Pulcinella in Hades
is a new limited edition book created at Eastside Editions by
Art Hazelwood. It is an accordion fold book… eight feet of continuous
four plate color etchings, vertically descending into Hades. It’s
a comedy. The protagonist, who appears in every image, is Pulcinella
of the commedia dell’arte.
Why an underworld journey should be treated as a comedy can perhaps best be explained
by the tremendous amount of literature to back up the view that Hell is indeed
a merry place. Comic journeys to Hell and Hades are long standing traditions,
and quotes relating to this tradition appear in the margins of this book.
The central image is bordered by handwritten texts from Plato to Bertolt
Brecht, from William Blake to Wilfred Owen as well as many other writers
who had a vision of the underworld. The quotes were written out in what
amounts to a 21st century handwriting sample by seventeen different people – artists,
filmmakers, professors, doctors, etc. These texts were then converted
into letterpress plates and printed on the margins of the prints by Jonathan
Clark of Artichoke Press, Mountain View, California.
Pulcinella in Hades is made up of eight connected etchings. Each etching
is 12” x
9” and consists of four plates. The etching techniques used aresugar
lift and spit bite aquatints with engraving. David Avery printed the images
with help from Art Hazelwood on Hahnemuhle Copperplate paper at the press in
Sonoma.
The images and the text are bound together in a book form with Japanese
silk covers and an embossed cover image. The book has a dual function.
It has a removable spine so that it can not only be paged through like
a traditional book but it can also be folded out and suspended as a scroll
from a cord attached to the book. Klaus-Ullrich S. Rötzscher bound
the books at Pettingell Book Bindery, Berkeley, California. The edition
of Pulcinella in Hades is limited to twenty books.
This is the third book by Art Hazelwood to be published by Eastside Editions.
Art’s work is in many collections including the Library of Congress,
The New York Public Library, Stanford Special Collections and Achenbach Collection
in San Francisco.
The price for this book is $3,000.
