FORMER WOLFSONIAN LIBRARY INTERN RETURNS AS TEACHER

Yehudis Benhamou first came to the Wolfsonian Library as a Master’s candidate at Florida International University, earning academic credit with an internship in our library. She returned yesterday morning leading a class of Hillel Community High School students studying the Second World War and the Holocaust. This was the last of a large number of school visits this month by teachers and students studying the subject. The Wolfsonian’s unparalleled collection of propaganda from this period has made us a popular field trip site for teachers.

The students at Hillel, like the Shenandoah Middle School students who visited earlier in the month, had the privilege of seeing a wealth of primary source materials laid out on the main reading room table. In trying to come to terms with the Holocaust, the Hillel students received a first-hand glimpse of the propaganda Hitler and the Nazis created to sow hatred and distrust of Jews in Germany and later in the territories occupied by the Germans during the Second World War.

In addition to fostering a German “master race” myth with images of beautiful and handsome Aryan-types, National Socialist propagandists also worked to create a counter-image aimed at uniting the country against a common enemy: the Jew. Ironically, before the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, one might have thought Germany the least likely European country to initiate an all-out war against the Jews. In the pre-Third Reich era, Jews had been emancipated, and the Jewish population had largely assimilated into German society, with high rates of Jewish-German intermarriage. Following Hitler’s rise to power, however, the National Socialist dictatorship began to foster and create stereotypes and unflattering images of Jews and other “degenerate” races to promote fear, distrust, and hatred of the supposed “enemies” of the Third Reich.

The Nazi campaign for “cleansing” the fatherland of foreign and “degenerate” cultural influences that began with the banning and burning of books and the publication of anti-Semitic propaganda, soon escalated into government-sanctioned harassment of Jews, the passage of racist legislation prohibiting intermarriage, the forced segregation of Jews into ghettos, and ultimately, deportation to so-called “work camps” during the Second World War.

The Wolfsonian has just this month received another donation to the collection of a pamphlet with a photomontage illustration by John Heartfield. Born in Berlin in 1891, Helmut Herzfeld became an ardent Communist, Anglicized his name to disassociate himself from the Nazis, and moved to neighboring Czechoslovakia following Hitler’s rise to power where he continued to satirize Fascism and Nazism. Rightly fearing a Nazi take-over, in 1938 he fled to England, ultimately returning to (East) Berlin after the war. Even as Heartfield used his artwork to counter Nazism and racial hatred in the 1930s, the Wolfsonian’s rich collection of political propaganda from this period will enable us to continue to educate present and future generations of students and to ensure that the world will not forget.

GIFT OF FRANCIS XAVIER LUCA &

CLARA HELENA PALACIO-DE LUCA

SPACED-OUT…

DESIGNS FOR THE FUTURE UNABLE TO FIT IN OUR UNREAL(IZED) ARCHITECTURE EXHIBIT

Often in the course of sifting through materials for inclusion in our library exhibits, we come across an item or two perfectly in fitting with our theme, but which, nonetheless, have to be left out given the constraints of limited space in our display cases. Such was the case in setting up our most recent exhibit, Unreal(ized) Architecture. The Wolfsonian-FIU library has some impressive holdings of the work of numerous architects from the early to mid-twentieth century whose projects, even though they were never actually constructed, had an enormous impact on future designers and architects.

The library holds a number of rare works showcasing the designs of Antonio Sant'Elia (Italian, 1888-1916). Sant’Elia became a disciple and leading light in the Futurist movement in pre-World War One Italy. Drawing inspiration from Viennese architects such as Adolf Loos and Otto Wagner and the skyscrapers just beginning to appear in American cities, Sant’Elia envisioned a futuristic urban environment in a series of drawings rendered between 1912 and 1914. His Città Nuova designs imagined an industrial city where huge skyscraper buildings with setbacks and terraces were connected by bridges and walkways. When the First World War broke out, Sant'Elia enlisted in the Italian army and died fighting the Austrians sometime during the Battles of the Isonzo in 1915. As a result of his premature death, most of his futuristic architectural designs remained unrealized, but many were widely published during the second Futurist wave of the interwar period and exercised considerable influence on generations of urban planners and architects.

The library also holds important examples of the Constructivist artwork and architectural ideas of famed Russian designer, El Lissitzky (Russian, 1890-1941). In the years between 1923 and 1925, Lissitzky came up with designs for a series of identical structures which he proposed be constructed at the intersections of a boulevard ringing central Moscow and the Kremlin. To save precious ground space, these enormous L-shaped three-story buildings were to be raised 50 meters off the ground by three pylons to be connected to tram stations and an underground subway. Lissitzky’s horizontal skyscrapers, (referred to as Wolkenbügel, or “Iron clouds” in the literature of the time), were never built, but the designs were printed in ASNOVA, the influential journal for the Association of New Architects in the Soviet Union, and in several important German publications and periodicals.

