New York Public Library

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2008 by Megan Holloway Fort

The exhibitions program at the New York Public Library--comprising an annual roster of some fifteen small, focused shows that explore the fine and performing arts, as well as literature, history, and current events--is a tremendous cultural resource for people in our city. And no wonder, considering the incredible wealth of collections material the library's staff have at their fingertips. This fall, three new exhibitions relating to the visual arts on view at the main branch--the History and Social Sciences Library on Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street--are particularly enticing.

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Yaddo: Making American Culture, on view through February 15, 2009, offers a window into the fabled artist's retreat of Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York, founded in 1900 by the financier Spencer Trask and his wife Katrina, a poet. After the loss of their fourth child, the Trasks decided to bequeath their baronial mansion and its surrounding four-hundred-acre grounds to future generations of creative men and women. Since Yaddo began welcoming guests in 1926, a roster of more than 5,500 distinguished artists have been in residence there, among them Milton Avery, Saul Bellow, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Aaron Copland, Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Mario Puzo, and Clyfford Still.

The Yaddo archives to 1980 are in the collection of the New York Public Library, and the exhibition includes a lively mixture of letters, papers, photographs, books, artworks, film clips, and sound recordings drawn largely from these holdings. It was organized by Micki McGee, who also edited and wrote the introductory essay to the accompanying catalogue, which is published by Columbia University Press.

Art Deco Design: Rhythm and Verve, on view to January 11, 2009, uses artist portfolios, prints, advertisements, textile designs, as well as recordings of music of the 1920s and 1930s, to explore the ways in which art deco was able to unify modern art and industrial purpose. Most of the objects included are from the library's Art and Architecture Collection, which is particularly strong in the decorative arts, and highlights of the exhibition include an Otto Morach poster that typifies the period's fascination with skyscrapers and automobiles, and the pochoir artist Eugene Alain Seguy's prints of insects and flora. A section of the exhibition is also devoted to exploring the art deco pochoir technique, a labor intensive hand-coloring process involving the use of stencil plates.

Another exhibition with an emphasis on prints is William James Bennett: Master of the Aquatint View, on view from November 7 through January 25, 2009. During the 1830s and 1840s Bennett, a British-born painter and printmaker, made a series of topographical prints that celebrated the beauty of the American landscape and the industry and architecture of its growing cities, especially New York. Rendered in aquatint, a printmaking process that suggests the fluidity and transparency of water color, Bennett's views are regarded by many as the finest folio views of nineteenth-century American cities. The exhibition includes forty prints and watercolors drawn from the library's Print Collection, many from the I.N. Phelps Stokes Collection of American Historical Prints, a group of more than eight hundred prints and drawings, primarily of town views and historical scenes, donated to the library by the architect Isaac New ton Phelps Stokes in 1930.

Yaddo: Making American Culture * to February 15, 2009 * Art Deco Design: Rhythm and Verve * to January 11, 2009 * William James Bennett: Master of the Aquatint View * November 7 to January 25, 2009 * New York Public Library * www.nypl.org

European tapestries

Some thirteen years ago, the Art Institute of Chicago commenced an initiative to research and restore the approximately one hundred European tapestries from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century in their collection. This fall, the fruits of those labors will be revealed in a major exhibition entitled The Divine Art: Four Centuries of European Tapestries and its accompanying catalogue. Edited by Christa C. Mayer Thurman, the curator in the Department of Textiles at the museum who organized the exhibition, the publication includes contributions from a number of European and American scholars and is sure to become a key resource in the field.

Tapestries were initially woven to cover the walls of castles and abbeys to keep warmth inside the buildings. About the mid-fourteenth century, probably in northwestern Europe, some enterprising artist or weaver conceived the idea of representing stories on these textiles, as opposed to merely decorative patterns, and tapestries embarked on their journey to becoming works of figurative art, eventually on a par with paintings on wood or canvas. Indeed, as the catalogue demonstrates, tapestry research presents a complex topic because, while usually grouped with the decorative arts, it is more closely related to the study of paintings in subject matter and scale.