Edward Lear, Moment to Moment

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Lear is known around the world as a prolific nonsense poet, but his first love was drawing and painting. Over a period of fifty years, he travelled in Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, India, and beyond, composing thousands of pictures. 'Edward Lear, Moment to Moment' brings together, for the first time, an outstanding selection of sketches and paintings from across the whole span of his career. Drawing on several collections and archives in the USA, the UK, and Europe, the exhibition will demonstrate Lear's acute sensitivity to cultural and geographic contexts, showing how his radically associative mind and method forge connections between disparate parts of his experience. At several points, the project will encourage consideration of how Lear's artistry can contribute to debates about the dynamics of multicultural exchange. In addition, both the exhibition and the public programme explore how Lear's itinerant life, one lived in many ways from moment to moment, fed into his creative process. The artist's troubled family history and his complex attitude towards his homosexuality -- along with his lifelong troubles with epilepsy, depression, and mental instability -- had a major influence on his work. This project shows how questions about sexual and social identity, physical and mental illness, became informing preoccupations of his art -- and, crucially, it demonstrates how Lear conceived his art not merely as marked by his past but as a form of therapy for dealing with it.Pushing beyond received views of Lear as merely genial or trivial, this project concentrates attention on how the artist experienced himself as an oddity, a stranger, a spectator ('Society is a game I can't play at,' he lamented). Lear was fascinated by forms of exile and uprootedness, migration and marginality; his 'outsider' status helped to make him an acute analyst of social codes, and of the ways in which these codes might be re-thought and reshaped. The exhibition comes at a time when debates about community diversity and cohesion -- and the role art might play in developing such connections -- are prominent. In addition, recent interest in art therapy, and in forms of creative mindfulness which attend to the present moment, speak to a public need to utilize art in order to foster mental and physical health. Both the exhibition and public programme aim to respond to this need. The underlying motivation of the project is to explore the ongoing legacy of Lear's work by inviting audiences to consider how he speaks from his moment to ours.