Article: Michael Mazur’s Inferno of Dante: The Artist and Me Plus Dante and Suzanne
Michael Mazur’s Inferno of Dante: The Artist and Me Plus Dante and Suzanne.
By Eric M. Zafran
Michael Mazur’s “Inferno: Canto II, Twilight.”
From “A Perspicacious Tenure, Suzanne Boorsch at Yale.”
Looking back over my life and career, I realize that I was very fortunate in who I met and the choices I made. The first lucky move was choosing to attend Brandeis University, in Waltham, Massachusetts. It not only had the Rose Art Museum, where I became an intern and got my earliest professional museum experience, but also had outstanding art history and studio art departments. Unusual was the school’s requirement that art history majors take courses in studio art. Thus it was that I found myself in 1965 in a life-drawing course being taught by Michael Mazur. I knew nothing of him as an artist, but he was a demanding yet understanding teacher. He quickly recognized that I was hopeless at life drawing and so recommended that I transfer instead to his printmaking class. At the time, I had no idea that this was Mazur’s first year at the university (where he would remain for ten years) and that he (a student of leonard Baskin) was already recognized as a distinguished printmaker, who would eventually become quite renowned. For me, he was a rigorous professor whom his students wanted to please, and it was he who provided me with an introduction to the techniques of woodcut, engraving, and etching. This proved invaluable knowledge, as I do not think anyone who has not handled the tools and engaged in the process can really appreciate the works of Durer, Rembrandt, Goya, or Picasso. Mazur gave his students great freedom to develop their own approach and experiment with these various media. I responded to the challenge and selected a large metal plate to produce an elaborate etching and aquatint that to me still retains a certain direct intensity and brings to mind my involvement with the printmaking process and my interaction with a brilliant artist.
This experience was to have long-lasting influence on my development. I went on to New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and had my first job in the Print Department of what was then Parke-Bernet Gallery, followed by an internship in the European Paintings Department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the Metropolitan Museum, I met the incredible staff of the prints department, which included, at that time, A. Hyatt Mayor (who became my master’s thesis advisor) and Suzanne [Boorsch], who would become a good friend and colleague. Suzanne remained there until moving to Yale, and I went on to a variety of curatorial positions, ending up as her neighbor in Connecticut, at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum. I was so pleased to discover that among Suzanne’s many distinguished acquisitions at Yale was Mazur’s remarkable portfolio of etchings, The Inferno of Dante, illustrating the translation of his friend the poet Robert Pinsky.
The subject had interested the artist since he had first read Dante as a student in 1957, but it was not until the early 1990s, when working in close collaboration with Pinsky, that Mazur produced a powerful series of monotypes of which a number were incorporated into the book published in 1993. As Mazur has observed, “We were both focused on the original. Dante was the visionary after all. We collaborated with him. We are two Jews who saw in the poem not the dogma of the church but a great contribution to the humanistic tradition in literature… Overall the tone was one of sadness and loss. This had to be communicated through both language and image.”
While the published version of The Inferno was very successful, Mazur felt that his images needed to be seen as individual plates, accompanied by text translations, rather than captions, and so he began working on a new set of etched illustrations, which were first exhibited at the castle of Dante’s patron, Cangrande della Scala, in Verona, Italy. Over a six-year period, from 1997 through 2002, a set of forty-one etchings was completed for the present grand two-volume portfolio, in which the images are juxtaposed with handsomely printed pages that have the text in both Italian and English.
Previous illustrators of Dante’s text, including the rather theatrical Gustave Dore, with whose works I had coincidentally been much concerned, depicted in realistic fashion Dante and Virgil on their journey through Hell. Here, instead, as the poet and critic Lloyd Schwartz has rightly noted, “Everything we see is, as it were, through [Mazur’s and Pinsky’s] eyes. Mazur’s images compel us to identify with the poet’s primary experience: the bewildering sense of space -- swirling, often mysteriously dislocated; the stupendous grandeur of the infernal architecture; the grotesque tortures of the sufferers and their profound pain.”
To capture these fantastic visions, Mazur employed the rich texture of the black-and-white etchings, printed on bright white paper, to portray the hallucinatory subjects in a near-abstract fashion. There are far too many brilliant images to detail in a short appreciation, but for me the series is truly launched by the plate accompanying canto 2, Twilight, which makes brilliant use of light and dark to evoke the words:
Day was departing, and the darkening air
Called all earth’s creatures to their evening quiet
While I alone was preparing as though for war…
I commenced: “Poet take my measure now;
Appraise my powers before you trust me to venture
Through that deep passage where you would be my guide.”
As if rising from a mountaintop, the spirit of the poet, surrounded by birds in flight,
ascends through a starry sky toward a haloed space set within a glowing circle.
The series of images concludes in startling and thrilling fashion with a final “landscape” for canto 34, titled Once More the Stars. It depicts, in a burst of swirling blue -- the first time color appears in all the prints -- the hill of Purgatory, which, as Schwartz writes, “looks very much like the false hill of ascent in canto 2. But this time, the image through the lens is heavenly -- stars swimming in the firmament.” The poet’s text reads in part:
Through a round aperture I saw appear
Some of the beautiful things that Heaven bears,
Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars.
Michael Mazur died in 2009 at the age of seventy-three, and I am sorry that I never got to thank him for his profound influence on me or praise in person his powerful works. Hopefully, this short text will acknowledge his achievement and prove that his memory is still vividly alive both at Yale and wherever great art is appreciated.
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Editor’s note:
Images: Use Twilight from this page. Caption: Michael Mazur, etching, Twilight, from Il Inferno di Dante.