Modern Books and Manuscripts
best work comes from children between four and six]. (1958-1970.)
Original visual poem [?]. 64 x 53 cm., polychrome watercolour washes and pastels on pink card. N.p.,[London], n.d.,
Good, very good or better condition, a bit dusty, card with many corner pinholes. Provenance: from the Cobbing estate via the trade. This is a strange poster/scratch board/ideas sheet/visual poem, the topmost statement in yellow crayon over a band of green wash declares:"The best work comes from children between four and six".Below this is a list of Abstract Expressionist and other painters such as Rothko, Lucio Fontana, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb and René Burri and aleatory poetic statements and adjectives. Bob Cobbing was Britain's "..major exponent of concrete, visual and sound poetry" (Guardian Obituary). He almost singlehandedly inspired the small DIY press revolution in Britain by starting the influential 'Writers' Forum' and the long running 'And' zine.From 1963 onwards,Writers' Forum published Cobbing's own work and anything that he considered experimental, concrete and imaginative. This included Anselm Hollo, Ginsberg's 'The Change', Eric Mottram, Claude Pélieu, Ernst Jandl, B.P. Nichol, P.J. O'Rourke, Bill Griffiths, John Cage, Nuttall and many others.It is entirely possible that this design is not a formal visual poem at all but is related to or partly created by Lewis Cook as an attempt at "...portraying sound visually.." (interview with Cobbing on Ubuweb). Cobbing expounded on this in the same interview:"My wife, at that time, would take little strips of coloured paper and make linear notations of sound. Lewis Cook would create a great blaze of colour on the canvas. I was doing these scruffy, little black and white images to start with, which turned eventually into colour images".Cobbing's Hendon Arts Together group also had a 'youth division', a group of schoolchildren recruited from "...mostly from the Alder School, a forbidding secondary modern in East Finchley" (p-169 Jeff Nuttall - Bomb Culture), an experiment in 'child art' that pre-dates Tim Rollins's KOS collaboration by decades. This might well be one fruit of the 'youth division' work.
Stock Code: MO46302
