Fine Arts Library Collections

The library recently acquired a rare 19^th century imprint: Costumbres y trajes de la edad media Cristiana y del renacimiento  (Barcelona : Libreria de Joaquin Verdaguer, 1852-1854). The book contains historical and descriptive essays and thirty-four hand-painted engravings of various figures in Western European medieval costume, such as this image of jousting knights. As was the custom at the time, the plates appear to have been created by various artists, some French and some Spanish, and assembled from different sources and then colored for the press. Verdaguer’s interests were apparently wide; his other contemporary titles include books on Chinese landscapes and calligraphy. This is one of the only three copies found in North America.

The Fine Arts Library has just purchased a copy of the limited edition Listen, listen : Adadam Agofomma : honoring the legacy of Koo Nimo produced by the book artist Mary Hark as a tribute to a Ghanaian musician. Listen, listen is a visual interpretation of  Nimo’s ‘palmwine music’. Hark uses native materials such as maize, plantain leaves, and papyrus to make the paper which is printed in a letterpress studio in Minnesota and finally bound in her own studio in Madison, Wisconsin.  The book incorporates recordings as well as prints by Ghanaian artist Atta Kwami.

‘Listen, listen’ fits into the library’s mission to collect a variety of artists’ books. Our artists’ books collection features personal, cultural, and political statements made by international artists working in a book or book-like format. For more information on this collection, look here: http://hcl.harvard.edu/libraries/finearts/collections/artists_books.cfm

Listen, listen fits into the library’s mission to collect a variety of artists’ books. Our artists’ books collection features personal, cultural, and political statements made by international artists working in a book or book-like form.

In 2003, the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow commissioned a facsimile reprint of the single issue of the early Russian modernist journal ‘Unovis’. This journal, organized by the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich and produced in 1920 by the staff and students of the Vitebsk Art School, is one of the principal forms of documentation of the art movement of the same name that flourished in Moscow from 1919 to 1922.

This facsimile edition also includes a book of essays on the movement and its makers (in Russian) and a reproduction of a full-color poster.

Ben Shahn at Harvard Commencement 1957

The Fine Arts Library holds the collection of Stephen Lee Taller devoted to the American artist Ben Shahn (1898-1969). The Archive contains many thousands of items related to the artist’s work, including books written by and illustrated by Ben Shahn, magazines in which his work was featured, exhibition and auction sales catalogues, commercial work (book jackets, record jackets, advertisements), dissertations, and newspaper clippings. An image inventory attempts to record every know work by the artist.

A separate portion of the Taller Archive held by the Harvard Art Museums includes drawings and graphic work.  The Museums also hold Shahn’s entire archive of photographic negatives.   All of those works may be viewed in the Museums’ collections database.

Shahn presented the 1956-57 Charles Eliot Norton lectures, published as The Shape of Content.  He also received an honorary degree from the University in 1957.

Capital, San Pedro la Rua cloister, Estella, Spain. Arthur Kingsley Porter Collection.

The Fine Arts Library holds a collection of over 10,000 photographs of European medieval monuments taken by Professor Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883-1933)  in the 1920s.   The Porter collection includes negatives as well as prints and served as the basis for several of his noted publications such as Romanesque sculpture of the pilgrimage roads (1923).

Kathryn Brush, Professor at the University of Western Ontario,  has studied Porter’s work in depth and  recently focused on the role played by Lucy Wallace Porter (1876-1962) in her husband’s photographic campaigns.  There is reason to believe that Mrs. Porter took many of the images and even that she may have been the more accomplished photographer.  It is of course difficult to attribute responsibility in the absence of detailed shooting records.  It was rewarding therefore to locate  this image of Mrs. Porter behind the camera as evidence of her efforts.

We have a new addition to the Fine Arts Library’s collection of facsimile editions of illuminated manuscripts. The facsimile in this case reproduces the  Kitāb al-Manāfi‘ al-Ḥayawān (The Book on the Usefulness of Animals), a collection of texts classifying and describing the varieties of wild and domestic animals, compiled by the medieval Arab scholar Ibn al-Durayhim al-Mawṣilī (1312-1361) and illustrated during his lifetime with 91 miniatures, probably in Mamluk Syria.

