I WILL BE VISITING FAMILY IN COLOMBIA, SO ENJOY A BLOG-LESS WEEK!

Since I’m heading off to Colombia, I thought I’d leave you with one of the rare Colombia-themed ephemeral items in the collection. The following is an airline luggage label designed for SCADTA (Sociedad Colombo Alemana de Transporte Aéreo), which boasted as being the first airline to provide air service to South America.

Also known as the Colombo-German Air Transport Society, the German-owned company began operations in Colombia after the First World War in 1919. The small airmail carrier used Junkers seaplanes to make landings in the Magdalena River since there were few if any landing strips in Colombia’s rugged mountain terrain.

Partly in response to the rise of this German competitor, U.S. President Herbert Hoover subsidized the expansion of Pan Am (Pan American World Airways) with the aim of establishing a dominant presence in the Latin American air routes.

After the Second World War, SCADTA merged with SACO (Servicio Aéreo Colombiano) to form Avianca (Aerovías Nacionales de Colombia), the Colombian carrier which continues to operate today.

WE WANT JUSTICE!

FORMER SUPREME COURT JUSTICE VISITS THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU LIBRARY

Yesterday afternoon, the library staff had the privilege of welcoming Sandra Day O’Connor, first woman Associate Justice appointed to the Supreme Court, where she served from 1981 until her retirement in 2006. Ms. O’Connor was treated to a sampling of Americana from the library collection, including some First World War sheet music covers and other propaganda, a variety of New Deal materials, and some Second World War propaganda designed for consumption overseas.

Ms. O’Connor was particularly taken with some CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) ephemera, reminiscing how a couple of camps had been established in or about her father’s ranch out West. She recalled that years later a number of former “city kid” enrollees in Roosevelt’s “Tree Army” who had never before been exposed to rural life, had made return pilgrimages to the campsite which so inspired them with a new-found respect for nature.

Naturally, we also displayed some of the law-related materials in our collection for Ms. O’Connor to peruse. The library holds some extraordinary oversized books illustrated by Violet Oakley, an important Arts & Crafts designer and muralist responsible for painting forty-three murals in the State Capitol, Senate, and Supreme Court buildings in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. One such portfolio, Law Triumphant, containing: The opening of the book of the law and The miracle of Geneva (1933) includes some beautiful color reproductions of some of the murals she designed for the Supreme Court building.

The library also has a number of rare items documenting the infamous “Scottsboro Boy” trials of the 1930s that so polarized depression-era Americans. When nine African-American youths were unjustly accused of raping a couple of white women, their defense was taken up by the Communist Party of the U.S.A.’s legal arm, the ILD (International Labor Defense). Eventually, defense appeals against biases juries and demands for retrials were heard by the Supreme Court of the United States. The Communist Party also planned to publish a linocut block book to help propagandize the cause and expose racial injustice under the Capitalist system. The library holds a unique prototype manuscript for that project that was never realized at that time.

Finally, we included a book with excerpts from Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man.” Published by the Heritage Press in 1961, the hardcover edition with “full linen cloth on which blaze the red flames of revolution” was designed by Roderick Stinehour, bound by Frank Fortney “and his fellow sans-cullottes,” with illustrations inside by Socialist activist and engraver, Lynd Ward.

SOME ADDITIONS TO THE LIBRARY

GIFTS AND ACQUISITIONS FROM THE CALIFORNIA ANTIQUARIAN BOOK FAIR, TED PIETSCH, AND THE LIBRARY OF JOHN GLADSTONE

Thanks to the generosity of a couple of new friends and long-time Wolfsonian supporters, I have the pleasure of announcing that we have been able to add some important rare titles to our library collection in the first few months of the year. Our collections development policy at the Wolfsonian is to make strategic acquisitions designed to build upon the strengths of our current holdings and to fill in important gaps in the collection as rare materials become available. Naturally, in the current climate of economic recession and shrinking budgets, we have been ever more dependent on donations of rare materials in expanding our library holdings. Fortunately, a number of friends of the library have stepped up to the plate early this year with pledges of support and donations of rare and reference works appropriate to our collecting interests.

