WOLFSONIAN-FIU LIBRARY

FORMER WOLFSONIAN LIBRARY INTERN RETURNS AS TEACHER

2010-05-29T13:39:00.016-04:00

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…

2010-05-27T13:34:00.010-04:00

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

2010-05-22T12:38:00.028-04:00

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

2010-05-21T14:00:00.016-04:00

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 !

2010-05-15T11:50:00.020-04:00

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…

2010-05-14T11:34:00.014-04:00

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.

VIVE LA FRANCE! LONG LIVE FRANCE!

2010-05-08T13:34:00.029-04:00

This morning we had an early morning visit to the library by the French Ambassador to the United States Pierre Vimont, the French Foreign Trade Minister Anne-Marie Idrac, the Consul General of France at Miami Gaël de Maisonneuve, and others here in Miami to attend an important economic conference. In preparation for their visit, I had pulled a representative sampling of French materials in the library collection.

As Ms. Idrac had served as the President of RATP and SNCF (the public transportation departments for Paris and France) and others in attendance were involved in high speed train projects, I had pulled some materials related to railway service in France. These included a mid-nineteenth century French portfolio of color chromolithographic plates illustrating the interior decoration and design plans for the emperor’s royal train car, a small booklet about the railway line between Paris and Orléans published in 1908, a spiral-bound book with an aluminum-foil cover about the use of new alloys and materials in building modern trains, and an American children’s book with a beautiful color page spread of a speeding streamlined train from the 1930s.

There was also a sampling of various French world’s fair materials on the table, including several postcards from the Exposition international de l’Est de la France and portfolios from the Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (1925: Paris, France).

The architectural connection between the styles of the pavilions built for that latter fair and the Art Deco hotels here in Miami Beach did not go unnoticed. There were also a few rare Art Deco illustrated books and bindings for the visitors to peruse.

As always, some of our incredible propaganda materials were also laid out for their consideration. The visitors had the chance to look over a rare children’s book designed to teach young French children the alphabet even as they learned about their fathers’ participation in the Great War, 1914-1918.

We also had some propaganda pieces from the Second World War, some lampooning the German occupiers; others promoting allegiance to the collaborationist Vichy government.

One could not help but feel the cruel irony of reading such laudable sentiments as “One for all, and all for one” and “Long live France” in a propagandistic alphabet book produced by the Vichy regime. That same alphabet book also carried such insidious messages for children on other pages encouraging them to “punish the traitors”!

Of course, no tour of our French materials would have been complete without a review of some of the stunning pochoir portfolios in our collection. The pochoir (or “stencil work”) technique was popularized by French publishers in the “roaring twenties” and was used in deluxe edition illustrated books and in oversized portfolios promoting patterns for haute couture fashion, textiles, wallpaper, and designs to be applied to porcelains. The pochoir process required the creation of individual stencils for each color image in an illustration and the painstaking hand-application of brilliant gouache paints one after another. While the pochoir technique produced brilliant color images unmatched by any other contemporary industrial printing process, because it was so labor-intensive and expensive it quickly fell from fashion following the Stock Market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression.

GIFT OF RICHARD P. SCHICK

TAKE FIVE: PART FIVE OF FIVE!

2010-05-06T10:22:00.066-04:00

REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRIT OF GIVING AND THE LAST FIVE YEARS OF LIBRARY

DONATIONS

After taking notice of some of the many generous donations of large collections and “big ticket” items, I thought in this final installment that I would acknowledge some of the smaller, individual gifts to the library collection made by Wolfsonian staff and the Florida International University academic community. Although there had always been a natural synergy between FIU faculty and students and our research center, the relationship really blossomed following the incorporation of the museum into the state university system in July 1997. As more FIU administrators, professors, and students toured the galleries, scheduled research appointments, and organized class visits to the museum and became more familiar with our general holdings and specific strengths, some of our FIU colleagues began to send a few items our way. Several FIU professors have applied to and received residential fellowship grants and many others have scheduled visits to our rare books and special collections library. Some of those visits have not only helped us further document the artifacts in our collection, but have ultimately resulted in the publication of books and scholarly articles that spread the word about our holdings to the wider community of scholars. It is especially gratifying to have professors using our collection and then donating a copy of their published works to our reference holdings.

GIFT OF LARA KRIEGEL ; GIFT OF JOHN STUART

Several other members of the FIU family also donated rare materials from their personal collections to the Wofsonian. David Rifkind, who has researched, lectured, and written extensively about Italian rationalist and colonial architecture in the Fascist era, recently donated a couple of original Italian State Tourist Department tickets to our library’s ephemera collection. Steve Sauls (a political and public affairs advisor to FIU’s long-serving president, Modesto Maidique) also recently gifted a few items to our library collection

GIFT OF DAVID RIFKIND ; GIFT OF STEVE SAULS

the collection have even come from FIU students. Although most students are not in the position to make gifts to a museum of high monetary value, that has not stopped a couple of students from finding, buying, and then donating rare ephemeral items of historical value or reference materials to the library collection. After investigating some of the World’s Fair materials in our collection, FIU student Brandon Viani found a historically-significant artifact from the Century of Progress Exposition (Chicago: 1933-34) and donated it to the library. Similarly, Natasha Marie Solis was engaged in research about the Arts & Crafts artist Violet Oakley, and afterwards donated a reference work about the artist that was not in our reference holdings.

GIFT OF BRANDON VIANI

Most persons journeying down the career path of the museum professional are not primarily motivated by monetary compensation or the prospect of fame and glory. More often than not, persons choosing to devote their lives to museum work are committed to the preservation and care of the world’s historical and artistic heritage, and to making that patrimony available to the public. It is therefore a testament to the extraordinary level of commitment to the institution, that many of the persons working at the Wolfsonian have not only devoted time and energy to keeping the museum operating, but that many have also gone the “extra mile” by donating items to the collection.

As so many staffers have donated reference books to help us document the rare items in our collection, I will focus only on the gifts of rare items. As noted in an earlier blog, (Oct. 30, 2009), Silvia Barisioni, the curator at our sister institution, the Wolfsoniana in Genoa, Italy donated a rare World War I period postcard to the collection. After sifting through family memorabilia from the World War Two era, our own Exhibition Designer Richard Miltner found and gifted a number of items to the library collection.

GIFT OF THE MILTNER FAMILY

In addition to donating a number of reference works to the library, Special Projects Coordinator, Regina Bailey and her husband Michael Spring also gifted several rare International Studio periodicals over the course of the last couple of years.

GIFT OF REGINA BAILEY AND MICHAEL SPRING

Our accountant, Lawrence Wiggins, an avid vintage postcard enthusiast, rummaged through his own collection and gifted a number of duplicates illustrating the Art Deco hotels and buildings on Miami Beach.

GIFT OF H. LAWRENCE WIGGINS III

Digital Library Specialist David Almeida and his wife Gina Wouters donated a large collection of vintage sheet music with extraordinary graphic design cover they had purchased at an estate sale.

GIFT OF DAVID ALMEIDA AND GINA WOUTERS

While organizing an exhibition on automobile design, curatorial assistant Lisa Li noticed that we lacked any promotional materials on the Model-T and decided to find an appropriate item and to donate it with her husband Ricardo Celorio.

GIFT OF LISA LI AND RICARDO CELORIO

After more than twenty years of working at the Wolfsonian, I too have picked up the collecting bug, and have on occasion donated a number of rare items to the collection to help fill in gaps in our otherwise strong holdings of children’s propaganda books; American WWI and WWII postcards; New Deal ephemera; and colonial propaganda.

GIFT OF FRANCIS XAVIER LUCA AND CLARA HELENA PALACIO-DE LUCA

Our former coordinator of Special Arts Projects, Angelika Jung, who has since moved back to her native Austria sent us a family heirloom with historical significance that made it a perfect fit for our library’s research collection. And while visiting in-laws in Germany, our former Associate Librarian, Nicholas Blaga discovered, purchased, and donated to the collection a couple of rare periodicals with beautiful covers by important artists documenting the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin.

