When the announcement of an Anna Mendelssohn exhibition appeared on the curator’s Instagram story, the sight of her intricate line drawings rolling across my screen festooned with heart emojis was disconcertingly familiar. Mendelssohn—who I’ve spent the past seven or so years researching—was a hermetic poet who hated the capitalist subsumption of art and modern technologies. In one of the poems on display she rails against those who ‘use electricity as a substitute for their brains’. Until recently, she has been a poet’s poet, her work little-known outside certain academic circles. No more. 2020 saw the landmark publication of I’m Working Here: The Collected Poems of Anna Mendelssohn, edited by Sara Crangle—a doorstop of a volume that materialises the scale of Mendelssohn’s poetic production. With the show at Whitechapel curated by Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, and the publication this year of an Anna Mendelssohn Reader out of Berlin, edited by curator Beatrice Hilke and artist Vera Lutz, it appears that her tenacious, audacious work has caught the attention of the art world. 

The opening night was unseasonably hot for October, the gallery packed for the unveiling of three autumn shows, and the small room where Mendelssohn’s work is hung was hottest of all. Painted a deep, heavy blue (Gentian Blue, according to the curator), a colour which threads through much of the work on display, it felt like being in a hot blue womb. Why blue? Variations on blue span Mendelssohn’s life and work. For about twenty years she lived and wrote under the pseudonym ‘Grace Lake’, a name that evokes aquatic hues. She published pamphlets titled Viola Tricolor (1993) and Tondo Aquatique (1995). Blue often takes a flower form: ‘a few stray violets, heralding a streak of blue’.1 A poem from Tondo Aquatique (1997), reproduced on the wall of the exhibition, opens with the line

I don’t know which colour to choose. The blue I dreamt was untranslatable.

The ‘blue I dreamt’ conjures Joan Miró’s surrealist painting-poem ‘Photo: This Is the Colour Of My Dreams’, an empty canvas save for the word ‘Photo’ opposite a patch of blue captioned ‘ceci est le couleur de mes rêves’ [this is the colour of my dreams]. Steeped in the legacies of European Surrealism, Mendelssohn’s picture-poems revive the practice of peinture-poesie, eroding distinctions between art and literature, image and text.

For the Twombly-esque picture-poem Relentless (c. 1997), which takes up the whole of one blue wall, blue is both the medium and the message. Moving rapidly from frame to frame, each frame a stanza, Mendelssohn’s looping cursive script traces ‘a / blue vein’ through ‘tree branches’, ‘white pacific foam’, and the ‘wildly clutching / hands’ of children, all in blue pencil. Speed is written into the poem’s content (‘poetry races’) and its form: almost entirely unpunctuated, Relentless is one long enjambed line.  

In one frame the ‘blue vein’ takes on a greater specificity as ‘the barely distinguishable / lazuli line’, indexing a precise shade, a deep blue, luxury, and archaeological depths. In another, ‘the blue vein’ is picked out in green pencil, playfully undoing the correspondence between colour and language. In the final frame of Relentless, which lurches into a violently colourful palette of mustard yellows, blood red and ink blue, the ‘blue vein’ is anthropomorphised: it ‘tries miserably, so / forlornly… to find / the orb of mighty laughter’. The blue vein’s got the blues. 

A state of melancholy links the last frame back to the first. The first stanza of Relentless is superimposed by a short letter to ‘Kate and Nigel’ [Wheale], longstanding friends of Mendelssohn’s. ‘TELL me what you think of this series of the pastel / poems… I’m in a terrible state of trying despair […] love, Grace’. Such interjections are characteristic of Mendelssohn’s genre-defying practice. Letters bleed into poems, poems bleed into drawings, words bleed into colours—and they bleed through blue veins. 

But Relentless is not a melancholic poem. It is fast, fierce, even riotous: 

poetry races through 
these streets, hitting 
itself against stone walls 
splitting glass, fragmenting 
solitudes eyes torn in 
the sun

These lines remind me of Pipilotti Rist’s video installation Ever Is Over All (1997) in which a woman strides down a city street joyously smashing in car windows with a huge flower (a scene reprised in Beyonce’s 2016 album Lemonade). The heady combination of exuberance, ferocity and lyricism points up another of Mendelssohn’s formative influences: the student uprisings of May ’68, which she experienced first-hand. An allusion to one of the best-known slogans of the French May (sous les pavés, la plage) is half-buried in the third stanza—‘poetry cannot tear its / gaze from the pavement’—although this throwback to a revolutionary moment is more compelled than celebratory.2

The affective register of Mendelssohn’s work is mercurial. An untitled picture-poem ‘in this intransigent / piece of darkness’ takes an elegiac tone: ‘whoever studies clouds / for a time-piece will be a fond / friend. will meet a sweet / end. in my pond-heart.’ 