The first materials to arrive this year came courtesy of Ruth Kruger, a collector who donated a number of vintage postcards from her own collection to the library in January. She also introduced me to the Tropical Post Card Winter Show in Pompano Beach, Florida, and her generosity inspired me to open up my own wallet to purchase and donate a few World War I, World War II, World's Fair, and Tennessee Valley Authority postcards to the collection as well.

Wolfsonian museum founder, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. generously pledged to match the library’s acquisitions budget and doubled our purchasing potential at the California Antiquarian Book Fair this last February. Thank to his continued support and contributions from Ellen and Louis Wolfson III we were able to pick out a few rare and important additions to our collection, including: a bound edition of deck plans for the Norddeutscher Lloyd, Bremen steamship company for the year 1912; a pictorial map of Havana, 1939; a rare Thonet catalog for chairs; a late 1930s illustrated book about automobiles; anti-Nazi cartoons and caricatures in a book and periodical from the Netherlands; and a Berliner Secession book on a sports art exhibition in 1927.

Long-time supporter Frederic A. Sharf, (who recently donated a large number of rare viewbooks on the Spanish American war, the Russo-Japanese war, the Sino-Japanese conflicts, etc.), augmented his own donation by facilitating the gift of more than thirty sketchbooks and one hundred original design drawings by automotive artist Theodore W. Pietsch II by his son and namesake. This very significant donation goes a long way towards helping to establish the Wolfsonian’s reputation as a critical repository of automobile design materials.

Finally, I would be remiss if I neglected to acknowledge the continued generosity of Ideal Gladstone. Every year since 2006, Ideal has invited us to sift through her late husband’s library to select whichever rare and reference books we deemed appropriate for our collection. Her husband, John, was a real renaissance man, and his library has proven to be a real gold mine for important reference works on such diverse subjects as: art history; the American labor movement; Communist art and aesthetics; World’s Fairs; and illustrated books by Rockwell Kent and others. The contributions of these and other donors can be accessed through our library donor webpage by clicking on the title of this blog.

DISPLAY OF WWI PROPAGANDA FOR MIAMI DADE COLLEGE STUDENTS

This Friday, Sandra Castillo and twenty of her Miami Dade College students came to the Wolfsonian-FIU for a lecture presentation on the subject of World War I propaganda. Although the Wolfsonian has gained notoriety as a “must see” repository of materials documenting the Second World War, we also have a very strong collection of rare books, periodicals, and ephemera dating back to the earlier conflict.

When asked to consider how wars were won (or lost), most of the students immediately responded with lists of the obvious determinants: powerful armies, warships, airships, and tanks; the production and supply of war munitions; strategic battle plans and victories; manpower and the attrition of the enemy. The impact of propaganda on the morale of enemy and friendly soldiers at the front, and civilians on the home front, and the court of world opinion did not immediately register with the students as something of vital importance to the combatants. After looking over some of the propaganda materials laid out on the main reading room tables, however, many of the students began to understand that it wasn’t only material considerations that impacted a country’s ability to maintain the fighting spirit also necessary for prosecuting a long and bloody conflict over the course of several years.

The professor and her students were treated to a wide variety of propaganda materials produced by all of the protagonists participating in the Great War. Highlights included The great war victory album and The century edition de luxe of Raemaekers' war cartoons; two recruiting posters aimed at an African American audience; postcards from Italy, France, and the United States aimed at lifting morale on the home front by lampooning the enemy; song books and sheet music covers designed to inspire patriotism and faith in final victory.

Among the items that proved most popular with the students were those books ostensibly written for children, but also designed to win over parental readers and an adult audience. Although our collection originally included a fair number of rare propaganda books designed for a juvenile audience, our holdings were dramatically augmented thanks to a generous donation by Pamela K. Harer in 2007 of more than one hundred children’s propaganda books from the First and Second World Wars. Several of the latter books have been included here, and others displayed in an earlier exhibition can be accessed by clicking on the title of the blog.

MONUMENTS TO FASCIST FOLLY

UNREALIZED EDIFACES PROPOSED TO RAISE THE PROFILE OF

MUSSOLINI'S IMPERIAL CAPITAL

This afternoon, David and Ann Wilkins arrived at the Wolfsonian library to conduct some research on some of the Italian architects' proposals for radically transforming the skyline of Rome during the Fascist era. David (University of Pittsburg professor emeritus) and his wife, Ann, taught for three semesters at the Duquesne University Italian campus, and will again be teaching and leading guided tours in Rome as part of the 10th anniversary celebrations. During their visit to our own rare books and special collections library the husband-wife research team looked at some of the published works of some important Italian architects.