Other Constructivist-minded architects expressed their revolutionary ideas in other publications, including Arkhitektura: raboty Arkhitekturnog o fakul’teta Vkhutemasa, 1920-1927, for which Lissitzky supplied the dust jacket cover artwork. The Vkhutemas architectural school in Moscow encouraged its students to experiment with and embrace the principles of Constructivism in projects designed to completely rethink the principles of construction. Such radical ideas, however, soon earned the scorn and derision of Joseph Stalin, and projects designed and built after his rise to power took a decidedly more conservative (neo-Classical) and Socialist Realist bent.

We also left some important American industrial designers and urban planners out of the exhibition for want of space. The library holds a number of books and ephemeral items highlighting the ideas of Norman Bel Geddes (American, 1893-1958), including his Magic Motorways (1940). Even before that publication went into print, however, Americans were introduced to his ideas at the popular Futurama exhibit he designed for General Motors for the 1939-1940 New York World’s Fair. Bel Geddes’ created a gigantic indoor panorama of a city of the future, which visitors to the pavilion could look down upon while riding along in chairs on a conveyor belt. Although his vision of a futuristic metropolis failed to materialize exactly along the lines that he envisioned, his designs for superhighways, cloverleaf entrance and exit ramps, and many other features did have a profound influence on the design of American highways linking cities to the suburbs.

AFTER HOURS, LAST CALL: VIP TOUR OF THE LIBRARY, TALK AND BOOK SIGNING

After the museum closed to the general public this past Thursday evening, a few VIPs were brought up to the rare books and special collections library for a private tour and presentation of materials. The guests of honor included noted international, New York Theatre, and Broadway choreographer, director, and producer Jonathan Stuart Cerullo and Joy Abbott. Mr. Cerullo has been involved in such productions as “Say Goodnight, Gracie,” “Band in Berlin,” “RSVP Broadway,” “Anna Kerenina,” “Ray Qualey,” “Sandstorm,” “Under Fire,” “Those Wonderful Babes & Bill,” and countless others. Joy was the long-time companion, wife, and widow of George Abbott (1887-1995), the producer, director, and playwright whose long and impressive career earned him the moniker “Mr. Broadway.” Other guests included Joy’s friend, Carol Towle; Ann Scully of the Mad Cat Theatre Company; Suzi Cohen; Brian Schriner, Interim Dean of the College of Architecture and the Arts at FIU; Michael Yawney, Assistant Professor in FIU’s Theatre Department; Wolfsonian Museum Director, Cathy Leff; Deputy Director for Development & Marketing, David Skipp; and Ian Rand, who before assuming the duties of Assistant Director of Marketing, Member Relations, & New Media at the Wolfsonian, served as director of publicity for Livent Inc., in Toronto and as press agent for several Broadway productions for the Fred Nathan Company in New York.

Although The Wolfsonian is probably more renowned for other collection strengths, the library does hold a substantial number of rare and important works dealing with dance, theatre, musicals and song, and the performing arts in general. Our guests were treated to a display of rare materials beginning with some nineteenth century Swedish dance cards, commonly used in the days when socially-conscious parents dictated with whom their debutant daughters might dance with at a ball.

MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR. COLLECTION

The visitors appeared to be particularly taken with an extremely rare Russian oversized portfolio of plates that provided instructions in how to build library/theatre/community centers in the early post-revolutionary period. Plate illustrated ideas for setting up stages, curtains, and chairs, patterns for paper puppets and costumes, etc. The library also holds a number of a series of reviews of the Russian Ballet in 1919 by C. W. Beaumont decorated with color pochoir (stencil work) illustrations by Ethelbert White.

MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR. COLLECTION

The library also holds a few copies of several important performing arts periodicals, such as The Dance, Theatre Magazine, and La Revue des Follies Bergère.

MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR. COLLECTION

VICKI GOLD LEVI COLLECTION

Mr. Cerullo, who apparently has a large collection of theatrical playbills and programs, appeared to be especially excited at seeing our own relatively small collection of like materials from the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. Largely through the generosity of Vicki Gold Levi, we have been able to acquire through donation a number of rare Cuban sheet music covers, Times Square memorabilia, and Broadway programs, and we hope to be able to continue to build this important area of our collection.

MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR. COLLECTION

VICKI GOLD LEVI COLLECTION

On an different but related theme, last night The Wolfsonian held a talk by Daniel Okrent, author of the recently published book Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. The library holds a sheet music cover from the prohibition era, as well as a number of Cuban tourist trade ephemera reminding Americans that things were not so dry in the nightclubs of Havana.

