Only the meeting between two different street names makes for the magic of the “corner.” ^[1]

In 2014, I participated on a panel on the artist Saul Steinberg at The New Yorker Festival , moderated by Ian Frazier. After the panel, Frazier introduced me to William McClelland, who told me about his brother David McClelland’s work at Harvard. Intrigued, I made a visit to Houghton Library to see McClelland’s manuscripts, and was struck by his calligraphies, especially how he used collage and other non-traditional media in his work. Given my previous work on Saul Steinberg’s monumental mural The Americans for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair, I was curious to learn more about David McClelland, an artist who also explored the possibilities of collage, calligraphy, and cartoons, and thus began my research. ^[2]

David McClelland met Philip Hofer, the renowned founder and first curator of the Department of Printing and Graphic Arts at Harvard, at some point during his freshman year. Hofer took McClelland under his wing, and commissioned a group of calligraphic manuscripts from him that are now in the collection of Houghton Library. ^[3] Hofer mentored many students at Harvard, as William H. Bond, Librarian of the Houghton Library, Emeritus, has described: “Boundless, too, were Philip’s kindness and friendship towards younger persons, undergraduates in particular. Those who showed interest and talent in the fields that attracted him found the latchstring always out, and, if they needed it, material aid was unobtrusively available in addition to encouraging words.” ^[4]

Hofer seems to have formed a special bond with McClelland, likely due to their shared passion for the art of calligraphy. ^[5] Both were also friends with the celebrated calligrapher, Father Edward M. Catich. The collection at Houghton contains several works by Catich, including calligraphic manuscripts, rubbings of inscriptions, and a stonecutting with Philip Hofer’s name incised on Pennsylvania slate. ^[6] McClelland first met Catich—who taught at St. Ambrose College in Davenport, Iowa—while in high school, and his work had a profound impact on McClelland’s development as an artist. In one diary entry, McClelland compared his work to Pablo Picasso’s collages; in another, he praised Catich’s landmark study of brush writing, The Origin of the Serif (1968), as a “truly great book.” ^[7] McClelland remained in touch with Catich throughout his college years, as another diary entry documented: “Sent 12th c. ms. to Catich today w. Hofer. Calligraphy excites me more than ever.” ^[8]

As an expert on the art of the book, Hofer closely followed the international resurgence of interest in calligraphy. He collected examples by calligrapher John Howard Benson and book designer and illustrator Rudolph Ruzicka, and commissioned work from the calligrapher Marie Angel and designer Hermann Zapf, among others. ^[9] Hofer’s collections of contemporary calligraphy and his scholarship shaped the field and led to museum exhibitions on the subject. For instance, in 1958, the Portland Art Museum in Oregon hosted an exhibition, Calligraphy: The Golden Age & Its Modern Revival , and in 1965, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Peabody Institute Library, and the Walters Art Gallery organized a three-part exhibition, 2,000 Years of Calligraphy . ^[10] While the latter provided a global survey of the art of written forms throughout history, the Portland Art Museum exhibition focused on contemporary examples, and featured renderings of Robert Frost’s poems by calligrapher Irene Wellington, a colorful alphabet by calligrapher Arnold Bank, and inscriptions by Father Catich. This period additionally saw the publication of several significant works on the subject, notably Catich’s Origin of the Serif and Donald M. Anderson’s textbook on the theory and practice of calligraphy, The Art of Written Forms (1969).

David McClelland wrote about this “sudden burst of interest in calligraphy” in an essay published in Harper’s Magazine in 1975. ^[11] In this article, he linked the renaissance in calligraphy to the rise of street and graffiti art at the time, arguing that the “impetus behind the italic revival and the graffiti blight have a lot in common: both come from a discovery of enjoyment in the act of writing, and both have elements of rebellion.” ^[12] The revival of the medium was, according to Lou Strick of Pentalic Corporation, who was quoted in the article, a reaction “against slickness and mass production” of the time. For Strick, there was “nothing artificial about calligraphy.” ^[13] Indeed, the avant-garde has long sought authenticity and promoted individual expression, often in response to mechanization and technological changes.  In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, for instance, artists and writers in the Arts and Crafts Movement celebrated the “honest” work of medieval artists and craftsmen and aspired to create handcrafted objects that were both useful and beautiful as part of an effort to reform society and counter the effects of industrialization.