GIFT OF ANGELIKA JUNG ; GIFT OF NICHOLAS BLAGA

Our former Membership Coordinator, Naomi Honig and her husband Burton also donated a 1940s era book of cartoons and caricatures. even as our former Art Director, Anthony DiVivo donated a rare children’s book from the 1930s.

GIFT OF NAOMI AND BURTON HONIG

In the course of weeding through his own library, our former Art Director, Anthony DiVivo discovered and donated a rare children’s book from the 1930s to the library collection.

GIFT OF ANTHONY DIVIVO

While serving as Associate Director for Development, Jeffrey G. Fischer donated a number of vintage World War II postcards and other ephemera to the library collection.

GIFT OF JEFFREY G. FISCHER AND MICHAEL SMITH

Leslie Sternlieb, who stepped in as publications word smith and editor of the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Art, also donated a number of rare books and programs documenting the crowning of Great Britain’s heads of state in the 1930s.

GIFT OF LESLIE STERNLIEB

The spirit of public generosity has not been limited to the donation of rare and reference books, periodicals, and ephemera, however. More than a half-dozen persons have generously donated their time helping the librarians to process, catalog, and conserve the new acquisitions streaming into the museum. Noting that the old self-healing mats in our conservation lab were beginning to decay and fray, Cheryl Price, an FIU student already donating her time creating protective enclosures for some of the rare and fragile works in the collection, donated money as well to fund the purchase of new conservation materials and supplies. Laurence Miller, whose incredible collection I referred to earlier in the blog, was not satisfied solely with gifting his cruise line materials; he has since been coming in three days a week to help us organize, accession, catalog, re-house, and digitize that collection. Another Wolfsonian staffer in the Business department, Armando Suarez has sacrificed his Saturday afternoons to come in and work as a volunteer cataloguer. And a number of young college students and graduates from FIU and the University of Miami, including Miriam Kashem and Al Pena, have also pledged their time this summer to unpaid internships in the library.

VOLUNTEER LIBRARY INTERNS ARMANDO SUAREZ, MIRIAM KASHEM, AND AL PENA

In concluding this series of reflections on the spirit of giving, I thought I would return full-circle to the question of motivation. Perhaps, as the expression goes, giving is its own reward. But then again, maybe the people who give to museums do not do so solely out of a sense of altruism, or because they have a heightened philanthropic spirit. Perhaps they give because they expect to get something of value in return for their donation. For some collectors, the dividend that they might reap beyond a break on their taxes is the knowledge that they have found a permanent home where cherished items will be cared for and preserved for posterity. For others, the reward may be the knowledge that that gift that they so value will now be placed in an institution where others can also share and appreciate its artistic, cultural, or historic significance. For those individuals who volunteer and freely donate their valuable time and energy, perhaps that labor is compensated for with practical work experience that will reap dividends when applying for schooling or careers in the profession. Or perhaps they take pleasure in the opportunity to work with and around a fascinating array of objects that tell us so much about the art, design, history, and culture of another epoch. Who wouldn’t want to spend their free time poring over and contemplating such cool stuff!

TAKE FIVE: PART FOUR OF FIVE!

2010-05-01T09:51:00.088-04:00

REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRIT OF GIVING AND THE LAST FIVE YEARS OF LIBRARY DONATIONS

Another important source of gifts to the Wolfsonian-FIU library have been those institutions or persons who, (through knowing the reputation of, or learning more about us during an actual visit to the museum), have offered us items they believed would be a good fit for our collection. Over the years, a number of libraries and librarians have directed collectors, duplicate copies, or rare items not appropriate for their own collections for consideration by the Wolfsonian. The director at the Bienes Museum of the Modern Book: The Dianne and Michael Bienes Special Collections and Rare Book Library, James Findlay was once the chief librarian here at the Wolfsonian and forwarded several runs of rare periodicals to us that match our own but not his new institution’s collecting interests.

GIFT OF THE BIENES MUSEUM OF THE MODERN BOOK

Samuel J. Boldrick, who recently retired after nearly two score years with the Miami-Dade Public Library System (where he managed the main library’s Florida Collection), has ever kept our collecting interests in mind. Over the years he has donated a number of rare books and art objects from his personal collection to the Wolfsonian-FIU.

GIFT OF SAMUEL J. BOLDRICK

As the Wolfsonian has transitioned in the last fifteen years from a private foundation to a public institution with an important university affiliation, so too has our reputation for excellence among the community of scholars here and around the globe. As a result, in the last few years the Wolfsonian-FIU library has also been contacted by librarians and museum directors offering items which were either duplicated or inappropriate for their own institutional holdings, but which they knew might enrich our own collection. Many gaps in our own holdings have been filled thanks largely to the facilitation of our rare books librarian Dr. Nicolae Harsanyi, and to the generosity of such institutions as:

THE JOSEPH REGENSTEIN LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

THE ALUMNI MEMORIAL LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON

THE NEW YORK SCHOOL OF INTERIOR DESIGN

THE HERMAN B WELLS LIBRARY, INDIANA UNIVERSITY

THE WATSON LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS ; THE CARRIER LIBRARY, JAMES MADISON UNIVERSITY

THE HOLY TRINITY ORTHODOX SEMINARY LIBRARY

THE GREEN LIBRARY, STANFORD UNIVERSITY ; THE ARTS AND SCIENCES LIBRARY, UNIVERSITY OF BUFFALO

THE ADAM CARDINAL MAIDA LIBRARY ; INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES ESTÉTICAS, COYOACÁN, MEXICO

In addition to those institutions whose caretakers knew enough about the Wolfsonian to selectively direct appropriate rare books, artist monographs, and archives our way, the library has also received offers of gifts from visiting fellows, researchers, and the general public. Often times, a tour through our galleries or an appointment in our rare books library served to provoke casual visitors and serious scholars alike to rummage through long-ignored boxes in their attics and cellars, and to send us a formal gift offer through the mail of some items they believed merited our attention. After a formal review process by the museum’s Collections Review Committee, many such items have been accessioned into our museum to be preserved and made accessible to many future generations of museum visitors and scholars.

While it would be impossible to acknowledge each and every individual who donated some reference book or artifact to the library in this blog, I did want to single out a few individuals, such as: Ruth Kruger, who was inspired by a Miami Herald article about Laurence Miller’s gift of his cruise line industry collection to donate a few of her own rare ocean travel materials; Mark Golebiowski, who was so enthralled by our Second World War collections as to ferret out and donate some rare items documenting occupied Poland; Michael Rosenfeld, who has repeatedly contacted us and sent a number of rare postcards and other ephemera to us on approval; Arno Erban, who following a presentation by myself and a former Wolfsonian fellow at the American Czech-Slovak Cultural Club, donated a rare biographical view book on the first Czech president, T.G. Masaryk; Tim, Bettina and Joe Gleason, who collectively gifted a number of steamship line and World’s Fair artifacts; and Charles L. Marshall, Jr., a Naples resident who visited the museum and afterwards contacted us and donated several World’s Fair ephemera, more than three score vintage sheet music covers in memory of pianist Anna Olson, and several programs from the Chicago Railroad Fair, jointly donated with Richard L. Tooke.

