A Balance of Quinces: The Paintings and Drawings of Guy Davenport

by Erik Reece, Guy Davenport (Artist)

Rather than reading, Davenport spent his leisure painting and drawing. A Balance of Quinces is an illustrated study of his graphic works.

139 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1996

Reviews

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Davenport embarrasses us: by his learning, his capability and, yes, by his clear obsession with naked boys. But Erik Reece is smart not to pander to these embarrassments. His clear, sharp sentences pat the pictures with careful curiosity, like bees attracted there by the bright colors; I felt the same gratitude at his descriptions of the paintings as I do for a good translation from a foreign language (art-speak after all is more than capable of behaving towards its readers like the bored oenophile who described the vintage his audience was tasting as possessing a "scrotal aftertaste"). Plus there's the question, implicit in any critical summing-up, of what we do with Davenport - how we use him, I mean. If I'm reading Reece right, what he wants is to see D as both a clarification and blurring of the line we mark between modernism and post-modernism: an artist not unlike Joseph Cornell (mentioned plenty in this book), or Orpheus (the subject of what looks from the reproductions to be D's most beautiful painting), in that his whole project is to put his magnet under the filings and see what happens.

[Jim Coughenour · Rating 3 out of 5]

I hunted this book down after reading Selected Letters: Guy Davenport and James Laughlin a couple months ago. I'm a longtime fan of Davenport's curious, overly-learned literary essays (Geography of the Imagination; Every Force Evolves a Form; The Hunter Gracchus), although I find his fiction almost unreadable.

This handsome monograph on Davenport's paintings and drawings by Erik Anderson Reece (one of his former students) is masterful — clearly written, intelligent, generous. Anderson makes a brave case for the art, but (so far) the argument is shocking for its central silence about an issue obvious to anyone who flips through the book: Davenport's painting reveals him as an unabashed pederast. Even so — given the almost monastic rectitude of his life — even his most graphic images convey a certain charm.