Fine Arts Library Collections

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

Who knew, in the summer of 1971, that the newest hotbed of art theory would be born, and grow up, in the villages of Chipping Norton and Leamington Spa and the industrial city of Coventry, twenty miles apart from each other and over one hundred miles northwest of London, the supposed center of British contemporary art? For it was there that David Rushton and Philip Pilkington – first-year students in the Fine Arts course at the Faculty of Art & Design, Lancaster Polytechnic – published the two (and only) issues of Analytical Art, rare copies of which have just now entered the Fine Arts Library collection.

Rushton and Pilkington quickly dissolved their work into the larger mission of ‘Art & Language’ group. (The entire text of the introduction to the last issue of the journal is: This is the final issue of Analytical Art. The editors will subsequently be publishing in Art & Language). Together with Terry Atkinson and most especially Charles Harrison they went on to make the discussion of conceptual art central to the critical dialogue of the seventies.

William Burroughs, photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe (1982)

The Fine Arts Library has recently acquired a complete, boxed set of the art journal RADAR, which was published in Switzerland between 1982 and 1988. This German language publication highlights the contemporary art scene in Europe and beyond; each issue includes an original photograph. In addition to this Mapplethorpe, this set features work by Gerard Malanga, Victor Bokris, and others.

To learn more about this title, please see this link:
 http://hollis.harvard.edu/?itemid=|libra…

“Radar” can be consulted in the Special Collections Reading Room of the library.

Sketch for controversial Busch-Reisinger mural

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.

Painter, educator and muralist, Lewis Rubenstein attended Harvard University (class of 1930), and later became professor of painting at Vassar College in 1939. He was commissioned to create murals by the Busch-Reisinger Museum and the Fogg Museum at Harvard, as well as the Jewish Center in Buffalo, N.Y., and the Wareham, Mass. Post Office for the WPA’s Section of Fine Arts in 1940.

The murals painted in the (now) Busch-Reisinger Museum in 1930 proved to be quite controversial. The murals, unveiled in 1937, portray characters Niebelung and Ragnarok of German legend. According to the artist, the characters in the murals are depicted in modern accessories to show the current threat to world peace for that time: fascism. Rubenstein stressed that the murals were, “frescos based on Germanic/Norse legends and used to make commentary on world events not to represent any specific figures.”

This October 31, 1935 article from The Crimson describes the controversial nature of the work. Many people felt that Rubenstein’s mural was a political commentary on Germany’s Socialist regime because the Nazi invasion of Poland occurred two years prior to the unveiling. To many, the mural itself was considered an “insult to the leader of foreign nation.”

The murals were covered by paneling from 1964 until 1980, when Rubenstein requested it be removed in honor of his 50^th class reunion.

Crimson article describing Rubenstein’s mural

The Fine Arts Library recently acquired a limited edition publication by renowned Australian photojournalist Stephen Dupont.  Entitled Axe Me Biggie, a rendering of the Dari expression for “take my picture”, it includes ninety black and white Polaroid portrait photographs of Afghanis taken near the central bus station in Kabul, on one day in 2006.  These were selected from over 665 images in total; as part of the project each print was presented to the sitter and the negatives retained to make further reproductions.  Although several of these images have been exhibited and published before, this book presents the largest survey available to date.   This handmade book features images printed digitally on heavy photographic paper.

Dupont has been photographing in Afghanistan since 1993 and the portrait project compliments his more journalistic work in the area.   He has photographed in many war-torn parts of the world to date.  Dupont was the Peabody Museum’s Gardner fellow in 2010 and is currently photographing in Papua New Guinea for that project.

Seated Buddha 550-577 AD Northern Ch'i Dynasty

The Fine Arts Library has subscribed to the online database produced by the National Palace Museum in Taipei.  The site contains high quality digital images of objects in the Museum’s collection as well as catalog information about each object in English, Chinese and Japanese.  There are also chronologies and other documents related to the history of Chinese art.

Access is also provided to digital copies of all Museum periodical publications (1983-2010). One can browse the table of contents of every issue by year of publication and by volume number. In addition, you can browse articles by topic (e.g. painting, prints, archaeology, etc.). Full text downloads and prints are available. However, please note that the publications are in Chinese only.

The database is available as an E-Resource on the Harvard Library portal.

One of the Fine Arts Library’s most unusual recent acquisitions is a lovely little volume of hand-colored engravings and lithographs. The volume consists of 25 plates depicting people and places in Turkey, Greece and the Levant. Once we had the book in hand, we were faced with the problem of how to record this new addition in the library’s catalog.

The illustrations in the book are accompanied by captions in French, Ottoman Turkish and Greek. Each plate is signed by the engraver Eugenio Fulgenzi and the printer Raffaele Fulgenzi of Smyrna (now called Izmir, Turkey) and is dated, 1836 – 1838.  Pasted inside the front cover of the book is a label with the printer’s name and address: Lithographie & Taille douce Fulgenzi & fils, graveurs.

But the book lacks a title page. It’s sometimes possible to identify a book by means other than the title. However, a search of online library catalogs in North America and Europe turned up nothing that matched the date, subject and physical dimensions of our new acquisition, or the name Fulgenzi.

After a great deal of searching, a specialized bibliography in the Fine Arts Library’s reference collection, René Colas, Bibliographie générale du costume et de la mode… (Paris, 1933) supplied a title for our mystery volume: Collection de costumes civils et militaires, scènes populaires, et vues de l’Asie-Mineure. Further research has revealed a handful of references in the works of authors who evidently had seen and studied these engravings by the Fulgenzis. But it appears that our copy of this rare work is the only one recorded in any research library’s collection.

Lithography was introduced in the Ottoman Empire in 1831 and only a handful of works appeared in the first decade, which puts this little volume by Eugenio and Raffaele Fulgenzi of Smyrna among the earliest books illustrated with lithographs to be published in Turkey.

Immediately above the printer’s label on the inside cover of our copy of the book is the bold ex-libris signature of the book’s owner, Th. W. Langdon, and the number 27.  One can also make out the name Langdon faintly inscribed over the printer’s label.  That has made it possible to identify the book’s original owner and to make an educated guess as to how such a book might have made it to New England, where it turned up at a book fair 170 years later.

Thomas Walley Langdon (1783-1861) and his brother John were Boston merchants, who were among the first Americans to embark upon the profitable Smyrna trade.  In 1820, John Langdon sent his son Joseph to Smyrna to act as an agent for himself and his brother. The venture was a profitable one for both brothers. Coffee, sugar, indigo, rum, and furs from the New World were traded for dried fruits, spices, sponges, Turkish carpets, mohair yarn and Smyrna silk.

The owner of this book, Thomas Langdon remained actively engaged in the Smyrna trade for many years. He married late in life and had no children of his own. He may have brought this volume home to New England as a souvenir of his travels. Meanwhile his nephew Joseph settled in Smyrna and married a local girl. Joseph Langdon’s great-great-grandson, Tom Rees, tells the fascinating story of the Langdons of Boston and Smyrna in his book, Merchant Adventurers in the Levant : Two British Families of Privateers, Consuls and Traders 1700-1950 (Stawell, 2003).