ArchivesSpace at the University of Iowa

Scope and Contents

This drawing depicts a self-portrait of Phillips on his 50th birthday. The imagery is of the cricket match. Phillips sponsored such a match at the Oval Stadium in London for his birthday but with one swing of the bat his back went out and he had to retire from the game. The poem reads, "play the shadow of fifty years. - only imagine a century - At last--welcome! - my own myself!" This drawing was exhibited at Phillips' Yale exhibition. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Phillips mentions that in 1975 he met the Sackners who founded the Archive holding most of his works. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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In this videotape, Phillips recounts the beginnings of his major bookwork, "A Humument." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents

In this videotape, Phillips recounts the beginnings of his major bookwork, "A Humument." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

Scope and Contents This work is a varient of Curriculum Vitae VII which was exhibited in the Phillips retrospective at the Royal Academy in London 1992. Phillips' use of "Words-words! Make me a rose" in this painting is derived from page 353 in the original and first revised edition of "A Humument." The poetic autobiographic statement of Phillips' elementary school days was composed by Phillips himself. The underlying text of Phillips' poem depicts the word "Llareggub." In 1954, the BBC broadcast Dylan Thomas's play Under Milk Wood, apparently unaware of the fact that the name of the fictional Welsh town Llareggub described in the play was an ingenious literary back-slang creation, namely, "bugger all" spelled backwards. The taboo nature of "bugger" is marked by the fact that Brophy and Partridge felt it necessary to dash the word in their 1931 compilation of military slang. Up until 1934, one could be fined or imprisoned for saying or writing "bugger" and has even been called "one of the most...

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Phillips writes about Cage (and could mean himself), "Art is done mostly by one person in a room and artists do not tend to look for heroes among the school-spawning tyrants of new orthodoxies: they seek the individual who offers fresh disciplines of liberty." -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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This brochure served as an announcement for "The Beauty In Breathing" exhibition to be held at the American Lung Association meeting in 1992 in Miami Beach and also as product information for Non-Invasive Monitoring Systems, a medical device company of which Sackner is CEO. Each brochure reproduced a work of the artist included in the exhibition and also a biographical sketch. The brochure is stored with the material, The Beauty In Breathing (photographs). -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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Tom Phillips' review of "Picasso: Creator and Destroyer" by Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.

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The biography of Tom Phillips describes his multi-faceted career in a droll style, perhaps authored by Phillips himself. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.