The work is of great importance for the history of Islamic painting, since it is one of the few illustrated codices of the Mamluk period that can be securely dated and linked to a known author. The autograph manuscript is held by the Royal Library of the Monastery of San Lorenzo del Escorial, near Madrid, Spain. No other copies are known.

This full facsimile edition of Ibn al-Durayhim’s Book on the Usefulness of Animals, accompanied by a scholarly translation of the text by Carmen Ruiz Bravo, was issued in 1990 by a small Spanish publisher that went out of business soon thereafter. As a result, few copies of this facsimile made their way into the collections of academic and research libraries. Only one copy is recorded outside of Spain, and until the Fine Arts Library acquired its copy none were held by institutions in North America.

Candace Hicks. Common threads

The Fine Arts Library recently acquired a unique artist’s book made from fabric with decorations and text created exclusively through embroidery.  Candace Hicks is a Texas-based artist who elevates a common copy book by recreating it with stitchery.  Common threads (2011) is one of several sewn books Hicks has made in recent years.

For more information about this and other books in our artists’ book collection, please contact us.

Byars catalogue

Here are photographs of the unassuming and enigmatic interior of a recently acquired 1977 James Lee Byars catalogue, issued to accompany an exhibition at the Städtisches Museum Mönchengladbach in Germany.  A gold box contains a sheet of crumpled black tissue paper with “TH FI TO IN PH” printed in gold, short for ’THe FIrst TOtally INterrogativ PHilosophy’.  Johannes Cladders’ essay is printed inside the box.

Byars’ object is merely the latest addition to our collection of over a dozen Mönchengladbach catalogs edited or assembled by Cladders in the 1970s and issued in challenging formats such as boxes, scrolls, and portable cases and featuring the work of iconic conceptual artists like Marcel Broodthaers, Giulio Paolini, Daniel Buren, and Jannis Kounellis.

The Fine Arts Library recently purchased a set of four issues of 14, rue du Dragon, the short-lived newsletter of the Cahiers d’Art. The title came from the address of the larger journal’s offices, located
in Saint Germain-des-Pres and just around the corner from the Café des Deux Magots, a popular hang-out in the thirties for the Surrealists and their literary friends.

We have four of the five issues that were published in  the spring of 1933 (a fifth issue, and an index, were published in 1935). Each issue is an octavo, folded from one sheet, and includes two inserts – one sheet of advertisements for local cultural businesses and a pink flier touting the Cahiers. The texts are generally reviews of films and theatre, excerpts from novels, poems, and notices of gallery shows, plus at least one large black and white photograph of a work of art produced by one of the Surrealists or French Modernists.

The Harvard Art Museums Archives recently completed  a processing project, generously funded by The Getty Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).  In the process of cataloging its major holdings from 1895-present, the Archives has uncovered some wonderful documents. The following represents material found during this project.

1944 photograph showing Paul J. Sachs (left of center) teaching “The Museum Course”

Paul J. Sachs was the first assistant museum director of the Fogg Museum and Harvard professor. He graduated from Harvard in 1900 and lectured at Wellesley College in 1916. Sachs became an Assistant Professor of Art at Harvard in 1917 and became a full Harvard professor in 1927. During his time at Harvard, he began developing his art collection, spending a great deal of time traveling, visiting museums and observing art trends. In 1915, Edward W. Forbes asked him to join the museum staff, and in 1923, Sachs became Associate Curator, remaining in this position until his retirement in 1948.

In 1922, he began teaching his most famous course, “Museum Work and Museum Problems,” commonly referred to as “the Museum Course.”

A list, compiled by Sachs, of former students who went on to become prominent figures in the art world museums.

Through the Museum Course, Sachs taught the history and philosophy as well as the administrative and organizational aspects of museums and curatorial work. He taught the finer aspects of collection development, donor relations, forgery detection and ethics. Students in the course were able to take trips to visit museums and private galleries.  Many of his students later went on to direct the county’s major art museums.

First page of notes from Paul J. Sachs September 29, 1930 Museum Course class