GIFT OF RUTH KRUGER

GIFT OF MARK GOLEBIOWSKI

GIFT OF MICHAEL ROSENFELD

GIFT OF ARNO ERBAN

GIFT OF TIM, BETTINA, AND JOE GLEASON

GIFT OF CHARLES L. MARSHALL, JR, IN MEMORY OF ANNA OLSON, PIANIST

GIFT OF CHARLES L. MARSHALL, JR. AND RICHARD L. TOOKE

TAKE FIVE: PART THREE

2010-04-28T11:43:00.037-04:00

REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRIT OF GIVING AND THE LAST FIVE YEARS OF LIBRARY DONATIONS

In addition to the rare books, periodicals, and other ephemeral materials donated by persons interested in finding permanent homes for their cherished collections, the Wolfsonian-FIU library has also received many works originally collected by design researchers and enthusiasts with a specific project or agenda in mind. Sometimes these collections grew slowly over time as an individual began collecting a few items here and there related to a lifelong obsession or passion; other times, items were selected deliberately and relatively quickly as authors and researchers prepared publications or exhibitions.

Over the last few years, the Wolfsonian-FIU library has had the privilege of collaborating with a number of educators, enthusiasts, and authors interested in design aesthetics. Vicki Gold Levi, for example, has assembled a large collection of materials, ranging in topic from the promotion of Atlantic City as a resort town; the U.S.-Cuba tourist trade in the pre-Castro era; Times Square and Broadway productions in New York City; and U.S. “Victory” propaganda from the Second World War. Following the publication with Steve Heller of Cuba Style: Graphics from the Golden Age of Design (2002), Vicki gifted several hundred rare periodicals, advertisements, and other ephemeral items to our library. She has since worked with Mr. Heller on another publication, Times Square Style (2004) and again gifted some of the original items acquired in the course of researching that book to the Wolfsonian library for which we are deeply grateful.

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT OF VICKI GOLD LEVI

Steve Heller not only consulted and used a substantial number of Wolfsonian objects and artifacts in writing his Iron Fists: Branding the Twentieth Century Totalitarian State; he also assembled an impressive collection of primary resource materials on his own. Following the publication of his impressive tome, he generously donated hundreds of Italian Fascist, German National Socialist, and Russian and Chinese Communist visual propaganda to the museum. Although the Wolfsonian is renowned for its collection of political propaganda from this period, there was virtually no duplication in the donation, and the gift has done much to add to our strength and depth on the subject.

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT OF STEVEN HELLER

William H. Helfand has been interested in and writing about pharmacy-related topics for many years. He has also spent much of his life collecting pharmaceutical and medicine-related propaganda. In 2002 organized and exhibition at the prestigious Grolier Club in New York City and concurrently published an illustrated history of medical quackery entitled Quack, Quack, Quack: The Sellers of Nostrums in Prints, Posters, Ephemera & Books. Thanks to a donation by Robert J. Young (mentioned in an earlier blog), the Wolfsonian Library was also beginning to build an important collection of popular health, hygiene, and physical fitness materials, even as Florida International University began to establish its own College of Medicine. Contacts between our founder and curator and Mr. Helfand recently resulted in his gifting more than a thousand pharmaceutical, medical, and propagandistic ephemera to the Wolfsonian-FIU library.

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT OF WILLIAM H. HELFAND

Local Miami artist and long-time Wolfsonian supporter, Michelle Oka Doner also pulled together an impressive collection of Miami Beach memorabilia in the course of working with Micky Wolfson to create an artistic memoir, Miami Beach: Blueprint of an Eden: Lives Seen through the Prism of Family and Place. Her beautifully crafted book (which uses natural materials in each limited edition binding) documents the development of Miami Beach as a tourist destination from the 1930s through the 1960s. As both the book and the archive of photographs, blueprints, clippings, and correspondence she later donated to the library demonstrates, Michelle and Micky’s fathers ably served as Miami Beach mayors and were “movers and shakers” who helped transform and shape the image, history, and culture of the city.

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT OF MICHELLE OKA DONER

Frederic A. Sharf, (who recently donated more than fifty rare view books documenting the Spanish American war, the Russo-Japanese war and Sino-Japanese conflicts), not only loaned and gifted some extraordinary automotive design drawings for an exhibition our curators were organizing; he also introduced us to Theodore W. Pietsch III. Theodore’s father was a talented automobile design artist and had left his son a large collection of sketchbooks and design drawings, many of which were reproduced in Theodore W. Pietsch II (1912-1993) and the Development of Automobile Design in the Golden Age. In the wake of the publication and an exhibition held at the Wolfsonian, Frederic Sharf facilitated the donation of thirty sketchbooks and a hundred or so drawings by Ted Pietsch by his son, establishing the Wolfsonian as an important repository of automotive design history. The librarians and digital library specialist are feverishly working to catalog and link digital images of these original works to our OPAC (Online Public Access Catalog). http://207.67.203.78/W10054

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT OF THEODORE W. PIETSCH III, FACILITATED BY FREDERIC A. SHARF

TO BE CONTINUED…

TAKE FIVE -- PART TWO OF FIVE!

2010-04-24T17:02:00.062-04:00

REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRIT OF GIVING AND THE LAST FIVE YEARS OF LIBRARY DONATIONS

WANTED: INCREDIBLE COLLECTION ASSEMBLED WITH LOVE AND CARE SEEKS COMMITTED, LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIP WITH A VIBRANT, SOCIALLY-EXTRAVERTED, RESPONSIBLE REPOSITORY. MUST BE WELL-ENDOWED, STABLE, AND WILLING TO OFFER PERMANENCY AND A BRIGHT FUTURE

Following Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.’s donation of the museum to Florida International University in 1997, other members of the Wolfson family have stepped up to the plate to help ensure that the institution would have the funding to make targeted acquisitions of additional objects and artifacts appropriate to the museum and library’s collecting mission. Just months ago, for example, several rare and important pieces were added to the library thanks to the generosity of the Wolfsonian-FIU’s Collectors’ Council Fund, with contributions from Ellen and Louis Wolfson III and Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. These monetary contributions demonstrate the faith and confidence the Wolfson family has in the competence of the curators and librarians to guide the growth and future development of the museum collection.

PURCHASED WITH COLLECTORS' COUNCIL FUNDS, CONTRIBUTED BY ELLEN & LOUIS WOLFSON III AND MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR.

Soon after The Wolfsonian became part of Florida International University, I was tasked with organizing and installing an exhibition of some of the Wolfsonian-FIU library’s material in the Green Library on the University Park campus with the aim of introducing our collection to the faculty, staff, and students. The choice of theme was an easy one: the Wolfsonian library holds an incredible collection of interwar period steamship company travel ephemera, and we knew that then director of libraries at FIU, Dr. Laurence A. Miller was an ocean liner buff.

http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Bon%20Voyage/Bon%20Voyage.htm

What I did not know at the time, was that Dr. Miller was not only an avid cruise line enthusiast, (contributing articles and reviews to a number of trade periodicals), but had been amassing and assembling a collection of post-war cruise line promotional materials since the 1950s. Years later, associate librarian Nicholas Blaga and I were invited to lunch by Larry, who had since retired and was enjoying even more time aboard ship. At that meeting, Dr. Miller showed us his exhaustive collection of books, periodicals, and original cruise line industry materials from the post-war period and expressed interest in donating the same to the Wolfsonian. Needless to say, we were delighted at the prospect of acquiring such a comprehensive collection that complemented rather than duplicated our own. It took fifty banker’s boxes to transport the collection to the museum and we have yet to come up with a definitive number of items, though something hovering in the neighborhood of 25,000 to 35,000 would not seem too far off. Even as our interns have been working with Dr. Miller to catalog the materials, Royal Caribbean International CEO Adam Goldstein and the Director of global facilities and properties Russ Bogue visited and had the opportunity to meet the collector and to see a wide variety of archival materials documenting their company’s history and ships. Naturally, with such an extensive collection to choose from, this blog will only be able to provide a small teaser of the many wonderful items in the collection.