Decades later, in the 1960s and 70s, artists like David McClelland (and critics such as Marshall McLuhan) would also look to the past to respond to the media environment and technological developments of the time. ^[14] In contrast to his peers making Pop art, who incorporated everyday objects and consumer goods into their work and used commercial advertising methods to critique conformity and consumption in the postwar period,  McClelland was inspired by illuminated manuscripts, calligraphy, and Celtic art and culture. ^[15] Indeed, his choice to work in an ancient medium, one that is an art of the artist’s hand that results in a singular work, stands in stark contrast to that of some of his contemporaries, many of whom purposely made multiples or used industrial fabricators to produce their work.

McClelland not only looked to European art of the Middle Ages as a model, but also, like many other artists at the time, to Eastern art and philosophy. ^[16] Just as Jackson Pollock was influenced by Japanese calligraphy, as seen in his Collage and Oil of 1951 (The Phillips Collection), where he painted torn pieces of Japanese and Western papers and pasted them onto a painted canvas, upon which he then splattered another layer of paint, so too was McClelland. As he acknowledged in a diary entry, “Some people do it, some people talk about it, some people tell about it, hence calligraphy’s potential reached only once in the history of civilization—Japan, 8–11th century.” ^[17] McClelland very likely saw examples in Hofer’s collection of the printed and graphic arts of Asia, and in other museum collections at Harvard. ^[18] Several of McClelland’s calligraphies in the collection at Houghton—such as his manuscripts of aphorisms by John Cage—incorporate the Japanese practice of writing over and across layers of various papers.

While some of McClelland’s works are strictly calligraphic manuscripts, others could equally be characterized as collages. In fact McClelland viewed calligraphy as a “subdivision of collage.” ^[19] While Picasso and Robert Motherwell typically used clippings from newspapers and magazines in their collages, McClelland instead selected texts from an array of sources and then calligraphed them by hand onto the page. His letterforms function much in the same way as the pasted printed matter used in other modernist collages.

Just as the Cubists affixed clippings onto the surface of the picture, thereby dislocating texts from their original context and creating new meaning, so McClelland reused texts, and, through calligraphy, reshaped them. ^[20] For example, in another of his calligraphies (see fig. 1), McClelland juxtaposed various quotations, written in different hands and colors, with an almond-shaped cutout in the brown paper, through which a piece of marbleized paper, attached to the verso, peeks through. ^[21] The eye-like form is a witty play on Cage’s adjacent advice “to find practical ways of turning the telescope around and looking through the other end.”

In a group of manuscripts, Eleven Addresses to the Lord by John Berryman , McClelland used a variety of letterforms, pasted papers, found objects, and painted elements. In one manuscript, for instance, McClelland expertly integrated text with an abstract watercolor, and in another, he experimented with materials such as foil. In another manuscript, Epic of Gilgamesh , McClelland skillfully employed paper cutouts to illuminate the text (see fig. 2) ^[22] . Beneath the words, “Eleven cubits was his height; the breadth of his chest was nine spans,” he layered papers of various shapes, textures, and transparency. For the “E” he used metallic paper, followed by letters outlined in pen. Into the torn piece of Japanese paper at center, McClelland cut rows of slim rectangles, nine stacked at left and eleven lined up at right. The cutouts reveal the coated and painted papers—from dark gray to brilliant red—pasted beneath. This dynamic arrangement of cut and pasted colored papers additionally recalls Kurt Schwitters’s collage, Drawing A2: Hansi (1918, Museum of Modern Art).

McClelland’s rendering of a quotation from David Smith showcases his remarkable graphic sensibility (see fig. 3). ^[23] This work epitomizes Guillaume Apollinaire’s statement, “Surprise laughs savagely in the purity of light, and it is perfectly legitimate to use numbers and printed letters as pictorial elements; new in art, they are already soaked with humanity.” ^[24] Like other artists and poets before him, McClelland played with letterforms, utilizing bright colors and bold lines to craft each letter and to fill the spaces between them, resulting in a vibrant composition.