As the couple discovered, the library holds a good number of works by the architect Mario Palanti (1885-1979). Born in Milan, Palanti gained notoriety for a number of important monumental Renaissance Revival and Art Nouveau-style edifices he designed between 1909 and 1919 in the capital cities of Buenos Aires, Argentina and Montevideo, Uruguay. On his return to his homeland in 1930, Palanti produced a number of drawings and published several books with designs for lofty monuments for Mussolini's Rome and other Italian cities.

Other totalitarian regimes also flirted with monumental architectural projects aimed at dwarfing the skyscraping "cathedrals to capitalism" built in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s. The Russians, for example, held an architectural contest between 1931 and 1933, and construction began in 1937 for a monumental “Palace of the Soviets” to be built on the ruins of a cathedral in Moscow destroyed by the Bolsheviks. The world war brought a premature end to the plans, however, and the imposing people's palace was never realized. Ironically, after the collapse of the Soviet state, the cathedral was rebuilt on the original foundations.

The Fascists were not inclined to leave their Capitialist and Communist competitors with a monopoly on monumental buildings, and in the context of such rivalry Mario Palanti began producing drawings and proposals for collosal construction projects for Rome and other Italian cities. His plans were nothing if not grandiose, but while the heroic style might have impressed Il Duce, the huge scale he envisioned was not deemed practical or desirable. Consequently, the designs remained little more than dream-like—(or nightmarish)—visions of an urban future-scape never to be realized.

Palanti's ideas, of course, were not conceived in an intellectual vacuum. Palanti's designs for re-envisioning Rome with his architectural monstrosities (or monster cities!)--drew inspiration from other contemporary architectural visionaries and works, such as Hugh Ferriss's influential, Metropolis of Tomorrow, published in 1929.

A BUSY SATURDAY MORNING!

Saturdays tend to be busy here in the library as we regularly have a couple of student interns and volunteers working, and are usually booked solid with research appointments scheduled by local university students. Today was no exception, with library interns Armando Suarez and Miriam Kashem coming in to gain practical experience in cataloguing rare books and ephemeral items and learning collection stabilization techniques designed to preserve the same. Two Florida International University students also took advantage of our weekend hours to do some research on some rare world’s fair materials in our collection.

In between supervising the interns and paging materials for the library patrons, I had the pleasure of meeting with long-time supporter and donor, Frederic A. Sharf. Mr. Sharf drove down from Palm Beach to the museum, bringing two Museum of Fine Art curators in tow to meet with Wolfsonian director, Cathy Leff, our own curatorial staff, and yours truly. The MFA curators are formulating plans for making use of Fred’s personal collection of Utility scheme garments and propaganda scarves in an exhibition with the working title: Beauty as Duty: Fashion, Propaganda and Morale in WWII-era Britain. The visitors were interested in seeing what materials the Wolfsonian-FIU might have to offer by way of collaboration. Although our own institution does not possess a large inventory of World War Two textiles, we do have a fine collection of Second World War propaganda posters in our Works on Paper department which our curators, Marianne Lamonaca and Sarah Schleuning presented to the visitors in a digital slide show.

As you can see from the images included in today's blog, our library collection does hold a few rare materials specifically documenting women’s fashion and style in war-time Britain, but really offered more in the way of comparative materials from other Allied and Axis nations. In addition to a fine illustrated children’s book of verses designed to teach English children how they might contribute to the war effort, other items pulled out for their review included: American propaganda postcards and commercial catalogs; a color illustration of a traditional Japanese woman in a kimono and a girl in Western dress designed to be fashioned into a paper fan; a book lauding the war work of German women; and a clipping of an advertisement by Italian fashion illustrator and Fascist propagandist Gino Boccasile (1901-1952) encouraging patriotic Italian women to eschew imported silk stockings for domestically-synthesized nylons.

While the curators were touring the museum galleries and discussing plans, Mr. Sharf came down to the library and hand-delivered into our custody a set of approximately one hundred original sketches and automotive design drawings made by Theodore W. Pietsch II (1912-1993). This was the second—though not the last, we have been assured—gift of automotive design drawings by Ted Pietsch that Mr. Sharf has facilitated in the last couple months. And while I was tempted to include a few in this blog, I’ve decided to hold off until next time….

