Everywhere men speak in whispers.
I brood on the uselessness of letters.

from Snow Storm
Du Fu (Tu Fu) as translated by Kenneth Rexroth

Language reverberates across time and space, from Chinese to English, from the eighth century to the twentieth, from one culture to another, with correspondences in emotion and experience. Kenneth Rexroth (1905-1982), poet, writer, playwright, and painter, brought the lines of Du Fu (712-770), a poet of the Tang dynasty, into the light of his, and also our, present.

Brice Marden’s series, Etchings to Rexroth (1986), significantly influenced by Rexroth’s interpretations of thirty-six of Du Fu’s poems, adds yet another layer to the cross-cultural and intergenerational creative dialogue, by extending it to include visual art. The resulting twenty-five images pay homage to calligraphy, and its simultaneous potential as word, image, and story, but are, in effect, a completely new language. Written from top to bottom, right to left, the forms begin as individuals, like letters, and, as the series progresses, become linked to one another, an evocative web of language whose letters have become unpredictable symbols.

Click here to download a podcast of a Du Fu/Rexroth poetry reading held in the gallery earlier this semester.

You can also load this file to your iPod or other mp3 device and listen to it during a visit to the exhibition. If you don't have an iPod, you can borrow one at the information desk.

Funded by the Mary Tebbetts Wolfe '54 Program Endowment, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and E. Franklin Robbins Fund.