In his manuscript, “Love is all there is” by Bob Dylan , McClelland excerpted lines from Dylan’s 1969 “I Threw It All Away” and arranged the words and letters to form a visual collage (see fig. 4) ^[25] . The decorated initials “L” and “O” in “LOVE,” recall those of illuminated manuscripts. Just as medieval scribes found opportunity in the counters (the open spaces defined by the shape of the capital form), so did McClelland. In this manuscript, McClelland masterfully reworks Dylan’s words, including his insertion of parenthesis in the last line. Dylan likewise drew from other sources and experimented with collage in his own music. As he described in a 1965 interview with Paul J. Robbins in the Los Angeles Free Press, his aim was to create “a collage of experience” with his songs. ^[26]

Like Dylan, McClelland was both an artist and a collector. After accumulating and selecting quotations from a range of sources—from sacred texts to poems to popular songs— McClelland isolated them and thereby transformed them into new works of art. He even wrote about the artist’s process of selection in his diary:

The artist’s responsibility to the past—it depends. In Welsh poetry it is clear. Beginning with Picasso it somehow got mixed up with collage—a tendency to personal selection of items which seem relevant. [Father Edward M.] Catich chooses 1st century Roman. Eric Gill, Babylonian. Others, less single-minded choose an enormous variety and arrange. Since this is my own thing, it is interesting to me but I am suspect of it. Using bricoleur techniques insures [ sic ] a certain individuality, but it is easy to lean back on it. That is why Picasso is so great—he never let up. ^[27]

McClelland’s mining of texts for use in his calligraphies and collages is akin to processes employed by other modern poets. His art not only has affinities with the language-based collages of many 20th century poets, but also with the works of artist Ben Shahn. As art historian Frances Pohl has written, “Shahn was not simply a painter who used letters. For him, letters were living shapes, signifiers of much more than the words they combined to form. He was concerned with the emotional resonance of a shape, with its historical and socioeconomic dimensions.” ^[28] As Shahn wrote:

I discovered the Roman alphabet in all its elegance and its austere dignity, and I fell in love all over again with letters.... As I learned the alphabet, and then many alphabets and many styles of alphabet and ornamentation and embellishment of letters without end, I found here too the wonderful interrelationships, the rhythm of line as letter moves into letter. There is the growing insight—there are, after all, only two basic kinds of letter, the severe unornamented Gothic without serifs and the Roman with serifs. And there is the pondering: Out of what tools and what materials have the styles of letters emerged? Were serifs first used to accommodate the chisel that carved letters in stone? Or were they, on the other hand, a hangover from some original cursive or painted kind of letter in which each element ended with a flourish of a brush?... All letters, of course, were once pictures. ^[29]

McClelland shared Shahn’s love of letters, and both pursued the potential of letters as pictures, as art. The arrangements of text and image—and inclusion of birds—in many of McClelland’s manuscripts draws comparison with some of Shahn’s graphic art, such as his greeting card “Behold How Good,” in the collection of the Harvard Art Museums, which was reproduced in his 1963 book Love and Joy About Letters (see fig. 5) ^[30] . While it is not known if McClelland ever saw this specific work, he certainly would have known of Shahn’s art through Philip Hofer, who collected calligraphy and illustrated books by Shahn, and also commissioned a Christmas card from him. ^[31] In 1956–57, the Fogg Art Museum hosted an exhibition of Shahn’s work, and he also gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard that year. ^[32] In 1958, Hofer wrote Shahn about doing another commission for Harvard:

I want so much to have a manuscript of flowers, birds, or beasts … for our Harvard Library series. I am commissioning the best artists here and abroad, believing that in so doing we may prove to have one day a very personal and telling expression of the art and calligraphy of our times in the greatest university library in the world. ^[33]

Hofer supported a range of artists and book projects. In 1968, Harvard printed Juliet Kepes’ children’s book birds , which combined poetic texts with expressive Japanese-inspired ink drawings of birds. In his foreword to the book, Hofer wrote that it would “appeal not only to children but also to the sophisticated taste of older generations who retain a sense of fun even where pure aesthetics are involved. What is purer than abstract calligraphy?” ^[34]

Given his appreciation for calligraphy and artists books, it is not surprising that McClelland’s playful take on John Cage’s 1961 “Lecture on Commitment,” featuring three birds engaging with Cage’s words, appealed to Hofer and found its way into the collections at Houghton (see fig. 6). ^[35]

This manuscript is one of a series of brilliant reworkings of texts drawn from Cage’s lecture. First given by Cage at the Beta Symposium at Wesleyan University, the lecture was initially composed on 56 cards, 28 with texts and 28 with numbers. The cards could be shuffled and arranged, then read with a stopwatch, in order to give talks of varying lengths. By selecting only specific sections of Cage’s work for use in his various calligraphies, McClelland upended the entire process, making it into a new work of art.

