THE JOHN DONNE SERIES
Songs and Sonets
The Palm Springs Art Museum, which is featuring three celestial works of June Wayne in their exhibition Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990, mounted a second solo exhibit of Wayne’s early lithographs Songs and Sonets, inspired by the poems of John Donne.
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Hexastichon Bibliopolae
The Good Marrow
Song
The Sunne Rising
The Canonization
Breake of Day
The Anniversaire
Twicknam Garden
A Valediction: Of Weeping
Oh, More Than Moon
The Apparition
A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
The Funerall
The Extasie
The Relique
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, Wayne created fifteen lithographs printed by Durassier. Presented in a black linen box, these prints accompanied the text of Donne’s poems.
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 Rothschild, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, amongst others. We are delighted that the Palm Springs Art Museum is now showing the complete edition. We are delighted that Palm Springs Art Museum is showing the complete set. Thanks to curator Sharrissa Iqbal.
Particles and Waves: Southern California Abstraction and Science, 1945-1990 on view at the Palm Springs Art Museum through February 24, 2025.
June Wayne: The Art of Everything is on view at the Fullerton Museum Center in Orange County, through January 5, 2025.