HIGHLIGHTS OF GIFTS FROM THE LAURENCE A. MILLER COLLECTION

After the passage of a number of years, I sometimes find it difficult after so many subsequent visits and conversations to remember exactly when first contact was made with a particular collector-turned-donor. Such is the case with Robert J. Young. What I do know is that Mr. Young was living in Deland, Florida (where some of the Wolfsonian staffers involved in the publication of the Florida Theme Issue of The Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts had traveled in researching one of the entries), and afterwards journeyed down to Miami Beach to pay the museum a visit. During that visit, Mr. Young (an octogenarian) talked with enthusiasm about his idol Bernarr Macfadden and the American Physical Culture movement and expressed interest in finding a permanent home for his collection of rare periodicals and books. Since our curator Marianne Lamonaca had long been contemplating a health and hygiene themed exhibit, she and I encouraged Mr. Young to send down some materials on approval. What arrived soon thereinafter were numerous boxes of rare periodicals and other materials that have greatly enhanced our coverage of the subject and period. With Mr. Young’s recent passing, we decided to organize a library display of some of those materials as a tribute to his generosity. http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Physical%20culture/PC.htm

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT OF ROBERT J. YOUNG

Sometimes gifts to museums come after many years spent cultivating relationships with high profile collectors; other times museums are contacted “out of the blue” by collectors or their agents expressing interest in placing them in an institution where they can be sure that their materials will be cared for and appreciated. In 2009, our rare books cataloguer Dr. Nicolae Harsanyi was contacted online with an offer by Harry Gottlieb of a collection of 398 pristine color lithographic prints taken by William Henry Jackson. Jackson had been hired by the railroad companies to take scenic views of the railway routes to promote tourism and had produced beautiful color prints using the “Photochrom” process, and we were as eager to acquire a set as the collector was to find them an appropriate home.

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT OF HARRY GOTTLIEB

Sometimes gifts are made to museums to memorialize loved ones who have passed away. John and Ideal Gladstone had always been active contributors and supporters of the Wolfsonian and Florida International University. John had contributed several articles to the Journal of Decorative and Propaganda Arts and they had gifted an archive of twenty-two publications and hundreds of issues of nineteenth century periodicals to FIU’s Archive Collections. After John passed away, Ideal began inviting the Wolfsonian’s librarians into her home to sift through her late husband’s library, allowing them to select whichever rare and reference books they considered appropriate for the collection. 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; technology and industrial design; and illustrated books by Rockwell Kent and others.

HIGHLIGHTS OF GIFTS MADE BY IDEAL GLADSTONE, IN MEMORY OF HER HUSBAND, JOHN

The Wolfsonian has always been interested in acquiring archives or large bodies of the work of individual artists from our period. The library, for example, has great collections of the work of a number of important book designers and graphic artists, including a group of Dutch artists working in the Nieue Kunst (or Art Nouveau) style; a collection of books, periodicals, posters and clippings of American graphic artist Bill Bradley; a collection of hand-painted book covers designed by the Rupprecht Presse in the mid-1920s; and a collection of books designed by Merle Armitage. While the Wolfsonian also had a fair number of limited edition books designed by Mac Harshberger (1900-1975), that collection was recently swelled by the generous bequest of a cousin of the family who donated scores of musical scores, song books, archival photographs and other ephemera left behind by Mac, his lyricist sister, and his partner and composer, Holland Robinson.

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT FROM THE ESTATE OF WILLIAM WHITNEY

We were also recently approached by a local Miami resident Elinor Brecher, who had a gem in her possession that originally belonged to her grandfather. This rare oversized portfolio entitled Century of the Common Man: two speeches by Henry A. Wallace contains autographed color silk-screened illustrations drawn by Hugo Gellert. Born in Hungary in 1892, Gellert had moved to the United States where he used his artistic talents to support the Communist Party of the United States of America. The portfolio had been passed down to Ms. Brecher, who gifted it to the Wolfsonian in her grandfather’s memory. It joins more than fifty other illustrated works by that artist.

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT OF ELINOR BRECHER, MADE IN MEMORY OF HER GRANDFATHER

As it would be impossible in such a short space to mention each and every donor to the collection, I will conclude this installment with a brief nod to a number of individuals who also donated significant rare pieces to the Wolfsonian librarian within the last five years. I thus conclude by recognizing the generosity of Dolores Trenner, Richard Schick, Tim Gleason, and Abbey Chase who gifted some of the wonderful items pictured below.

TAKE FIVE -- PART ONE OF FIVE!

2010-04-23T14:07:00.054-04:00

REFLECTIONS ON THE SPIRIT OF GIVING & THE LAST FIVE YEARS OF LIBRARY GIFTS

In commemoration of our fifteenth anniversary, Wolfsonian curator Sarah Schleuning organized an exhibition showing off some of the many gifts that have come into the collection since our tenth-year celebrations in 2005. The exhibit, entitled +5: Recent Acquisitions from The Wolfsonian Collection, officially opened with a members preview and opening reception last evening. As I milled about the lobby mingling with some of the donors, staff, and other guests, I got to thinking about what motivates collectors (and the public) to turn cherished private possessions over to a public institution—the topic of today’s blog. Rather than include items already on display, I thought I would use this occasion to highlight some works that didn’t make it into the show given the limited space in the galleries, the large number of contributors, and the sheer number and volume of items that have been added to the collection. Of course it is equally impossible to recognize in a short blog all of the persons who have contributed to the library over the last five years, so this will be the first of five such blogs dedicated to acknowledging some of those who have contributed either gifts, money for acquisitions, or time, work, and energy in support of the museum library.

In the course of my twenty-plus years working at the Wolfsonian—(beginning some five years before the private foundation and collection was transformed into a public institution)—I have had the privilege of working and conversing with the museum’s visionary founder, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr.—or Micky, as he is more commonly known. Having traveled with Mr. Wolfson to various book fairs and flea markets, it became obvious that Micky was not motivated by any sort of hoarding instinct. Rather, he always seemed to take more pleasure in the hunt than in the capture, and in knowing that he was preserving rather than consuming forgotten treasures. The Wolfsonian first opened its doors as a public institution on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month in 1995, and in July 1997, Mr. Wolfson donated the museum building and its contents to the state of Florida and specifically to Florida International University. But Micky's mania for collecting (and donating) did not end there. Micky has continued to travel the world collecting (and preserving) things, often in consultation with the curators and librarians with the aim of filling in gaps in the collection.

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT OF MITCHELL WOLFSON, JR.

But while the museum has continued to benefit from our founder’s continued generosity, the +5 exhibition now on display on the seventh floor galleries demonstrates that other important collectors have fully embraced the mission of the institution and have shown their commitment to seeing it grow and prosper. In recognition of our growing reputation as an important repository for wartime propaganda, Leonard A. Lauder donated a large number of American posters and related ephemera from the Second World War.

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT OF LEONARD A. LAUDER

When Pamela K. Harer began hunting for a permanent home for the large collection of children's propaganda books she had amassed in Washington State, she was directed by bookdealer extraordinaire Michael Weintraub to the Wolfsonian as the most appropriate repository. Soon after making contact, Pamela gifted more than one hundred illustrated propaganda books to our rare books and special collections library.

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT OF PAMELA K. HARER

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT OF JEAN S. AND FREDERIC A. SHARF

Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf have been long-time supporters of the museum and most recently have donated a substantial number of large works on paper and rare books to the Wolfsonian with promises that more would be on the way. Over the years, Fred has amassed an incredible collection of view books, original travel journals and diaries, and other rare materials documenting the English and European exploration and colonization of Africa, the Spanish-American War and U.S. expansion in the Caribbean and Philippines, and the rise of the Japanese Empire in the Far East. Not only do his donations dovetail nicely with the Wolfsonian’s collection interests, but they fill a gap in our otherwise strong collection of colonial and empire propaganda.

HIGHLIGHTS OF A GIFT OF JEAN S. AND FREDERIC A. SHARF

TO BE CONTINUED...

THE BIONIC MAN TO BECOME A REALITY?