Like Hofer, McClelland was fond of children’s books, and Bruno Munari’s Nella Notte Buia (1956), with its innovative use of color, textured papers, and cutouts (and dedicated to John Cage), was one of his favorites. In a diary entry, McClelland compared a new notebook he had purchased to Munari’s book:

This book really is just too pleasant for words. One really is forced to calligraph it—eclectically…. This book reminds me of Munari’s “Nella Notte Buia.” You learn about the finer relations of paper to writing instrument, because you can make a little catalog of effects, as Bruno himself once put it. ^[36]

The combination of the visual and tactile in Nella Notte Buia —from its sections of black paper to represent night to its chapters composed of tracing papers layered with various printed ink images of green grass and black insects—certainly resonated with McClelland. Munari’s influence can be seen in the way McClelland employs a range of shapes, papers, and cutouts in his collaged manuscripts, such as in another work from his manuscripts of John Cage's lectures, where he pasted a rhombus-shaped form cut from wood veneer paper at the top of the page that hovers over the script below.

In 1967, Munari taught two courses at Harvard, “Introduction to Visual Design” and “Vision and Value: Advanced Explorations in Visual Communication,” which he took over from artist György Kepes, the husband of Juliet Kepes. ^[37] McClelland studied with him while he was at Harvard, and was inspired by the ingenuity and diversity of Munari’s artistic production, from his “unreadable books” (wordless books composed of images and fragments of cut, torn, and perforated papers that told stories through typography, papermaking, and binding) to his “Negative positives.” In this latter series, which he worked on for nearly 50 years, Munari investigated Gestalt theories of visual perception. In another series of collages, “Theoretical Reconstructions of Imaginary Objects” (1950–76), Munari drew on archaeological methodologies to transform found fragments of drawings or musical scores into abstract compositions. In his 1966 book Design as Art , which was translated into English in 1971, Munari described the process of creating these “Theoretical Reconstructions”:

Every now and then archaeologists digging in the Sahara, or in some cave that was once on the sea shore, find a fragment of animal remains. By close examination they discover that it is a bit of the tooth of a creature that lived in the Upper Paleolithic Age…. This fragment passes into the hands of other experts, who try to reconstruct the whole animal, man or object…. We see a lot of these reconstructions in Natural History museums…. As everyone well knows, the genuine part is left just as it was found while the reconstructed parts are made of quite different materials, partly to make the reconstruction work stand out.

Let us carry this idea over into the field of art. Let us set our imaginations to the task of reconstructing something which we assume to be unknown and build up a fantastic and unexpected thing according to the structural and material data provided by the few fragments we have to go on…. This is how we do it. We take a few scraps of black paper, or coloured paper, or paper from a packet, wrapping paper, a sheet of music, a rag, or anything else that comes to hand. We tear the first of these into two or three pieces and drop the pieces on to a sheet of drawing paper. Then we go on to the next kind of paper. The objects (they are nothing less than the fragments we have discovered) will fall on to the paper any old how. We then look at them for quite some time, and maybe we will want to move something, but we must not do this according to any rule of logic, but simply (as Hans Arp said) according to the “rule of the moment.” ^[38]

Munari’s pairing of paleontological methods with improvisational artistic techniques, undoubtedly appealed to McClelland, especially given his passion for paleography, music, and collage. ^[39]

Munari, like other artists at the time, experimented with new media and borrowed techniques from other fields. Many modernists also participated in book projects, and in 1961, Philip Hofer even organized an historical survey on the subject, The Artist and the Book, 1860–1960 , at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. While some artists created unique books as art objects, others collaborated with poets and writers to produce illustrated editions, such as Frank O’Hara’s In Memory of My Feelings (1967), which featured his poems illustrated with lithographs by Joe Brainard, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Motherwell, and others. ^[40] McClelland’s work surely aligns with such avant-garde projects.

