Ambrose Vollard, is in the foreground looking at a young woman, who is seen by us in reflection in a mirror being carried across the square by a second Ambrose Vollard; the young woman, in turn, is startled to catch sight in the mirror of the man looking at her.

Meanwhile, Duchamp constructing his Bride has morphed into Duchamp sitting with a nubile café companion. Joyce’s intricate chess-game of a novel has become an actual chess game which is echoed in three games of hopscotch. Shakespeare & Company has retreated to the back and a young Sylvia Beach is at the print’s left side, posing as a lady of the night. After these changes I was left with Joyce and Proust in the taxi, which also began to recede - in space, in importance, and in time. Its occupants reappear now as children, spectators to the game of hopscotch which two other children, Marcel Duchamp and his sister, Adele, also watch.

I might mention that I’ve been told that hopscotch in Europe can be bipolar: the far end is “heaven,” the near end is “hell,” a concept which gave me my angels and devils in the form of dancers and motocyclists.

I think, for me, the real purpose of the image emerged as I began to visualize these themes and shifting references staged on a city square which was defined by two buildings. For the central building, which became the print’s dominating subject, I chose a villa in Dresden which survived the Dresden fire-storm of the second World War. The small section in the middle being painted by the man on a ladder is the orginal villa, but in a gesture towards renewal I piled it on top of itself until I ran out of room. Passing behind this now monumental edifice is a World War I German Albatros DV.

Moving in an opposite direction, a rain-shower is passing in front of the building. I put the rain in for various, technical reasons, but, in the process I seem to have sent people scurrying. Totally myterious as to function, the building remains a looming presence which moves beyond the intricate intimacies of Joyce and Proust, an impenetrable façade which points to modern aloofness. My thoughts turning to Kafka, I call it The Ministry.

Peter Milton. The Ministry. 2003. is the first print of a series of three. The series title, Hidden Cities, is taken from a chapter of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. On Hahnemuhle paper. Image size: 24”x37”, Paper size: 32”x46”. Edition size: 140.

ministry

Hidden Cities I: The Ministry (Second State). 2006. Etching and engraving. 24 x 37 inches. Edition 75.

Before I had left Hidden Cities there seemed to be an open invitation in this progression for further exploration of the balance between the stage set and the players of Hidden Cities I: The Ministry. I expanded the profusion of characters in the theater of that print even further and it became The Ministry/Second State: unofficially I think of it as  The Ministry of Sighs and Whispers.  The first version of the image focused on three iconic figures, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Marcel Duchamp, all living in Paris in 1922. That was the year Ulysses was published,  Proust died, and Duchamp left for New York to finish The Bride Stripped Bare, later broken in shipping. The second state of The Ministry extrapolates on the theme of broken glass, adds Man Ray (who established himself in Paris in 1922,) inserts balloons, large and small, and a dysfunctional chessboard under Sylvia Beach. In short,  it generally sends as many balls in the air as I hope the image can support.     

embarkation

Hidden Cities II: Embarkation for Cythera. 2004. Etching and engraving. 24 x 37 inches. Edition 140.

A central element in my 1975 Daylilies was taken from an anonymous photograph of a strolling holiday crowd which has come to see a dirigible. But I thought the dirigible was too distracting and never included it. The crowd, deprived of purpose, begins to merge with the shadows of other figures and disappear over the horizon. The figures take on an air of drifting and melancholy which evoked my identification with them.

Twenty-nine years later I have returned to my mysterious crowd, and I have restored their airship to them. But this time the airship has become a spectacle of such majestic bouyancy that it must be tied down. I imagine it moored to take on passengers. A long line of ineffable associations eventually led towards a voyage for the island of Cythera, Aphrodite’s mythic sanctuary of “luxe, calme et volupté”. It is also in fact a voyage for me to return to Antoine Watteau’s masterpiece Embarkation for Cythera, and to the concept of beauty so sadly neglected in the contemporary esthetic canon.

The original impulse for this image came from my lifelong obsession with space and urban immensities. The two core inspirations are both European cityscapes. The left is a long down-going, improvised from the steps of Montmartre in Paris. The right is a long up-going, improvised from the Spanish Steps in Rome.

Large spaces have such a palpable living presence that I decided to eliminate the competing presence of central figures altogether. The human figure remains in small details – peering, lurking, disappearing. But there is the suggestion of a whole population below. There is a city inside the city, unobserved.

SUBTEXTS AND DIVERSIONS
The Title: Hidden Cities. A chapter in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Calvino gives me permission to shrug aside the inhibiting dictum of my teacher, Josef Albers – “Boy, there are a hundred wrong solutions to an esthetic problem. And only one right one.”

The Buildings. On top, a 19th century villa in Dresden which survived the 1945 fire bombing. Underneath, a recreation of 16th century building by Antonio Palladio. At the far top of the Spanish Steps, the Trinità dei Monti.

METR POL. A subway? A cinema? The sign has lost its “O;” There are Art Nouveau fragments of the Paris Metro work of Hector Guimard.

The Taxi. The same cab from The Ministry of the ill-fated ride of Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Now there are other goings-on.

The Tree. Mabery Street in Santa Monica, my daily winter walk.

