Tom Phillips: artist and magpie

At Skylona we have a large collection of material relating to this extraordinary British artist. Many of these works are part of a gift from the artist to a friend, made in the early 1970s.

Tom Phillips was born in London on 25 May 1937, and from the very beginning, he seemed constitutionally unable to limit himself to just one career or art form, let alone one medium.

Painter, printmaker, poet, composer, opera director, curator – over the course of a long and extraordinarily varied career, he became one of the most inventive and playful figures in British art. He died in November 2022, still working, still curious.

He grew up as Trevor Thomas Phillips, and studied English literature at St Catherine’s College, Oxford, where he also sneaked in drawing classes at the Ruskin School of Art alongside his literature studies. That dual appetite for language and image would define everything he went on to make. He later studied under Frank Auerbach at Camberwell School of Art, soaking up the rigour of traditional fine art while clearly itching to take it a stranger direction.

His first one-man exhibition in London was at the AIA Gallery in 1965, and he won a John Moores prize four years later – early signs that the art world was paying attention. But it was a chance trip to a Peckham Rye junk shop that would change everything.

The threepenny masterpiece

In 1966, Phillips set himself an objective: to find a secondhand book for threepence and alter every page using painting, collage, and other techniques – creating texts and poems from fragments of the original pages. It was an idea inspired by William Burroughs’ ‘cut-up’ writing process; where he formed new narratives by rearranging existing text. (A method also famously employed from the 1970s by David Bowie, to ignite concepts for song lyrics.)

The book Phillips chanced upon was a Victorian novel, A Human Document by W. H. Mallock, published in 1892 – an obscure social comedy that almost nobody had read in decades. Phillips set about transforming it into something extraordinary.

He remade every page as an artwork, using gouache, watercolour, ink and collage to redact or partially obscure unwanted words, so that new poems and micro-stories emerged from the fragments of original text. He called the work A Humument – an invented portmanteau word derived from the book’s title. It was a project that soon took on a life of its own.

Screen-printed examples of A Humument are available here at Skylona. 

A recurring character named “Irma” floated through the pages like a ghost, eventually giving her name to a full opera – conceived by Phillips in 1969, recorded in 1977 and 1988. 

Despite initially ‘completing’ the 367 pages of A Humument over seven years, Phillips never considered it finished. He continued to transform and develop the work, with revised versions added to each new edition. In 2016 the sixth edition was published, in which every page had been revised since the first version. 

Even after declaring it “final”, by 2018 he again returned to the project and had, at the time of his death in 2022, already created 78 pages of a new version. He described A Humument as having no genre at all, simply calling it “a treated novel”.

A life in many dimensions

Phillips was so much more than ‘the Humument man’. His work spanned painting (both figurative and abstract), concrete poetry, sculpture, site-specific mosaics, tapestries, and wire-frame objects. 

He made mosaics for the streets of Peckham, where he lived most of his life, and created a tapestry for St Catherine's College, Oxford. He made quilts from prostitutes’ calling cards, three dimensional poems constructed in copper and silver wire, and skulls formed of glass or covered in orange peel. There was always a sense that no medium was off-limits, no idea too outlandish to try.

For a time he was a tutor at Ipswich School of Art, although Phillips referred to himself as “a lousy teacher”. Despite this, he had a strong influence on the life and career of one notable former student, Brian Eno. They became firm friends and occasional creative partners. You can read a wonderful account of this, written by Eno, on the Tom Phillips website.

Phillips also had a passion for Dante, receiving the Frances Williams Memorial Prize in 1983 for his illustration and new translation of Dante’s Inferno. He made a TV version of the Inferno with Peter Greenaway, which won them both the Italia Prize as co-directors. 

He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1984, and a major exhibition of his work was held there in 1993. In 1989 a retrospective of Phillips’s portraits was shown at the National Portrait Gallery. He also curated the acclaimed RA exhibition Africa: The Art of a Continent in 1995, which subsequently travelled to Berlin and the Guggenheim in New York.

The art of finding

What ties together these eclectic strands is a particular habit of mind: the belief that meaning can be discovered, not just created. Phillips was a finder and a transformer – someone who looked at forgotten things and saw what else they might become. He approached old books, old images, and old ideas the way a magpie alights on shiny objects – with delight, and without apology.

His final completed work, in September 2022, published weeks before his death (but developed over decades) was Humbert – another ‘treated’ book, derived from Humbert Wolfe’s Cursory Rhymes, a 1927 book of children’s verse. With Humbert he incorporated drawings and other poems to create what Phillips called “a compendium of things I’m interested in” – a kind of autobiographical coda to a lifetime of making.

Tom Phillips was an artist who seemed to find the whole world interesting. And he had the skill, wit, and stamina to encourage others to see it that way too.