Grief is a woven basket but you already knew that didn't you

An exhibition by Hardy Hill presented by CASSIUS & Co. at Sotheran's Athenaeum

In connection with Hardy Hill’s ongoing exhibition at Sotheran’s Athenaeum, Sotheran’s, in partnership with CASSIUS&Co., is pleased to present a selection of books chosen personally by Hardy in relation to the exhibition and to themes central to his practice.

Bringing together literature, philosophy, theology and art, the selection explores questions of perception, belief, identity and experience. From Aubrey Beardsley’s graphic imagination and T. S. Eliot’s religious pessimism to R. D. Laing’s exploration of interpersonal perception, Hugh Farmer’s interpretation of Christ’s temptation and a seventeenth-century Hebrew Bible, the books reflect ideas that recur throughout Hardy’s work. 

His own reflections on the selected books appear throughout in quotation marks.

ARISTOPHANES; Aubrey BEARDSLEY (illustrator). The Lysistrata.
Second English edition of Beardsley’s eight illustrations to Lysistrata, one of 750 copies (500 for the United Kingdom and 250 for the U.S.); this edition includes – seemingly for the first time – a ninth illustration, the notorious forgery ‘The Adoration of the Penis’. | READ MORE

‘The objects that attracted one in adolescence possess, in adulthood, an eerie power. Beardsley and his loosely enjambed retinue of similarly mothy provocateurs (Von Bayros, Rops, Ricketts) acted as my midwives, delivering me from the enchanted boudoir of childhood, through the fresh green hell of adolescence, and out into the adult situation sometimes called the ‘depressive position’. While my inner life has in the interval and like a net in the sun, dried out almost completely it is still nice, in moments of weakness, to imagine all the dim hideousness might find itself garlanded.’

[HEBREW BIBLE.] יהושע ושופטים.

Two portions, comprising Joshua and Judges as well as Samuel, of the handsome eighteen-part, pocket-sized Hebrew Bible printed in Geneva by Pierre de la Rouvière. | READ MORE

'A sad and lovely thing.'

LAING, R.D., H. PHILLIPSON, and A.R. LEE. Interpersonal Perception.

First edition, inscribed by Laing “To Mike / With all wishes / from Ronnie / March 1969” to the front free endpaper. | READ MORE

‘I love Laing. The Divided Self is the saddest book ever written.’

ELIOT, T.S. After Strange Gods.

A scarce signed first printing of Eliot’s troubled and troubling 1933 Page-Barbour Lectures, a volume withdrawn by the author after a single reprint the same year. | READ MORE

‘Eliot’s high church revanchism belies an unusually virulent and devouring pessimism. This cross purpose is actually entirely appropriate to a writer who is at bottom a mystical Christian in the lineage of Mechthild of Magdeburg. The soul can, after all, be represented only by way of its negation and disfigurement, that is, by way of its misrepresentation; or as Eliot himself says, "poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality".’

FARMER, H. An Inquiry into the Nature and Design of Christ's Temptation in the Wilderness.

First edition of Farmer’s allegorical reading of Christ’s temptation, later revised and expanded; this edition remains rather scarce. | READ MORE

‘The temptation is my favourite episode from the synoptic gospels save maybe for the agony. I note that Farmer reads the gospels metaphorically; I agree with this so long as we are willing to read everything, the textureless nothing of our own lives in particular, metaphorically.’