2010-04-17T14:56:00.014-04:00

Arriving at the Wolfsonian a few hours before he was scheduled to deliver a public talk in the museum’s auditorium entitled: MERGING MAN AND MACHINE, Hugh Herr, the director of the Biomechatronics Group at the MIT, had the chance to pop upstairs and take a peek at a few items culled from the library collection. Mr. Herr, a climbing enthusiast who lost both legs below the knee, works with a group of MIT’s best and brightest on cutting-edge research blurring the lines between science and design aimed at morphing the human body and the machine to produce “smart prostheses.” The research team is exploring the science by which “disabled” persons might not merely be outfitted with prosthetic limbs, but provided with robotic appendages and sophisticated electronic devices that might actually permit them to far exceed the capabilities of their own biological limbs. Sound farfetched?! Not for you Six Million Dollar Man fans. Oops! Now I’m really showing my age.

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

Following a general tour and walk through the back stacks of the rare books library, Mr. Herr had the opportunity to view some of materials created in the wake of the First World War with the aim of rehabilitating severely wounded war veterans. Not surprisingly, Hugh noted that during and immediately after nearly every war and military conflict (with the exception of the Vietnam War), increases in U. S. government funding served to spur on research breakthroughs and design developments in the technology of prosthetic devices. Our own holdings of rare books and ephemera confirms Mr. Herr’s assertion, with a spate of titles on the subject appearing in countries participating in the Great War, such as An Imperial Obligation: Industrial Villages for Partially Disabled Soldiers & Sailors (London: Grant Richards Limited, 1917), The Disabled Soldier (New York: Macmillan Company, 1919), and the German leaflet: Ludendorff-Spende für Kriegbeschädigte! Sammel-liste. [Ludendorff contributions for disabled war veterans! Collection list.]

Of course, the rudimentary prostheses from this period can hardly be compared to the sophisticated devices being designed today, and in the wake of the ghastly mutilations suffered during the First World War, it is hardly surprising that many artists (such as Georg Grosz, 1893-1959) focused instead on the dehumanizing and dystopian aspects of an increasingly mechanized world. The library, for example, holds a powerful German Expressionist piece illustrative of the disillusionment of many post-WWI artists with technologies’ potential to better the human condition. This portfolio of prints, Der Künstliche Mensch [The Artificial Man] by Willi Geisler (1848-1928), contains ten plates providing a scathing indictment against dehumanizing mechanization and transformation of human beings into robotic automatons.

In the late interwar period, as the horrors of the First World War slowly began to fade from public memory, other intellectuals began to consider the benefits of mechanization and robotics in human affairs. Some even contemplated a future in which technological development bettered the lives of ordinary human beings. Mexican author German List Arzubide, for example, wrote a series of stories for children to be broadcast on the radio in the 1930s. In Troka El Podoroso [Troka the Powerful], the robot protagonist champions the labor-saving industrial technologies (washing machines, sewing machines, adding machines, bulldozers, etc.) and transformations (pen and ink to typewriter, stairs to elevator, moonlight to electric bulb, etc.) combining elements of Mexican folklore and mythology with the new mythic hero.

In a similar vein, our public speaker Hugh Herr also focused his attention on the optimistic, life-affirming, and potentially-utopian aspects of the merger of man and machine. It is his hope that the transformative technologies and designs that he and his group are working to develop will indeed help to usher in a world in which handicaps will disappear in the seamless blending of man and machine. In the world that he envisions in the not so very distant future, advances in science and design in the “smart prostheses” technologies will permit human beings to attain newer and ever higher levels of physical (and cognitive) potentiality. Go Cyborgs!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Jgfp0hVwPI

POSTCARDS FROM THE EDGE

2010-04-16T14:23:00.022-04:00

IMAGINING A DAY WHEN THE WOLFSONIAN MIGHT EXPAND ITS WASHINGTON AVENUE BLUEPRINT TO THE SIDE, SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE STUDENTS AT FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY CREATE DESIGNS FOR A POSTCARD MUSEUM

This Wednesday, Wolfsonian Special Projects Co-ordinator Regina Bailey and I drove out to the Paul L Cejas School of Architecture building on the Modesto Maidique Campus of Florida International University. We had been invited by Claudia Busch to sit in on Design 4, a professional and peer review session where those students were making their final presentations for designs for a postcard museum to occupy the site adjacent to the Wolfsonian. The students and their professors had come to the Wolfsonian library some months earlier with the aim of learning about the special needs and requirements of an institution dedicated exclusively to the preservation, study, and exhibition of the postcard. (See my blog dated Friday, January 8, 2010).

On that occasion, the students had the opportunity to chat with curator Sarah Schleuning, exhibition designer Richard Miltner, and the library staff to hear about the special challenges posed by storing and presenting small ephemeral items such as postcards to the public in a novel and exciting manner. Some of the ideas that had floated around at that time ranged from the digital projection of postcard images in galleries and public spaces; the possibility of creating narrow galleries in which small format postcards would not get lost; creating storage facilities to protect the fragile paper items from windstorm and water damage in a hurricane flood zone; and the pros and cons of employing natural and artificial light down here in sunny South Florida.

Regina and I were eager to see the projects that the students had come up with for meeting these challenges. Professors Eric Peterson, Elite Kedan, and Erik Sundquist had converted eight classrooms on three floors of the School of Architecture building into studios for the review session. Although we did not have the chance to listen to each and every one of the student presentations, we did have the privilege of listening in on the critiques provided by Jon Stuart, David Rifkind, and other reviewers, and to enter all eight studios to view the design drawings and three dimensional models created by the students. Here is just a small sampling of what we saw.

SOMETHING TO SING ABOUT

2010-04-10T11:10:00.010-04:00

Some wonderful gifts arrived this week just in time for inclusion in our up-and-coming exhibition +five: Recent Acquisitions from The Wolfsonian Collection. This show which will open on April 23, will highlight some of the gifts and acquisitions that have come into the museum in the course of the last five years. The most recent additions to the Wolfsonian collection had been sent to the museum library by collector, friend, and donor, Vicki Gold Levi.

We first encountered Vicki nearly a decade ago when she came down to Miami in the course of looking for materials to be included in a book project she was preparing for publication in collaboration with Steve Heller (another Wolfsonian donor and supporter). For some time, Vicki had been voraciously collecting ephemeral items documenting U.S.-Cuba tourist trade relations in the pre-Castro era. Her project culminated in the publication of Cuba Style: Graphics from the Golden Age of Design by the Princeton Architectural Press in 2002. Soon after her first visit to the Wolfsonian, Vicki arranged to have the bulk of that collection gifted to the Wolfsonian library, where some of the hundreds of ephemeral items were soon after exhibited in one of our galleries. Highlights from her donation can be seen online at the following web address: http://www.wolfsonian.org/collections/c9/indexvgl.html Other items from Vicki’s personal collection and loans from some of the materials she donated to the Wolfsonian also appeared in another exhibition organized by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2008: ¡Cuba! Art and History from 1868 to Today.

Following that first meeting and subsequent donation, Vicki has not been idle. In 2004 she published yet another book entitled: Times Square Style: Graphics from the Golden Age of Broadway—again donating to our institution some of the colorful items in the wake of the project’s completion. A number of these gifts were exhibited in a library display in 2005 X: A Decade of Collecting when the Wolfsonian celebrated the acquisitions that had come in during our first ten years as a public institution. http://librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Decade%20Collecting/DC%20displays.htm

Once again Vicki has sent some wonderful materials our way, including some programs, sheet music covers, postcards, and periodicals. All of these materials will be added to our Web catalog http://207.67.203.78/W10054 with direct links in the records to digital images. Included in this blog are a few of the items being considered for the +five exhibition which I offer up as a teaser.

