A Humument; Song of Myself; The Library at Elsinore
Tom Phillips, 2019-22; 1995; 2007
Walking on Peckham Rye, William Blake once saw ‘a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars’.
The late Tom Phillips lived and worked in Peckham for most of his life, until his death, in 2022. We don’t know whether he saw those angels, but he shared much with Blake. His art often interwove text and image; he could instil in the particular a sense of the universal; he was literary, allusive and political.
The Bodleian acquired the bulk of Phillips’ archive directly from the artist between 2007 and 2013. In it one finds documented his work as a painter, printmaker, illustrator, sculptor, translator, composer, librettist and set designer. In early 2025 the library was offered the opportunity to acquire three further items, including two sculptural pieces. An essential lead grant from Art Fund, together with the support of the V&A Purchase Grant Fund, a private donor and the library’s reserves, allowed it to complete the acquisition in September.
The first acquisition is the seventh iteration of the work A Humument (2019–22). Although uncompleted at the time of Phillips’ death, it comprises 76 finished pages (example pictured right), all of which, unlike earlier versions, are unpublished and have never been seen or studied. The origins of A Humument lie in Phillips’ decision, in 1966, to purchase the first secondhand book he came across, priced at three pence. What he found was W. H. Mallock’s obscure philosophical novel A Human Document (1892). He immediately began ‘treating’ the physical book, painting, cutting, slicing and even burning the existing text to create new narratives entirely at odds with Mallock’s dry original: ‘I plundered, mined and undermined its text to make it yield the ghosts of other possible stories, scenes, poems, erotic incidents and surrealist catastrophes that seemed to lurk within its wall of words.’ Each page is a work of art in its own right, with a strange beauty – typography is decorated with coloured borders and, recalling Blake, luminously embellished with intricate painted scenes. This final version strikes a plangently political tone.
Song of Myself (1995) (pictured left) is a hanging sculpture, described by Phillips as ‘an attempt to list the various identities that go to make a single artistic life’. It spells out words in delicate wire calligraphy, with every interconnected word borrowed from or alluding to a text or work of art. The title is from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, while the opening references the Anglo-Saxon poem ‘The Seafarer’, which Phillips first came across as a student at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. The texts within the work invoke figures who exerted an influence upon him, such as Homer, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Conrad and R. L. Stevenson. Music, so important to Phillips, can be found represented in allusion to Wagner and Schumann, and films by Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles also feature. Phillips wrote: ‘The unity of the piece in which letters are tortured into cooperation hopes to reflect an overall homogeneity in the spirit of its maker.’
The Library at Elsinore (2007) consists of a series of obscure books painted a uniform grey and placed in a specially fabricated bookcase. The newly ascribed titles are taken from real books, each using lines from Hamlet. In explaining his idea, Phillips asks the viewer to envisage a ‘dumb show’, in which Shakespeare is summoned to an audience with the King at Elsinore, the castle that exerts its brooding presence in the play. While waiting in the library, he looks at the books and sees ‘all have titles equally suggestive of emotion, escapade and death. So is it also on the shelves below. As if in a dream the titles conjure up, one after another, a sequence of speeches and events in a play.’ After his audience, Shakespeare returns, only to find that the books ‘contain a dull series of tracts and biblical commentaries’.
The Bodleian’s motivation for acquiring these works is to add to existing strengths as well as retain the only version of A Humument in the UK, help advance scholarship on one of the nation’s great postwar artists and display them for free for the enjoyment of all.
More information
Title of artwork, date
A Humument; Song of Myself; The Library at Elsinore, 2019-22; 1995; 2007
Date supported
2025
Medium and material
Manuscript material artwork (76 pages from the uncompleted seventh edition); wire hanging; painted wood bookshelves and books
Dimensions
35.5 x 33.5 x 10cm; 360 x 180cm; 151.7 x 114 x 20cm
Grant
80,640
Total cost
201,600
Get a National Art Pass and explore Bodleian Library
You'll see more art and your membership will help museums across the UK
National Art Pass offers available at Bodleian Library
10% off in shop
Enjoy 10% off in the shop with your National Art Pass
Expires: 1 Jan 2027
Art Funded by you FAQs
Contact us
If you have a question about a work of art featured here, please contact the Programmes team. We’ll be happy to answer your enquiry.