June Wayne John Donne’s “Songs and Sonets” at the Palm Springs Art Museum
The Palm Springs Art Museum mounted a solo exhibit of June Wayne’s early lithographs Songs and Sonets, a series inspired by the poems of John Donne.
June Wayne’s interest in printmaking began in the early 1950s. Dissatisfied with the state of lithography in the US, she journeyed to Paris in search of a printer who could realize the project she had in mind.
From an early age Wayne had been a voracious reader of literature, discovering Kafka as a teenager and later becoming enthralled by the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne.
Meeting master printer Marcel Durassier was transformative. Wayne persuaded him to work together on the John Donne series, and later arranged for his stay in Los Angeles as she founded the Tamarind Lithography Workshop, which changed printmaking forever.
In seventy intense days between 1958 and 1959, working around the clock, Wayne created fifteen lithographs printed by Durassier. Presented in a black linen box, these prints accompanied the text of Donne’s poems, set and hand printed by Brümer Hartmann, Berlin, in the Antiqua face designed by J. S. Erich Justus Walbaum in 1800.
The John Donne Songs and Sonets is represented in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Edmonde de Rothschild, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, amongst others. We are delighted that the Palm Springs Art Museum is now showing the complete edition. Thanks to curator Sharrissa Iqbal, and director Adam Lerner.