Elsewhere, we meet Mendelssohn at her most satirical and irreverent: ‘I’m as good as Mayakovsky even if he did have a roaring great prick’, as she scrawls across a series of loose-leaf pages titled ello ello. With this claim, Mendelssohn asserts herself as the unrecognised inheritor of a revolutionary tradition of socialist art, if not of its toxic masculine tendencies. Imprisoned as a young man for his involvement in subversive political activity, Mayakovsky started writing poetry in solitary confinement. He became a leading figure of the Russian Futurist movement and of the Russian Revolution itself, famously pronouncing that ‘the streets are our brushes, public squares our palettes’. With a feminist chutzpah worthy of Valerie Solanas, Mendelssohn’s deliberately crude alignment between poet and phallus refers to the revolutionary machismo Mayakovsky has come (fairly or otherwise) to personify.3 Other works on display, such as the mock-Dadaist manifesto ‘MAMA womanifiasco numera una’ (1985), similarly pastiche and subvert a violent, masculine aesthetic.

Mendelssohn’s own history is almost as dramatic as Mayakovsky’s, if far more obscure. Convicted of involvement with the left-wing urban guerrillas known as the Angry Brigade in 1972, Mendelssohn defended herself during what was then the longest criminal trial in Britain in the twentieth century. Although she insisted on her innocence and spoke eloquently in her own defence, Mendelssohn and three of her co-defendants were handed ten-year sentences. Between 1971 and 1977, Mendelssohn was incarcerated in Holloway women’s prison. Unlike Mayakovsky—and in a rebuff to the myth of the prolific and productive writer behind bars—the debilitating conditions of prison life effectively stifled her poetic voice. Following her release, she devoted herself once again to her poetry and her art. One prison drawing is on display; a likely self-portrait, with a cigarette hanging louchely from the artist’s mouth.

Why was Mendelssohn obscure? Mendelssohn loved, read and identified with many dissident Russian poets, from Irina Ratushinskaya to Joseph Brodsky, and frequently characterises herself and her art as the target of state-sponsored censorship and repression.4 Enter such poetic cataclysms as: 

Osip Mandelstam in England would have been
murdered too.5

But Britain in the 1970s was not Revolutionary Russia, and Mendelssohn consistently disavowed any association with a macho, militant politics. Traumatised by her encounters with the criminal justice system, she shunned fame and publicity. Her archive is full of turned-down invitations, unsent letters, and invectives against certain publishers, intrusive journalists and artistic sell-outs. Without a source of stable income, she lived a clandestine and impoverished post-prison life. Nevertheless, she left behind an extraordinarily rich repository of poetry, writing and art, now at the University of Sussex. Time may yet prove Mendelssohn to be at least as good as Mayakovsky.

Despite its small size, Speak Poetess demonstrates Mendelssohn’s dizzying stylistic range. There are portraits, watercolours, a still life, pastels, notebook sketches, poetry drafts, autofiction and charts. The loose, rapid scrawl of Relentless and ello ello are counterpoised by the meticulous, fine-line precision of her ideograms and line drawings. The ideograms are like a secret language, a kabbalistic code, intricate and indecipherable, written in shades of black and blue ink. Colour as well as form is encoded: 22 columns of tiny ideograms written in black ink are followed by eight columns in blue.

Written in a pictorial language that is entirely her own, Mendelssohn’s ideograms reinvent a quintessential medium of literary modernism. In the essay accompanying the exhibition, Cheung notes how the ideograms ‘index Mendelssohn’s lifelong fascination with written languages interpretable through symbolism or the pictorial such as Arabic and Chinese’—to that list I would add Hebrew, and the Kabbalistic construction of images with pictorial symbols:

Mendelssohn was born into a Jewish, working-class, political family—her father fought in the International Brigades against Franco—and her Jewish identity was of vital importance to her throughout her life. Tondo Aquatique is published under a version of her Hebrew name, C.N.E.L. Kushnereva Mendleson b. H’K, and its cover depicts four spherical ‘tondos’ (a Renaissance term for a circular work of art), drawn in a muted, dusty blue:

I do not know whether Mendelssohn knew this, but the colour blue, denoted by the Hebrew term tekhelet, has played a prominent role in Judaism since ancient times.6 A line of the ‘blue vein’ can be traced back to medieval Kabbalistic myth: blue is a talismanic colour. 

