A Commission to Really Lust After

“Shall I read you the verse?” artist Ruth Weisberg asks before explaining the genesis and evolution of her latest work, “Canto V: A Whirlwind of Lovers.” And the ambitious project, which recently went on view in the Virginia Steele Scott Gallery at the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, does require some explanation.

Both the mural-size drawing of 18 figures, which was spread on the floor in preparation for hanging, and 13 smaller prints and drawings already installed in the gallery depict nudes being swept through space on swirling drapery. Visitors might assume that the figures are caught up in some strange, sensuous dream. Still, the couples seem so listless, melancholy and disengaged, it’s difficult to imagine the circumstances that set them adrift.

As Weisberg reads a few lines from Dante’s “Inferno,” it becomes clear that her artwork was inspired by the Roman poet Virgil’s description of lovers whose adulterous and carnal sins have condemned them to an eternity of being blown by winds of passion:

As winter starlings riding on their wings

Form crowded flocks, so spirits dip and veer

Foundering in the wind’s rough buffetings.

Upward or downward, driven here and there

With never ease from pain nor hope of rest

As chanting cranes will form a line in air,

So I saw souls come uttering cries--wind-tossed,

And lofted by the storm.

But Weisberg is not the only artist to have been inspired by those words, nor is Virgil her only muse. She has taken some visual cues from English artist, philosopher and poet William Blake (1757-1827), whose engraving, “The Circle of the Lustful,” portrays the same scene in his illustrations of Canto V of Dante’s “Inferno.”

Weisberg’s project began about three years ago when Edward J. Nygren, director of the Huntington’s art collections, invited her to do a body of work based on a work in the institution’s vast holdings.

“I immediately thought, ‘It’s got to be William Blake. I’ve always been interested in him. Who am I kidding?’ But it was a wonderful opportunity to study the collection, so I took time to go through the prints and drawings,” she said.

She paid several visits to the Huntington during the following year and half, and finally settled on “The Circle of the Lustful.” “It has a wonderful spread of lovers and it’s interesting because none of them are grounded; they seem to be transported by the wind,” she said.

Blake’s interpretation of the scene allowed Weisberg to pursue her ongoing interest in transcendent figures who seem to defy gravity. His composition also fulfilled her wish for “a simple, dramatic form” that could be adapted to a much larger scale, about 12 by 24 feet.

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With the idea taking shape, she began a long process of drawing and photographing friends and members of her family, figuring out poses and angles so that the figures would appear to be flying. “I had to pose the models so that I was looking directly down on them, to give the illusion of looking up at them when the drawing is on the wall,” she said. “I also wanted them to be very sensual and tender but always turning away from each other. They are locked into an eternity of not coming together, but not coming apart. I decided to let the body be the expressive element, rather than the face.”

As for her choice of media, she limited herself to Venetian red and blue-black watercolor and related hues of colored pencils. The major challenge was to portray “a fluid spiral” of figures in “very unforgiving media,” she said. “You’ve got to get it right, but I adore unforgiving media and I love to see how much I can get out of simple means.”

The Huntington, which is known as a bastion of British culture, has hosted a few other exhibitions of contemporary American art, but Weisberg’s show is “the first of a hoped-for series of exhibitions created by artists in response to works and settings at the Huntington,” Nygren said.

For Weisberg, 57, the project is an important landmark in her 30-year career. Born and raised in Chicago, she received her bachelor and master of arts degrees from the University of Michigan, and also studied painting and printmaking for three years at the Academia di Belle Arti in Perugia, Italy.

Her youthful experience in Italy was essential to her development, she said. “More than anything else, I looked at great art, particularly frescoes, and that has had an enduring influence on my work. That classical education and my Jewish background have been the two most powerful influences on my work, and I have tried to synthesize them.”

She has returned to Italy repeatedly since her student days, continuing to draw inspiration from the art of the Renaissance. An enormously productive artist, she also has shown her work in more than 200 exhibitions. Well aware that her figurative, history-based artwork has been unfashionable throughout much of her career, Weisberg said that “styles come and go” so artists should pursue “what they believe in deeply.”

That’s the sort of advice she gives to students at USC, where she has taught art since 1970 and serves as dean of the School of Fine Arts. An energetic leader in national academic circles, she was president of the College Art Assn. during 1990-92 and received the association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art Award in 1999.

Teaching is part of “giving back,” a responsibility that was instilled by her parents and maternal grandmother, Weisberg said. But unlike many artists who teach, she seems to have found a balance between her duties at the university and her work in her studio. “There’s a lot of cross-fertilization between the two,” she said. “People often ask how I do it, but it seems very natural to me.”

And even as she prepared for the Huntington exhibition opening, she was looking forward to completing two major commissions. One project is a 28-foot mural for a medical building in Northridge. The other is a series of 30 drawings for a new Haggada--the part of the Talmud that tells the story of the Exodus and is read at Passover--to be published by the Central Conference of Reform Rabbis.

“This is a very special time of my life,” she said.

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“CANTO V: A WHIRLWIND OF LOVERS” by Ruth Weisberg, Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, 1150 Oxford Road, San Marino. Dates: Tuesdays through Fridays, noon to 4:30 p.m.; Saturdays and Sundays, 10:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Ends Jan. 30. Prices: adults, $8.50; seniors, $8; students and children 12 and older, $6. Phone: (626) 405-2141.