ABOUT MICHAEL MAZUR & THE INFERNO OF DANTE

             Michael Mazur is well known for a remarkable body of work in painting, drawing and prints. Since his first show in New York in 1960, his work has been exhibited yearly and may be found in the collections of nearly every major museum in the U.S; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, MOMA, The Whitney Museum, The Chicago Art Institute, The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, L.A.MOCA, The Pennsylvania Academy and The Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Natonal Museum of American Art and its counterpart in Australia at Canberra and the Musee des Beaux Arts, Montreal among others. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston has an archive collection of the artist's complete work in prints as well as major paintings and drawings; The Prints of Michael Mazur with a Catalogue Raisonne, is available from Hudson Hills Press.

 

           This suite of forty-one etchings extends and deepens the record of Mazur’s lifelong reading of Dante’s poem.

           From 1992-2000, Mazur created two bodies of work based on the Inferno. The etchings continue and expand the project begun as 36 monotype illustrations for Robert Pinsky’s acclaimed translation, The Inferno of Dante, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1994. The etchings were first exhibited in Italy, in Verona, and, later, in Rome, in 2000 during the 700th anniversary of the date that Dante gives as the beginning of the Divine Comedy. In Verona, the suite was installed at the Museo di Castelvecchio, built by the Salieri family in the mid-fourteenth century, a short time after Dante’s death. Dante’s great Salieri patron, Can Grande, literally “Big Dog,” was the ruling figure in the city and protected the poet during his years in exile in that city. Dante dedicated Il Paradiso to him. In Rome the suite was exhibited at The American Academy.

            Mazur’s prints take the viewer through Limbo, into the three circles of Hell: the Incontinent—sins of violence to the self, others and nature; Fraud; and ultimately, Betrayal, the cold depths of the lowest circle. (See Mazur's MAP) From Charon, the boatman, to Paola and Francesca, Ugolino, and, finally, Satan, Mazur uses personal visual metaphor to explain as well as illustrate the text. Dante’s use of puns and topical reference is matched by the artist’s use of visual connections to contemporary and historical sources.

    

             The tower in Canto VIII will be recognized as the Pilgrim monument in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The model for this tower was originally the city hall in Sienna and a version was used by the Florentines for their city hall. Dante might have seen the designs, but it would tower over the future of a city that had sent him into exile and despair. At twenty, Mazur could see that tower from his apartment in Florence—not far from Dante’s birthplace—where as an art student, he first read the poem that intrigued him from that time on. The familiar monument could also be seen from his studio on the East End of Provincetown as he worked on these images forty years later.

 
     

 
INTRODUCTION

IMAGES AND TEXTS

 

LINKS

OTHERS HAVE WRITTEN

 

 Electa Editions in Italy published a catalogue of the complete etchings. An additional separate edition of the individual prints without text are signed & numbered SE 1- 25 and includes 10 artist proofs, signed and numbered SE a.p. 1 - 10.

For booking information on the traveling exhibition contact

Dante-Inferno@comcast.net

For more information contact the Mary Ryan Gallery

info@MaryRyanGallery.com

 

 

 

 

copyright © Michael Mazur and Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1993/2003