Some
of the works included in the exhibition explicitly engage with Eliot and his writing, such as Philip Guston's grim deathbed painting East Coker: T.S.E. (1979); David Jones's painted inscription Nam Sibyllam (1958), made as a gift for Eliot, which combines the
text from Petronius that is The Waste Land's epigraph with the opening lines
of the poem and other phrases connected to the Grail myth; Graham Sutherland's two Illustrations for T. S. Eliot (1973); and Vibeke Tandberg's The Waste Land (2007), which consists
of 36 collages in which the artist has cut
out each
of the words
of the poem, and re-organised them alphabetically and in groups, at once
fragmenting Eliot's poem
of «broken images» even further and bringing its underlying verbal structure to light.
Pettibon's rough, drunken comic - influenced graphics and wacky
fragments of text («Don't go home with a hard - on,» «Popped heads like thought balloons, whuyyyt») balance
out Dzama's comparatively delicate lines, floral patterns, and child - like illustrations.