VISIT BY NORTH BEACH SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

2010-04-09T17:01:00.026-04:00

Over the course of the last two days, the Wolfsonian hosted four North Beach Senior High School student tours in the library, where the sixty student participants were given the opportunity to look at a range of rare books, periodicals, and ephemera on the subject of African American history. The lecture discussions in the library centered on the troubled history of race relations in America and the long struggle of African Americans for full recognition of their civil rights. When asked when the Civil Right movement began, the overwhelming consensus among the students was to reference Dr. Martin Luther King and to assume that the struggle had began in the 1960s. Using objects from our collection and library, we encouraged them to consider the visual evidence that suggested that the struggle for equality and rights had begun much earlier and had progressed in fits and starts building up to the successes achieved in the sixties.

We began by considering a bust of world heavyweight boxing champion Joseph Louis Barrow (better known as Joe Louis, 1914-1981) and my assertion that his history might reveal much about changing race relations in the United States. Both of Louis’s biological parents were children of former slaves, and his family had worked as sharecroppers in the South until (like more than a million other African Americans) they migrated North after the First World War to escape KKK terror and poverty. But it was in the boxing ring that Louis made his own important contribution to the fight against racism. Although he had lost a 1936 match to the German prize fighter, Max Schmeling—(which the Nazis touted as proof of Aryan racial superiority)—a second bout had been arranged for the summer of 1938. Just weeks before the scheduled rematch, Louis visited the White House where President Roosevelt encouraged him to use his muscles to demonstrate to the world that the fallacy of the Nazi “superman” myth. Louis did not disappoint. The fight in Yankee Stadium was broadcast live by radio around the globe, and caused a sensation when Louis knocked Schmeling to the mat three times within the first two minutes of the match, with Schmeling’s trainer throwing in the towel on the third fall. Louis’s victory, (coupled with African American runner Jesse Owen’s earlier successes at the 1936 Olympic games held in Berlin), helped persuade Americans to reject the racist doctrines espoused by Nazi propagandists. Little more than a month after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Louis enlisted in the army and afterwards allowed his image to be used to encourage other African Americans to do likewise, and when reporters questioned him about his decision to enlist into the racially-segregated armed services, he replied that there were “Lots of things wrong with America, but Hitler ain’t going to fix them.” Although this next poster is not one from our collection, I could not resist including it here as a perfect example of how Joe Louis's fame and image was used to persuade other Americans to join the fight.

After contemplating Louis’s statue staring out from behind the glass walls of the library stacks, the students entered the library main reading room to look at a wide variety of books, periodicals, and other printed paper materials documenting the experiences of African Americans in the united States. The groups talked about Jim Crow laws and segregation; the promises for better treatment held out to African American men who served their country with pride in the First World War, and the disappointing reality that awaited Black veterans returning home from military service. We talked about lynchings and looked at examples of racial stereotyping from the twenties and thirties.

We also talked of the Great Migration of African Americans (like Joe Louis’s family) to Northern cities in the 1920s and 1930s; the crippling effects of the Great Depression made worse by racism; the trials and tribulations of the nine “Scottsboro Boys” who barely escaped lynching only to endure years in prison during a slew of trials, appeals, mistrials, and retrials in a legal campaign organized by the Communist Party of the United States of America; the Roosevelt Administration’s efforts to provide some measure of economic security and parity for unemployed African Americans within the federal relief programs.

Finally, we wrapped up by coming full circle back to Joe Louis and other African Americans who were encouraged to participate in helping Uncle Sam win the Second World War, cognizant that there was still much to be done for civil rights in America, but only after the threat of the Nazis’ New Order was eradicated.

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

2010-03-23T10:00:00.009-04:00

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!

2010-03-19T17:38:00.026-04:00

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

2010-03-18T14:19:00.026-04:00

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

2010-03-12T16:32:00.015-05:00

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

2010-03-11T15:57:00.020-05:00

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!

2010-03-06T16:37:00.023-05:00

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

2010-03-04T08:42:00.003-05:00

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

2010-03-01T08:31:00.007-05:00

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.

RESEARCH VISIT BY TWO FIU GRADUATE STUDENTS RESEARCHERS

2010-02-26T13:47:00.022-05:00

This Thursday two Florida International University students taking the same Ethnohistorical Methods class but working on very different projects came to our rare books and special collections library to gather information and do some research. This course benefitted from a Mellon grant which allowed the professor to integrate museum objects and artifacts into the curriculum. One of the goals of the course is to train students to make use of primary source materials for their research projects, but also to encourage them to investigate how and why such archives and collections were amassed by conducting interviews (where possible) with the persons responsible for gathering the materials.

Charles Heck arrived at the library with an interest in social and environmental considerations in the development of the Brazilian city of Rio de Janeiro, as well as its notorious favelas. While our own collection trails off pretty quickly in the post-war period, we were able to direct the student to a large collection of architecture slides taken by one of the Wolfsonian’s former fellows, Eric Dluhosch. Professor Dluhosch, who retired a few years ago from teaching at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, traveled extensively across the globe and spent time in Brazil at architecture conferences that investigated various social housing experiments and documented the development of slums in that and other Latin American countries. His large collection of architectural slides was donated to Florida International University some years ago and is in the process of being digitized for use by the university’s School of Architecture. The student may have the opportunity to meet with and interview Dr. Dluhosch directly as he is escaping the snowiest and the coldest of the winter months down here in sunny Miami Beach. Of course, there were also items in our own collection that addressed some of the student’s research concerns as well including the brochure pictured above.

Later that afternoon, Professor Dennis Wiedman directed another of his students, Benjamin Augustyn, to our library to discover what materials might be available for researching his topic of colonial tourism. While the student had originally been focused on some of the colorful travel posters of the interwar period, (of which there are many in our museum), he soon learned that there was a wealth of related materials in other formats (brochures, advertisements, menus, postcards) available for direct consultation in our library, or else easily viewed on the internet via our web OPAC and virtual library displays: ( http://207.67.203.78/W10054 ; http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org ) As the Wolfsonian founder, Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. happened to be in town, we were also able to set up an interview with the original collector of the materials. Here are a few samples of some of the colonial tourist trade materials to be found in our rare books library.

FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT? RIGHT YOU ARE!

2010-02-20T16:18:00.008-05:00

It’s 4:00 PM in the afternoon this Saturday and it is the first opportunity I’ve had all day to sit down at my desk, get caught up with voice mails, emails, etc. At 10:00 AM twenty Miami-Dade County teachers enrolled in a Master’s program at Florida International University arrived for a lecture presentation on the Wolfsonian library’s holdings of New Deal era materials. Three lingered on after 1:00 PM for an opportunity to do some archival research in our library.

Even as I was in the process of clearing some of the rare Roosevelt era books and ephemera from the table, notification came that a group of twenty-three Frank Lloyd Wright enthusiasts would be coming up at 2:00 PM to see our library display, listen to an overview of the library collection, and to see whatever we had to offer regarding the work of the famous architect. They did not go away disappointed. The group was treated to a number of Frank Lloyd Wright related items, including: Ausgeführte Bauten und Entwürfe, a two-volume elephant portfolio of his work published by E. Wasmuth in Berlin in 1910, and which helped to establish his reputation internationally; an advertisement for The Jewel of the Orient: The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, his most famous building in that country; a special edition of the Dutch graphic design magazine Wendingen devoted exclusively to Frank Lloyd Wright’s work and featuring a special cover design mimicking the architect’s style; the Annual of American design, 1931 featuring Frank Lloyd Wrights’ article, “Principles of design”; the July 1937 issue of Town & Country featuring his Falling Water masterpiece on the front cover; and Amerikka rakentaa, a Finnish work celebrating Wright’s architectural genius in 1945.

Here are a couple of images from the rare brochure advertising his famous hotel built in the Maya Revival style and completed in 1923 before the Great Earthquake struck the city that same year. The edifice survived relatively unscathed considering the devastation unleashed by the 8.3 magnitude quake, but in 1968 much of the façade was dismantled and carted away, and the building itself demolished to make way for a new hotel on the same spot. The images from this brochure were taken soon after its opening.