GIFT OF DAVID ALMEIDA & GINA WOUTERS ; VICKI GOLD LEVI COLLECTION

VISITS BY SHENANDOAH MIDDLE SCHOOL STUDENTS

Throughout the month of May, more than two hundred Shenandoah Middle School students studying the Second World War and the Holocaust have come to the Wolfsonian library to see a presentation of primary source materials from the collection. Before coming to the Wolfsonian, the students participating in the museum education program had the chance to hear a talk by a Holocaust survivor and to read Anne Frank’s famous Diary of a Young Girl, chronicling her life in Amsterdam hiding during the Nazi occupation.

At the museum, each visiting class was split up into two groups of twenty to thirty students. Wolfsonian Manager of Youth & School Programs Coordinator, Claudia Caro Sullivan took half of them on a guided tour of the museum galleries, and some of them also participated in an art project involving the creation of a book of self-portraits. The other group was ushered up to the library for a talk about the rise of Adolf Hitler to power in Germany in 1933, and a discussion of the history of racial discrimination in the United States and Germany. The students learned that although the United States was still struggling with segregation, horrific lynchings and KKK terror, Jim Crow laws, and other discriminatory practices, some progress towards civil rights began to be made during the Roosevelt Administration. Ironically, at the same time, Germany’s rather tolerant record as regards Jewish emancipation and assimilation and Jewish-German mixed marriages made an immediate about face as the Nazi regime promoted anti-Semitism and goose-stepped the nation down the path of a racist regime. After the discussions, the students in my group joined Claudia, and those in her group came up to the library.

One of the questions we tried to address during the back-to-back discussions in the library was how Hitler and the National Socialists were able to seize power, exercise dictatorial control, and to perpetrate such a monstrous program as the liquidation of six million Jews and another six million Gypsies, Russians, homosexuals, disabled persons, and a host of political dissidents. The materials laid out on the table suggested that Hitler and his gang recognized the importance of propaganda, for even a dictator needed to maintain at least the appearance of popular support.

Garnering the support of talented graphic artists, photographers, and filmmakers Hitler and his Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) staged rallies and parades and a paper campaign designed to forge a positive image for himself and his party that belied the hideous program he had in store. Promising work in a time of global depression, a revival of German fortunes after the humiliations of defeat in the catastrophic First World War, Hitler appealed to German patriotism and provided them with a scapegoat aimed at uniting the nation against a common enemy. During the war, the Nazis forced Jews to wear badges to single them out and employed heavy doses of anti-Semitic propaganda to dissuade persons in the occupied territories from sheltering the “enemies” of the Third Reich (like Anne Frank and her family) and to encourage them to turn them in to the Gestapo for deportation to “work camps.”

The bachelor führer was also savvy enough to recognize the importance of posing with youngsters. He also provided propaganda books for the schools and established the Hitler Jugend as a means of brainwashing an entire generation of impressionable youths.

The visiting middle school students, however, were not so easily manipulated by the propaganda. Many perceptively noted the discrepancies between Hitler’s racist rhetoric and reality. As one French caricature from the period made clear, (and as Charlie Chaplin had hilariously pointed out in his brilliant and pointed satire, The Great Dictator), the browned-eyed, brunette leader of the blonde race did not match the Aryan ideals he promoted.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJOuoyoMhj8

It became obvious from our discussions that it was not possible to determine a person’s race by appearances, and that the horrible stereotypes of Jews the Nazis created as a prelude to the Holocaust were caricatures as absurd as the idea of an Aryan “master race.” If it were so easy to identify Jews, some concluded, why had it have been necessary for the Nazis to force persons of Jewish ancestry to wear badges identifying themselves as such?

NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH THE WORLD EROTIC ART MUSEUM !

Peddling past the Miami Beach Convention Center this morning en route to the Wolfsonian Museum, I noticed the banners by the entrance marketing the annual EXXXotica Expo, a three-day trade adult event billed as a "Celebration of Sexy." Hosting an adult trade show might seem out of place in other city convention centers, but it seemed perfectly in keeping with South Beach’s reputation for sun, skin, and hedonistic partying. Among the sponsors listed on the banner is WEAM, the World Erotic Art Museum, located on east side of Washington Avenue just a couple of blocks north of the Wolfsonian. The very different collections of the Wolfsonian and WEAM are not such as to invite confusion—although in the course of looking up Miami Beach museums on the internet, my brother-in-law from Colombia did assume that I worked for the latter museum. When he and his family visited last year, their guided tour through the Wolfsonian certainly altered their expectations of what they might see, but did not appear to be a let-down or disappointment.

