University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Graduate School
Doi
Abstract
In 1966, British artist Tom Phillips began an artistic journey that spanned half a century; picking up a used book in a bookstore, Phillips meticulously altered each page of the work to create a new artist’s book titled A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. Despite the fact that many scholars consider A Humument to be a canonical example of an altered artist’s book, there is a dearth in visual analysis scholarship on the work. In this thesis, I will be looking at Phillips’s theories of ornament through his lecture “The Nature of Ornament: A Summary Treatise” and demonstrate the ways in which he makes the case for a reinvigoration of ornament in high art throughout his artistic oeuvre, principally in A Humument.Master of Art
