Get our latest staff recommendations, award news and digital catalog links right to your inbox.
Published by David Zwirner Books
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
Table of Contents
About The Book
At once comic, tragic, and erotic, Venus & Adonis (1593) is a poem by William Shakespeare based on passages from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This new translation by Hafid Bouazza of Shakespeare’s text is illustrated by Marlene Dumas, the renowned painter celebrated around the world for her highly charged depictions of the human form.
Through a series of expressive ink washes, Dumas paints new passion into the poem—bodies bleed into one another, lips part in sighs of passion, a flower blooms to life. Desire in all its heady intensity is evocatively washed over the pages. As with Dumas’s wider body of work, however, tragedy is not forgotten and is frighteningly played out with equal intensity. The owl, “night’s herald,” as Shakespeare writes, flies jet black across the sky; a wild boar looms like a shadow over Adonis’s suffering, wounded body; black dissolves into gray; and bodies are lost in a sea of ink.
The poem tells the story of Venus, the goddess of love, and her attempts to seduce the hunter Adonis. It is a complex, kaleidoscopic work in which love takes center stage—Venus’s lustful yearning for Adonis ripples throughout, each stanza and line tinged with unrequited longing. As Venus declares, “Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, / Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.” Like Shakespeare before her, Dumas opens up a seemingly unending flow between light and dark, love and death, pleasure and pain.
Dumas’s complete suite of thirty-two works on paper is reproduced in this volume, exactingly placed by the artist throughout Shakespeare’s text. Copublished by Athenaeum and David Zwirner Books as an English/Dutch edition, the book is a striking yet beautiful paradox—a marriage of text and image that is as sensual, fleshy, and carnal as it is unnerving and disturbing.
Through a series of expressive ink washes, Dumas paints new passion into the poem—bodies bleed into one another, lips part in sighs of passion, a flower blooms to life. Desire in all its heady intensity is evocatively washed over the pages. As with Dumas’s wider body of work, however, tragedy is not forgotten and is frighteningly played out with equal intensity. The owl, “night’s herald,” as Shakespeare writes, flies jet black across the sky; a wild boar looms like a shadow over Adonis’s suffering, wounded body; black dissolves into gray; and bodies are lost in a sea of ink.
The poem tells the story of Venus, the goddess of love, and her attempts to seduce the hunter Adonis. It is a complex, kaleidoscopic work in which love takes center stage—Venus’s lustful yearning for Adonis ripples throughout, each stanza and line tinged with unrequited longing. As Venus declares, “Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, / Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.” Like Shakespeare before her, Dumas opens up a seemingly unending flow between light and dark, love and death, pleasure and pain.
Dumas’s complete suite of thirty-two works on paper is reproduced in this volume, exactingly placed by the artist throughout Shakespeare’s text. Copublished by Athenaeum and David Zwirner Books as an English/Dutch edition, the book is a striking yet beautiful paradox—a marriage of text and image that is as sensual, fleshy, and carnal as it is unnerving and disturbing.
Product Details
- Publisher: David Zwirner Books (March 19, 2019)
- Length: 144 pages
- ISBN13: 9781644230008
Browse Related Books
Raves and Reviews
“With her series of expressive ink washes, Dumas paints new passion into the poem and desire in all its heady intensity… The book is a striking yet beautiful paradox - a marriage of text and image that is as sensual, fleshy, and carnal as it is unnerving and disturbing.”
– Staff, Books on Show
“Dumas has illustrated this poem - and the moody emotionality of those symmetries - in numerous paintings on canvas and paper, each in her eerie, watery style.”
– Andrew Durbin, Frieze
Venus and Adonis “offers a contemporary, explicit take on Shakespeare’s version of the classical myth."
– Staff, Phaidon
“Her usual bluntness gives way to a rapturous eroticism in which ink has its own salaciousness… Ms. Dumas made her name through art of a certain cruelty. In tenderness, she may have made a masterpiece.”
– Jason Farago, The New York Times
“In this highly sensual pictorial poem… Dumas highlights the binding chain of history and myth as she imparts pictorial life, intimately and expansively.”
– Sally Grant, Hamptons Art Hub
“Evident across this series of work, the artist’s uniquely sensitive treatment of the human form and her constantly evolving experimentation with color and texture.”
– Staff, Blouin Artinfo
“[Dumas] reroutes [Shakespeare’s] exploration of female sexual arousal beyond grotesque caricature to deliver a sense of emotional depth that is potent and profound.”
– Alfred Mac Adam, The Brooklyn Rail
The poem Venus & Adonis is “learnedly classical and rhetorically complex.”
– Tim Smith-Laing, Apollo
Resources and Downloads
High Resolution Images
- Book Cover Image (jpg): Venus & Adonis Hardcover 9781644230008