AFTER HOURS VISIT BY FIU HISTORICAL METHODS CLASS

2010-02-19T14:43:00.012-05:00

Last evening, Dr. Aurora G. Morcillo brought the graduate students in her Historical Methods class to our rare books and special collections library for a presentation by Mellon grant coordinator Jon Mogul and yours truly. The aim was to expose the students to some of the nonliterary primary source materials in our library and to help them learn how to “read” and make sense of the visual imagery and physicality of the artifacts. It is hoped that after their visit the students might began thinking about utilizing such materials not merely as illustrations, but as evidence as compelling and potentially revealing as anything offered in some of the more traditional literary sources. The library table in our main reading room was laid out in advance of their arrival with an array of diverse materials covering five areas of strength from our collection: World’s Fair catalogs and ephemera; a wide variety of items documenting various colonial projects of the late nineteenth and twentieth century; all manner of propaganda produced in the Soviet Union; Spanish Civil War leaflets and vintage postcards; and a variety of rare books, calendars, and portfolios illustrated by American Socialist and Communist artists in the 1930s.

Starting with the VTS (Visual Thinking Strategies) methodology, the students were asked to look at and describe exactly what they saw in the artifacts until the group collectively exhausted the imagery of the items. In order to interpret and make sense of the objects, the students were next asked to think about these same designed objects in the historical, social, and cultural context of the times in which they were made. They were encouraged to think about who produced the work and for what intent? Who was the intended audience? Was there a subtext or subliminal message buried in the text or image that the historical audience might have immediately or subconsciously recognized? How was the message meant to be distributed? Was there some relationship between the design of the object (photograph, photomontage, linocut, illustration, and caricature), its form (exhibition catalog, postcard, leaflet, and handbill) and the ideology its creators espoused?

I have included one item from each of the five categories mentioned above so that my readers might also have a chance to try their hand at parsing and interpreting the items for themselves. Feel free to comment with your own impressions and interpretations of these historical artifacts.

A VIRTUAL VERSION OF ALPHABET SOUP !

2010-02-17T12:01:00.013-05:00

FIU STUDENT-CURATED EXHIBIT NOW ONLINE

Thanks to the efforts of Digital Library Specialist David Almeida, a Florida International University student show exhibited in the Green Library on the Modesto Maidique campus in the winter months of 2009/2010 can now be viewed online. Seven undergraduate students studying the Great Depression and New Deal Era researched and selected materials from the Wolfsonian-FIU library and from the Mitchell Wolfson Study Collection in downtown Miami. They displayed those items in an exhibition about the New Deal programs of the Roosevelt Administration. Now that show lives on in a virtual display format which can be viewed by anyone using the internet anywhere around the globe.

The display is arranged according to the themes chosen, researched, and curated by the students. Mariana Clavijo covered President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s earliest New Deal programs: the NRA (National Recovery Administration) and AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration). Maria Aliano and Miriam Kashem gathered artifacts from our own rare books library as well as items in Mr. Wolfson’s private collection to examine how the New Deal aimed at solving the issues of problem youth during the Great Depression. Ms. Aliano honed in on the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps) while Ms. Kashem also explored government-produced pamphlets from the WPA (Work Projects Administration) and NYA (National Youth Administration) aimed at showing how the government was taking care of its younger citizens. Jessica Tejeiro chose items related to the FAP (Federal Arts Project), focusing on federally-funded galleries and community art centers while Kevin Pineiro looked at Federal One projects including: the FTP (Federal Theatre Project), FMP (Federal Music Project), and the FWP (Federal Writers’ Project). Michelle Zavala and Christie Vina teamed up to explore the FWP (Federal Writers’ Project), looking at the American Guide Series of books published to promote travel and tourism to all 48 states and territories of the United States.

VISIT BY MIAMI SHORES BAPTIST ACADEMY STUDENTS

2010-02-05T13:53:00.011-05:00

This morning we entertained twenty-three third to fifth graders and their teachers and monitors from the Miami Shores Baptist Academy in a library tour arranged by Claudia Caro Sullivan in our education department. The young students had come to the library for a presentation of the book as art object. The tables in the main library reading room were laid out with a variety of beautiful books ranging from oversized leather editions richly decorated in the art nouveau style complete with gold tooling; batik cloth bindings; upholstery and fabric sample books and decorative arts catalogs with a papier-mâché contoured cover stored in a silk cloth covered box; a batik vellum elephant portfolio holding one hundred year-old, poster-sized Rembrandt lithographic reproductions and another oversized portfolio containing pochoir illustrations of a Navajo War Ceremonial; and a unique binding made of bass and mother of pearl with hand-painted vellum pages done in the style of an illuminated medieval manuscript.

As delighted as the students and their escorts were with the beautiful books on the table, the real surprise was reserved for me, however, when I picked up a Dutch language children’s book on Snow White. As I began hesitantly to trip my tongue over the Dutch title, Sneeuwwitje, one of the precocious young girls in the group intervened, confidently pronouncing it with flawless ease and precision. Evidently her parents had moved to South Florida a number of years ago, and she had been raised bilingually. Here are some images from the work in question:

VISIT BY FIU STUDENTS STUDYING THE HOLOCAUST

2010-02-03T13:55:00.014-05:00

This Tuesday, the Wolfsonian library hosted the first of two scheduled visits by Professor Oren B. Stier and the students taking his Holocaust class on FIU’s Biscayne Bay campus. Oren Stier earned his PhD. from the University of California, Santa Barbara and serves as the graduate program director in the department of Religious Studies and the director of the Judaic Studies Program at Florida International University. Oren was a recipient of a Mellon infusion grant that allowed him to spend some time before the start of this current semester visiting the Wolfsonian. Working with Mellon grant coordinator, Jon Mogul and the library staff, Professor Stier preselected visual arts objects suited towards exposing his students to the Third Reich’s propaganda campaign that preceded and paved the way in Germany and the occupied territories for the mass deportations of Jews to the Nazi death camps. The students will be picking a museum object or library artifact and writing a five hundred word essay analyzing the visual message, historical context, etc. The second half of Professor Stier’s class will be coming to do the same this coming Friday. Here are a few of the items that the class had the chance to see.

Lest we conclude that the National Socialists' hateful anti-semitic propaganda campaign went unchallenged, I've decided to include in this blog a couple of images designed by Arthur Szyk, a Jewish artist born in Łódź, Poland in 1894. In 1936, Szyk completed his Hagaddah, but was unable to find a publisher in Poland owing to some of the blatantly anti-Nazi images included in the work. The following year, Szyk moved to England, publishing the latter work—sans the anti-Nazi references. In December, 1940, he again relocated, this time to New York City where he continued to produce anti-Nazi propaganda. Inspired by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms speech in 1941, Szyk created an illustrated version of the same well before Norman Rockwell published his own iconic version. The same year, he published The New Order, a book of anti-Nazi caricatures, and in 1943 Szyk illustrated the cover of another booklet championing his people’s cause.

LATE NIGHT VISIT TO THE LIBRARY--AND A VIRTUAL VISIT FOR MY READERS

2010-01-30T16:53:00.016-05:00

Last evening a number of VIP guests were given “after hours” access to the Wolfsonian’s galleries and rare books library. Museum founder Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., director Cathy Leff, curator Marianne Lamonaca, and I were all on hand to greet the visitors and provide them with a guided tour through the museum.

The diverse group had very different interests, but the library is capable of providing something for nearly anyone’s taste. And so the visitors were able to see rare books and other small print format materials covering such diverse themes as: pharmaceutical paraphernalia; circuses; garden and landscape portfolios; architectural masterworks; modern furniture catalogs; and illustrated Russian and Soviet era books. There was not much I could do to string the hodge-podge menagerie together with anything other than “and now for something completely different,” but the visitors did not seem to mind.