Diverse in tone and style, it would be strange if blue were the only colour with which Mendelssohn experimented. Blue is not the only colour. There are reds, pinks, yellows, emerald, black, ‘white grey’, ‘pistachio chalked’, ‘coffee coloured’, ‘lime silk’.7 She titles a poem from Tondo Aquatique ‘never beiger’.8 One of the paintings on display is a kaleidoscopic wash of ink and watercolour. Mendelssohn’s interest in colour was profound. She read Goethe’s colour theory, and we might read her unreadable colour chart as a parody of his symbolic colour wheels which aligned colour to various character traits (‘blue’ is associated with the ‘common’).9 Mendelssohn makes similarly allegorical and mystical use of colour:

Prussian myzi, only I could wait for your magnesium blue to hover
[…] scumbled blue quaternity10

Blue may be untranslatable, but one of the works in the exhibition does transliterate between image and text. Key (below) shows us the signs for tree, fountain, smash, bird song, keys, speed, time, life, death, winter, summer, spring, autumn and lies. The tree looks like a tree, the keys look like bones, lies are a right-angle, death is a blot. Key could be a tattooist’s tiny flash card, or sketches for avant-garde emojis. The initial correspondence between word and symbol for ‘tree’ is misleading: here, as everywhere in Mendelssohn’s work, meaning is mutable and fugitive. Her picture-poems are not riddles. They do not want to be solved. Readers of her work are warned against ‘reading paintings as though they were rule books’, and frequently reminded that ‘a poem is not going to give precise directions. / you mustn’t disturb the hiding places. / they address a different world / where trees are decorated with diamonds’.11

Where are the trees covered in diamonds, the hiding places?12 In the thickets and densities of Mendelssohn’s impressionistic drawings, perhaps, several of which are on display. Composed of modernist architectural and arboreal forms, shrouded words and hidden figures, these complex dreamscapes are as fantastical as Piranesi’s carceri. They whirr with a kinetic, Futurist energy. 

‘Blue’ does not signify ‘freedom’, but it is bound up with it, and it threads through Mendelssohn’s work from her earliest writings to her last: a blue vein. The very first poem published in Mendelssohn’s Collected Poems, a typescript from one of her prison notebooks, contains the lines: 

Prison wall: Pigeon perch.
Prison wall bigger than us
The moon the Sun the Sky the
birds the jets the blue the SKY.13

The sky, for Mendelssohn, is an enduring motif (‘lazuli’ is from the Persian for ‘sky’) and a paradoxical term that represents both emancipation (‘my page changes into a sheet of sky’) and incarceration (‘the sky hold me in simple hard labour’).14

The intersection between colour, creativity and incarceration emerges again in a typed-up fragment from Mendelssohn’s roman-à-clef, ‘A cry, crumble and cry’ (c. 1980-1990), which recounts ‘the time I was sent back to jail’ and emerges from a pastel whirl of blue: 

Her last published pamphlet, py. (2009), opens with the line: ‘prove it! out of the blue / oranges tumbled’. Here, blue is not a colour but an idiom for the unexpected; a shorthand for sky; and another pastiche, this time of the surrealist Paul Éluard poem la terre est bleue comme une orange. Making a mockery of the demand for proof (evidence, legal certitude), py.’s 27 acrostics on the word ‘poetry’ tumble ‘out of the blue’ with the same sheer kinetic energy as Relentless. 

Blue is the colour of water, of sky, of ink. For Mendelssohn, it is the colour of poetry.

Anna Mendelssohn: Speak Poetess runs from 11 October 2023 – 21 January 2024 and is curated by Eugene Yiu Nam Cheung, the 2023 Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow at Whitechapel Gallery, with Sara Crangle, Professor of Modernism & the Avant-Garde at the University of Sussex as curatorial consultant.

Acknowledgements: I am grateful to the Anna Mendelssohn estate for generous permission to reproduce images and quotations.