The Café. On the Montmartre steps. I call it “d’Orfée”, or the Orpheus Café. Orpheus can only bring Eurydice out of Hades if she follows behind him and he doesn’t look back. Here, there’s a woman who looks back.

The Airship. Taken from a 1850 drawing of an “aerostatic locomotive” by Petin. It had moveable louvers, steam-driven propellers and was hydrogen filled. It was never built.

Hidden Cities II: Embarkation for Cythera. Etching and engraving on Hahnemuhle paper. Image size: 24”x37”, Paper size: 32”x46”. Edition size: 140.

continuum

Hidden Cities III: Continuum. 2006. Etching and engraving. 24 x 37 inches. Edition 140.

Continuum is the last of the three Hidden Cities prints. Each new series sets out to explore some of the questions—aesthetic and iconographic—raised by the preceding series. And in the Hidden Cities series the big question had become how much literary and referential material I could interweave into a three dimensional space without its becoming a rat's nest and losing all viceral impact. The series encompasses two extremes. The first Hidden Cities, The Ministry, tries to maintain the sense of a single experience of space while incorporating a maximum number of cross-references. The third, and last, piece of the series, Continuum, completes the experiment by taking an opposite diriection and dispenses with the need for a concordance altogether; compensating for the loss of narrative abundance by increasing architectural detail and spatial presence to maximum potential.

So what follows is not a treatise on intentions, but simply a list of some of the sources which may nudge at the curious. Making lists is one of life's pleasures, and I might hope that reading this one can give some insight my strategies for diversion.

1. The Galleria Victorio Emmanuele II as Time Machine. Milan 1867. Stretched, spread and multiplied from two photographs taken from the same vantage point a century apart. One from the turn of the 19th century and one from the late 20th century.

2. Kaisergalerie, Berlin, 1873. The façade on the prow of the looming structure improvised from a 1900 photograph of the Galerie.

3.The precariously hanging towers above the central glass structure: more elements from the Kaisergalerie.

4.The Café Cerberus: a reference to the three-headed dog guarding Hades (the three heads here being the real dog, his reflection and his shadow.) Hades was suggested by the the forked passages which lead to the far gates into two worlds (one of which has a dazzling light coming from it, while the other seems to open onto the jumble of a city.) The evocation of heaven and hell makes a full circle from the hopscotch game (Himmel und Hölle in German) of Hidden Cities I.

5. BIFFI: a contemporary shop of Milan fashion. Its first incarnation was as the Café Biffi, the first business to open in the Galleria. Its neighbor is the café where the aperitif Campari was invented by its founder Gaspari Campari, ca. 1880. Campari is a nectar of heaven or hell depending, it seems, on your taste.

6. Three men with canes walking into the café. From a 1914 photograph of three German farmers on holiday by August Sander: no doubt looking for a drink of Campari or Punt e Mes.

7.The chairs: from Eugene Atget, Paris 1923, le café Dôme, the same chairs as in Hidden Cities I.

8. The crowds. The early-evening strolling in groups that is traditional in Italian towns: known as passeggiare la piazza.

9. The sky: from a photograph I took in the Yorkshire moors. The skies of islands are skies still low from their ocean origins. My own East Coast skies seem too high: I seem to be more at home with the ocean skies as if returning to an ancient memory.

10. The great vaulted roof under the glowing sky: an imaginary convex structure repeating in reverse the concave glass dome at the left. Escher meets Piranesi. Concave is convex is concave.

11. The floor: mostly altered elements of the Milan Galleria. The strips are an invention. Escher meets Dali?

12. The transparent woman: a phantasm from the present, not yet fully clear, probably, like others, just passing through.

continuum

Visions and Revisions: In Search of Lost Time (Second State). 2006. Etching and engraving. 25 x 40 inches. Proof.

Visions and Revisions

This important exhibition also celebrates the completion of a fourth large plate. The title of this work aptly describes Milton’s recent creative journey - Visions and Revisions (In Search of Lost Time). Rather than following a linear progression for the development of his images, Milton continues to revisit accumulated compositional elements for more exploration. Sometimes he adds new references or includes structural changes. Always beautifully and meticulously rendered, all of the images combine magical spaces, both intimate and expansive. Milton’s prints incorporate a rich fabric of literary and historical associations. The artist, like the viewer, continues to find in these dense images elements which beg for further investigation.

Revising Revisions

My most recent piece is In Search of Lost Time. It follows the second state of The Ministry. It is, itself, a second state, but much altered, of Visions and Revisions, which was the print before the Hidden Cities series.

The Ministry formulated a palpable space first and later added the dramatis personae and the enigmatic drama itself. That is my usual approach. But in the earlier Visions and Revisions,  I had reversed this; I established the figures first and only then provided a stage set, as it were. The print asks the question: how elaborately complex can an image be without losing its formal integrity. And answers the question by presenting itself as a tapestry and a statement of textures. When it was finished, I returned to my accustomed way of working and to the illusion of space in the last two prints of the Hidden Cities series, which culminated in the grand sweep of Continuum. But I felt that the tapestry deserved another visit; and perhaps it could sustain the imposition of a window on the third dimension, my usual preoccupation. In Search for Lost Time takes the confined intricacies of Visions and Revisions and opens them into a larger space and time.