Alas. It’s in Switzerland.
Lines of Flight
Mervyn Peake, The Illustrated Work
From 4th October 2009 to 14th February 2010
Opening October 3rd, 2009, 6 PM
In the presence of the Peake family and Michael Moorcock
Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) is celebrated today as the writer of the extraordinary series of novels about Titus Groan (often referred to as the Gormenghast books). Yet, during his lifetime he was more known for his graphic work.
From 1939 and for almost two decades, Peake produced illustrations both for his own work (Captain Slaughterboard; Rhymes without Reason) and for classics (Household Tales by the brothers Grimm; Alice in Wonderland; Treasure Island). His mastery of the pen and the pencil were unrivalled. Visually, his style could be disarmingly economical, using very pure and clean single lines to create a striking sense of volume. But with cross-hatching and dots Peake could also make his drawings look like engravings, providing the characters and objects he depicted, or the background to them, with rich and varied textures and a wide range of shades.
Mervyn Peake shows in all his images a fertile imagination, an inclination towards the grotesque, and towards the darker side of the soul. For throughout his life Mervyn Peake walked a razor’s edge as sharp as one of the lines he drew in indian ink: on one side lay his own mental fragility and on the other the fierce heat of his creative powers. Whether in writing or drawing, his pen defined the border between beauty and deformity, the familiar and the strange, and expressed a balancing act between his repulsion and attraction for the human race. It is tempting to compare the comet-like career of Mervyn Peake, the brilliance of his life and the lines of his drawings, with those “lines of flight” dear to Gilles Deleuze (A Thousand Plateaus, 1987) that characterize the trajectory of those who live their lives under the sign of experimentation and liberation.
As the hundredth anniversary of Mervyn Peake’s birth draws nearer, it is high time to pay homage to this fabulous one-man-band by displaying his illustrative work, somewhat forgotten today. The illustrations shown at Maison d’Ailleurs are seen for the first time outside the British Isles.
The Maison d’Ailleurs (translated as “House of Elsewhere”), is a museum of science fiction, utopia and extraordinary journeys in Yverdon-les-Bains (Switzerland). It is a non-profit foundation functioning both as a public museum and a specialized research center.