That’s what we in the trade call a “teaser”! So here’s hoping you automobile design enthusiasts tune in to the next installment of Wolf-Lib-Log!

STOP AND GO TRAFFIC IN THE WOLFSONIAN LIBRARY

JEFFRY SCHNAPP AND WOLFSONIAN CURATORS REVIEW LIBRARY MATERIALS FOR SPEED LIMITS EXHIBITION

Jeffrey T. Schnapp, based out of the Stanford Humanities Lab, returned to Miami Beach this last Monday to meet with our curators and to discuss ideas for reworking the exhibition he guest curated at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, entitled: SPEED limits / La Vitesse et ses limites. Commemorating the centenary of the Italian Futurist movement and its obsession with speed and technology, the show examines the important role played by speed in radically and rapidly reordering the modern world not only in the obvious terms of a more rapid means of transportation and communication, but also in its more subtle manifestations in art and culture, urbanization and city planning, and industrialization and design. As implied by the title, the exhibition does not merely celebrate speed; it also consciously calls attention to the limits and problems that the rapid pace of modern life has created for humanity. The show is set to reopen at the Wolfsonian-FIU in September, 2010, and will integrate more of the Wolfsonian's own collection in its redesign.

This is not Jeffrey’s first curatorial collaboration with the Wolfsonian. Another of his exhibitions, Revolutionary Tides, brought together the minds and materials of the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for the Visual Arts (Stanford), The Wolfsonian-Florida International University, the Hoover Institution Archives, and the Stanford Humanities Lab for a show that ran from February 24th, 2006 through July 25th, 2006 here in Miami Beach. A small display of library materials was also organized at that time to complement the exhibit on the gallery floors:

http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Revolutionary%20Tides/Revolutionary%20Tides.htm

This Monday’s meeting included a stop in the library to review some selections from our rare books, periodicals, and ephemera that might be integrated into the themes of the new exhibition. Here is a “Sneak peek” of a few library items that might be included.

GUIDED TOUR AND PRESENTATIONS GIVEN TO FIU AND BARRY STUDENTS

This Friday and Saturday, the Wolfsonian library hosted two scheduled library visits by local university students. The first group came from our own university, Florida International and was made up of students learning VTS or Visual Thinking Strategies; the second group hailed from Barry University and were more directly focused on the topic of propaganda.

On Friday, the entire reading room table was laid out with a wide variety of rare books, periodicals and ephemera aimed at encouraging the group to focus on the imagery and design of certain artifacts and to ask questions of the material as they might do with the literary or intellectual content. The session was designed to be a participatory experience, with the students being asked to parse the objects and to delve ever more deeply into the visual narrative by gathering information from the group about what each individual saw. Finally, after exhausting the group’s collective powers of observation, the class was subjected to a series of questions aimed at provoking them into delving ever more deeply. They were asked, for example, to consider such questions as who made the objects and who was the intended audience? Was there a visual narrative, and might there also have been a “subtext” or subliminal message embedded in the design? They were also challenged to consider the historic, social, and cultural context in which the object was created, distributed, or displayed. They were encouraged to think about the possible implications of the techniques and materials used in creating the artifacts.

Almost as soon as this first group was out the door, the display was dismantled and a new one set up for the Barry University students studying propaganda techniques. A few items on the table were ideally matched to the interests of both groups and so left out a second time. Among this latter group were some periodical covers with photomontages designed by John Heartfield (1891-1968). A committed Communist, Heartfield Anglicized his name from Helmut Herzfeld to disassociate himself from the Nazis seizing power in his native Germany, and used collages of photographs to lampoon and ridicule the forces of Capitalism and Fascism. In an age where fascist dictators told lies through the “objective” medium of staged photography, Heartfield used the “subjective” and creative technique of photomontage to recapture “truth.”

Here for your consideration are a few of Heartfield’s masterful creations. See how well you can master the art of VTS. As an added note as to just how effective and transcendent these images proved to be, the top image inspired a rock group in the early 1990s to recycle and adapt it as the artwork adorning their own record album cover. See if you can come up with the name of the band.