Danny Israel Art
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East London, UK.

Mary Butts

​Sanctuary

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​Sanctuary is the title we have given to our exhibition at the 2022 London Parallax Art Fair – an exhibition we dedicated in part to the flame-haired early modernist, feminist, novelist, essayist, diarist and Times literary critic Mary Franeis Butts (1890 – 1937) thought by her contemporaries to be the equal of TS Eliot, DH Lawrence, James Joyce and Ezra Pound.  She was also grandmother to this artist. (See Wikipedia). many would perhaps also agree that Mary herself sought sanctuary through a luminous literary topography composed variously of classical myth, antique portent, esoteric symbolism and psychological premonition, now distilled through her unique narrative voice within a reconfigured modernist literary landscape. Perhaps Mary also sought sanctuary in her work, in those long days at her escritoire in her studio in Rue de Montessuy, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, followed by long nights among the Jeunesse Dorée in the salons, restaurants, cafés and nightclubs of Montparnasse, Montmartre, Le Marais, and Paris St. Germain. Perhaps Mary finally found sanctuary in Tebel Vos, her isolated fisherman’s cottage overlooking the village of Sennen Cove, at the furthermost reach of the Cornish peninsula.
 
Chronicler of the so-called Lost Generation – indeed a fully paid-up member herself – she was variously colleague, associate, friend and confidante to the Surrealists Jean Cocteau and André Breton, the professional iconoclast Aleister Crowley, poet and playwright Gertrude Stein, photographer Man Ray, poet and publisher TS Eliot, collector and gallerist Peggy Guggenheim, Evelyn Waugh, Wyndham Lewis, Roger Fry, The Woolfs, Mireille Havet, James Joyce and Paul and Essie Robeson, among a host of others, but it is the forensic nature of her Diaries which tie the age together in a manner said to be unsurpassed to this date. But while the reputation of her peers has survived the 50’s Beat Generation, the 60’s Hippy Generation, and the ’70s and ’80s post-modern generation Mary only now achieves the wider recognition, as a female writer in a historically male publishing world, that many believe she has always deserved.  Indeed, her literary legacy, including her essays, novels, literary criticism and diaries, now finds sanctuary at the Beinecke Library at the University of Yale. Our exhibition, at Parallax, hopes to contribute to a revitalised discourse about this remarkable early feminist and, more generally, to the pursuit of personal sanctuary in our own daily lives from a fine art perspective – a matter Mary would surely approve.  The items below, which I call portable shrines, are now part of a series including reliquaries, altarpieces and totems, and are named after various aspects of Mary's life and work.


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  • Copperfield Rd
  • Mary Butts
  • Croatia
  • Drawings
  • Prints
  • Requiem
  • Studio Visits
  • Exhibitions
  • About Danny
  • Contact