Upon arriving at the museum this morning, I began to think about what objects in our collection might appeal to the typical EXXXotica expo attendee. The erotic tendency in art is, of course, as old as art itself if one considers the earliest cave drawings and sculpture. Even in a collection like the Wolfsonian which is weighted towards the propaganda and persuasive arts, there are objects and materials with an erotic edge. Certainly, artists like Eric Gill (British, 1882-1940) did not shy away from depicting the nude in his artwork, and certainly saw nothing incompatible in celebrating religiosity and the procreative urge of the world. http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Eric%20Gill/Eric%20Gill.htm

Our current library exhibit looks at the influence of body-builder and publisher Bernarr Macfadden and the Physical Culture Movement he championed. Macfadden used his publishing empire to attack Victorian prudery and to promote physically-healthier citizens and attitudes towards the human body. Ironically, while publications such as Sunshine and health magazine were originally attacked as pornographic, the nudist lifestyle they advocated in the 1930s was naturalistic rather than hedonistic, and marketed as family-friendly. http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Physical%20culture/PC.htm

Another area of the collection actually celebrates the erotic are some of the deluxe edition books produced in France in the interwar period. Often focusing on the decadence of the aristocratic class of the Ancien Régime and employing the pochoir (stencilwork) technique, these luxuriously illustrated books were marketed to a wealthy clientele with a penchant for erotica. The Wolfsonian has a number of such works in its collection, but my personal favorite is a parody of that erotic tradition. Elphie et son éléphant is a tongue-in-cheek satire of the popular Babar the Elephant character that appeared in children’s books promoting French nationalism and pride in her colonies. This playful parody for adults, however, chronicles the amorous adventures of an adulterous elephant. A few of these books and portfolio plates appeared in a past library display, Fashion and Passion: Deluxe Pochoir Editions.

http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Pochoir/Pochoir.htm

In the same period, European regimes also resorted to creating sexualized imagery of “native” women in much of the propaganda produced to drum up interest in their colonies. Posters, postcards, and other ephemera aimed at recruiting young men into colonial armies or promoting colonial tourism would invariably depict the women of those regions as enticingly exotic beauties.

Unquestionably, the most disturbing examples of sexual imagery in our collection are the propaganda materials created with the aim of sowing the seeds of hatred against real or perceived “enemies of the state.” During the First World War, the protagonists often resorted to employing subtle and obvious rape imagery to demonstrate the uttery depravity of the enemy. The “Huns” were frequently depicted as brute beasts intent on rape and their Turkish allies as degenerate Sultans smoking opium from hookahs and hanging out in harems.

In the wake of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany, the Nazis created many disturbing children’s books and booklets for adult depicting Jewish men leering at Aryan women and children with lecherous and perverse intent. During wartime, propaganda produced for the troops used “rape” imagery to inspire hatred for the enemy, while leaflets dropped behind enemy lines used sexualized imagery to sap the morale of lonely soldiers at the front or promote discord and distrust in the ranks of allied armies.

OUT WITH THE OLD, IN WITH THE NEW…

LAST CHANCE TO SEE BERNARR MACFADDEN AND THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL CULTURE MOVEMENT LIBRARY DISPLAY BEFORE IT IS REPLACED WITH UNREAL(IZED) ARCHITECTURE EXHIBIT

Earlier this week, I completed a draft for the descriptive and interpretative label text for a new library display to be installed in the third floor foyer next week. That means that this weekend will be the last opportunity that museum patrons will have to take a look at body-builder, publishing magnate, and champion of the Physical Culture movement in America, Bernarr Macfadden. Virtually all of the materials on display were donated to the museum library by Robert J. Young, an ardent disciple of Macfadden and the crusade for better living through a regimen of exercise, abstention from tobacco and alcohol, and a healthy diet. Having assembled a large personal library on the subject, Mr. Young donated the materials to the museum to ensure that they would not be lost to future generations of students and scholars.

As the American Institute of Architects will be holding their convention in Miami this June, we thought that our new display ought to show off some of the architectural gems in the library collection. During a brainstorming session, our rare books cataloguer came up with a brilliant suggestion for a unifying theme for the exhibit. Dr. Harsanyi proposed that we focus on some of the illustrious architects and theorists represented in our collection whose designs for edifices and city plans had not been realized at the time. Visitors coming to the museum this summer will be treated to some rare designs by Leopold Bauer, Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott, and Charles Rennie Macintosh and his wife Margaret Macdonald for an early twentieth-century competition to build a House for an Art-lover. Portfolio plates of a Frank Lloyd Wright multiplex housing development and plans for a utopian industrial city by Tony Garnier will also be on display.

As anyone who knows anything about the Wolfsonian might expect, our exhibit on architecture will also touch on the propagandistic element inherent in such project proposals for designs for monuments, buildings, and cityscapes to be built for the totalitarian regimes in the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany. Come in next week and experience the imaginary architectural landscapes envisioned by architects such as Vladimir Tatlin, Boris Mihailovich Iofan Mario Palanti, and Hermann Geisler. As a teaser, here are some other works by these architects that give you a sense of what to expect.