Artists use knives, thread, wood, handmade paper, wire and other tools to execute their beautiful writing. Some create their designs with straight edge and compass – or with punch, matrix, mould and molten metal – or with the computer and even artificial intelligence.
Anne Bertier, Dessine-moi une lettre (2004)
Giovanni Francesco Cresci, Il perfetto scrittore (c. 1570) Johnson P 170
Bruce Rogers, Champ rosé (1933)
Steven Ferlauto and Jeffrey Morin, The Sacred Abecedarium (2000)
Francesca Lohmann, An Alphabetical Accumulation (2017)
Felice Feliciano, Alphabetum Romanum: The Letterforms of Felice Feliciano (2010)
Fra Luca Pacioli, De divina proportione (Venice, 1509) Arch. B d.24 (2)
Yevhen Berdnikov, Paper Cut Alphabet (2023)
Online Exhibition Bonus!
Cathryn Miller’s L is for Lettering (2011) is a brilliant example of the book artist’s rite of passage: make an alphabet book, but make it new.
Tauba Auerbach has made the alphabet her life’s work. How to Spell the Alphabet (2007) uses the title of one of her best-known works. A work of ink and pencil on paper (2005), it begins “EY BEE CEE DEE” and was featured in MoMA’s “Ecstatic Alphabet” exhibition (2012). Her artistic playfulness makes the letters of the alphabet self-referential and ecstatic (“to stand outside themselves”). Another route to this is what she calls “letter worship” as demonstrated in this homage to another artist of the letter: Paulus Franck.
Thanks to the editors Joseph Kiermeier-Debre and Fritz Franz Vogel, we have this facsimile edition of Paulus Franck’s Schatzkammer, Allerhand Versalien Lateinisch vnnd Teutsch (1601/1995), a “treasury of all manner of German and Latin ornamental letters. The editors neatly use the margins of their book to add to the historical context. On the verso page, they have the geometrically controlled design of Albrecht Durer (1525), and on the recto, the exuberance of John Seddon (1695).
Another lifelong devotee of the alphabet is Annie Cicale. Her Patterned Alphabet (2013) is an extended dance of contrasts and complements with printing, paper and patterns.
Not quite an alphabet book but clearly a children’s book and artist’s book at play with the alphabet is Kurt Schwitters’ Die Scheuche (1925/1965), which might send you flying over to the display with Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, Bembo’s Zoo: An Animal ABC Book under Alphabets Alive! — Animals.
Kurt Schwitters, Die Scheuche [The Scarecrow] (1925/1965)
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