While some of McClelland’s works were commissions, such as those for Hofer, others were gifts for friends or family. All were deeply personal works, and McClelland took great care in selecting the passages. These works can also be understood as conversations between McClelland and the recipients. As he reflected in a diary entry: “Conversation is the most important thing. Naturally I only say that so categorically because I now realize that conversational discourse per se can be considered the take-off point for a whole constellation of issues. It may be the most productive level on which to work—as a start. If language is the basic symbolic medium, then conversation is the basic context of all symbolic communication.” ^[41] Each work, in fact, reflects the connection that McClelland had with both the text and the recipient. These works, then, are also autobiographical, and collage was the perfect vehicle. As Robert Motherwell observed, collage is “a way to work with autobiographical material” and a productive “form of play.” ^[42]

McClelland’s highly personal, handmade works also contrast with the cold detachment characteristic of much of the Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual art of the time. His work can even be read as a rebuttal to the theories of artists like Sol LeWitt, who stated that “In conceptual art the idea of the concept is the most important aspect of the work…. It is usually free from the dependence on the skill of the artist as a craftsman…. What the work of art looks like isn’t too important.” ^[43] For McClelland, concept, skill, and beauty were all paramount. As he reflected in a diary entry on John Cage:

Struck by the fact that I feel free of the restrictions he is thinking himself out of. I find nothing in his work especially amazing. Often good, but certainly not surprising. Free of the historically imposed restrictions maybe we can now get back to the serious business of making beautiful things. ^[44]

McClelland’s works, like the illuminated manuscripts of medieval Europe, are interdisciplinary. They investigate the visual and material side of letters as well as the sensory aspects of writing, all of which are central to the practice of calligraphy. But many of them are also collages, a medium that by its very nature, as critic Donald Kuspit has argued, “destroys the very idea of a medium, of any one ‘pure’ mode of art.” ^[45] McClelland’s collages are investigations of the relationship between surface and depth, illusion and representation, word and image, text and context. His works—like those of Robert Rauschenberg, John Cage, David Smith, and other postwar American artists— challenge modernist notions of medium specificity and self-referentiality. ^[46] David Smith resisted such distinctions and viewed sculpture as “drawing in space.” His pioneering works, such as The Letter (1950, Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute), a sculpture of a page of writing, and Hudson River Landscape (1951, Whitney Museum of American Art), blurred the boundaries between sculpture and painting.

Smith and McClelland had much in common: both were native Midwesterners and avid readers of poetry and literature. The two also shared an interest in prehistoric art. In 1974, David McClelland wrote a short piece for Harper’s Magazine in which he discussed the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio and described a friend’s “amazing experience” while standing in the egg section of the effigy mound. McClelland noted how such works can change one’s perspective and observed: “Few people today understand the art of arranging space in such a way that it affects subtle areas of human consciousness. This does not mean the heritage is entirely lost to man. To find it yourself, turn the world upside down and start at the top.” ^[47]

Both artists felt free to make art with no restrictions. In his “Sprays,” for example, Smith laid metal bars, scraps, tools, or cardboard cutouts (sometimes in the shape of letters) on a piece of canvas or paper, then sprayed around the edges with paint. After he removed the cutouts—like a photogram or stencil—only a ghostly image remained. McClelland similarly explored negative space, letterforms, and letters as form in his art. As McClelland remarked in one of his diary entries, “Here is an interesting thing. Letters do not really have an inside or an outside.” ^[48] McClelland deeply admired Smith’s work, and wrote:

Whammo. David Smith put as much of himself into his sculpture as I put into this diary—more. We are so alike in certain attitudes. I’ll bet Smith was really driven to be the best American sculptor. I am driven to be the best American collage [ sic ]. I wish I had been able to meet and talk to Smith. His work has that passion of the abstract—of intellect—of crudeness—that is so really Indiana. ^[49]

Both Smith and McClelland created works that merged and transcended disciplines—sculptures as drawings, calligraphies as collage. In 1952, while a visiting artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, David Smith stated: “I don’t want my medium to hold me [back] from having a soaring vision.” ^[50] Like Smith, McClelland experimented with new methods, materials, and media. David McClelland, through his calligraphies and collages, broadened the boundaries of art, and he clearly did not hold back.