And so I thought that my virtual visitors might like to share in the “behind the scenes” tour with a glimpse of some of the varied items included in our diverse holdings.

WOLFSONIAN TOUR BY HISPANICS IN PHILANTHROPY

2010-01-29T10:47:00.012-05:00

Last evening museum founder Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. was on hand to conduct a tour arranged by Cristina Eguizabal of FIU's Latin American and Caribbean Center for fifteen visitors from foundations that fund Hispanic organizations. The rare books and special collections library was one of the first stops on the tour, and the participants appeared to relish the opportunity to see some of our rare Latin American and Caribbean materials laid out on the front table of the reading room.

The group responded with enthusiasm to the display of Latin American treats which included: rare books from Mexico; magazines and other printed materials from Argentina; a city planning book for Rio de Janeiro and some oversized commercial labels from Brazil; some illustrated sheet music covers, two large posters from pre-Castro Cuba, and a run of the periodical, Social with cover designs by Conrado Massaguer.

Although our library holdings are not as strong as we would like them to be with regard to materials from the West Indies and the Caribbean, we did have a few gems laid out for the group to see. Among the items were some beautifully illustrated cruise ship brochures, and—with Haiti figuring some prominently in the news owing to the tragic earthquake there—a novel set during the tumultuous years of the Haitian Revolution entitled Black Majesty, written by John Vandercook with illustrations by Mahlon Blaine. Puerto Rico was represented as well in the American Guide Series' Guide to the Island of Boriquén. The book was compiled and written by the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration in cooperation with the Writers’ Program of the Work Projects Administration to document the Roosevelt Administration's efforts to rebuild the economy, put people back to work, and stimulate interest in tourism during the Great Depression.

We are still “beefing up” our Latin American holdings. Persons interested in gifting materials in keeping with the Wolfsonian’s collection interests are encouraged to submit in writing any offers. Emails or letters should provide a full description of the items intended for donation (including an assessment of condition) and provide an image of the same prior to sending the actual item in question.

VISIT BY MIAMI-DADE COUNTY PUBLIC SCHOOL TEACHERS IN MA PROGRAM AT FIU

2010-01-23T16:58:00.008-05:00

Miami-Dade County Public Schools and Florida International University have for a number of years now been collaborating on program designed to encourage teaching professionals to earn a Master’s degree from the university while only incurring the cost of incidental fees, textbooks, and other related materials. Twenty of these teachers are currently enrolled in my Readings in American History: The Great Depression & New Deal Era course being taught at the Modesto Maidique campus at FIU this semester. This weekend, two of those ambitious students braved the South Beach parking nightmare and visited the Wolfsonian museum to learn more about the New Deal era.

Michael Littman drove out to the museum on Friday evening to one of our public programming events—a screening of the documentary Soul of a People: Writing America’s Story, followed by a question and answer session with the producer and director, Andrea Kalin of Spark Media. Renowned author and activist, Stetson Kennedy was also on hand to answer questions from the audience. Mr. Kennedy, who was featured in the film, had joined the WPA Florida Writers’ Project at age 21 and served as editor, oral history and folklore collector. Mr. Littman was thrilled to have the opportunity to speak with Mr. Kennedy and to have him autograph one of his books which he had brought with him.

Mr. Littman returned to the Wolfsonian today in order to begin researching his final project—a virtual exhibit that will compare some of the similar programs enacted by Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States, Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, Benito Mussolini in Fascist Italy, and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. He was joined in the main reading room by another teacher enrolled in the pilot Masters program, Brian Orfall who is interested in using our original holdings related to the infamous Scottsboro race trial, the International Labor Defense, lynchings, and other civil rights agitation in the 1930s.

CONGRATULATIONS TO ONE OF OUR OWN!

2010-01-21T15:37:00.007-05:00

I could not be more pleased to be able to announce that our own Digital Library Specialist, David Almeida was one of ten finalists selected out of 2,100 international artists applying for the West Prize, originally launched in 2008 with the aim of discovering new artists. David is largely responsible for digitizing the library collection, training and overseeing the scanning work of interns, and for creating our virtual library displays and donor acknowledgement web pages.

www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org ; www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org

David’s latest work plays on the scientific tradition of depicting plant and animal specimens by focusing his attention and camera lens not on real creatures but rather on their plastic representations which have become a ubiquitous part of our consumer society. As a finalist, David stands to receive $10,000 and his work will be added to the West Collection. Additionally, his artwork will be featured in a catalog documenting the work of all ten 2010 winners. The catalogue will be available at the time the exhibition with the same name, “10”, opens this spring at the SEI Gallery in Oaks, Pennsylvania. All of us at the Wolfsonian are extraordinarily proud of his artistic accomplishments and the recognition he has earned for his work.

A FLOOD OF FIU STUDENTS INNUNDATES THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU LIBRARY!

2010-01-15T17:04:00.007-05:00

NO DAMAGE (AND LOTS OF ENTHUSIASM) TO REPORT

This Thursday was a rather busy day here at the Wolfsonian-FIU Library. With David Almeida and I taking down and packing up the student exhibit at the Green Library on the Modesto Maidique Campus, rare books cataloguer Dr. Nicolae Harsanyi was left to hold down the fort, supervising interns, volunteers, and visiting scholars. At the same time, he was on hand to make a presentation to more than a dozen FIU students enrolled in Professor Tori Arpad’s exhibition installation class. The main reading room tables were laid out with all manner of rare materials garnered from nineteenth and twentieth century world’s fairs and international exhibitions, and the professor and her students had the opportunity to peruse the items on display and ask questions.

Shortly after those students departed and Mr. Almeida and I returned, we all had to scramble to quickly change out the display in preparation for the arrival another batch of FIU students. Professor Dennis Wiedman had been awarded a Mellon curriculum development grant and had devised an Ethnohistorical Research Methods class for graduate students with an interest in researching museum materials illustrative of globalization and modernity. The students were first given an introduction to the library collection and an orientation on the rules and regulations to be followed in scheduling research appointments. I also delivered a Powerpoint presentation in our classroom downstairs utilizing lots of digitized images of artifacts organized thematically and designed to show off some of the areas of strength that might prove useful for them as they begin to consider final research paper topics. But as the expression goes, “there’s nothing like the real thing,” and the students seemed to especially appreciate the opportunity of seeing an array of original primary source materials up close. I think it safe to assume that we can expect lots of FIU students emailing us with requests for research visits over the course of the Spring semester.

ALL THE WORLD’S A FAIR!

2010-01-13T17:38:00.008-05:00

This past Monday, Dr. Lara Kriegel and eleven FIU students enrolled in her senior seminar: World’s Fairs, Exhibitions, and History, came up to our rare books and special collections library to meet the librarians and learn how to access the collection via our web catalog and how to schedule research appointments. Following the brief orientation, the students were treated to a presentation of original international exhibition materials aimed at giving them a chronological overview of the world’s fairs while simultaneously introducing them to themes that might serve to inspire their final research paper topics.

The library’s holdings of world’s fair materials is particularly rich with regard to the fairs ranging from the first major international exhibition—(the so-called “Crystal Palace” exhibition in London, 1851)—through the San Francisco and New York World’s Fairs in 1939-1940. Although we do have some materials from some of the later fairs, our collection is far less comprehensive for the post-World War Two period. Our rare books cataloguer, Dr. Nicolae Harsanyi, having recently delivered a paper dealing with Romania’s pavilions at various world’s fairs, addressed the students about the importance of the fairs in terms of national self-representation. It was also evident from the original materials laid out on the table how important certain fairs were in terms of promoting and disseminating new artistic and architectural styles.

Although we often think of the fairs in terms of education and entertainment, we also wanted to impress upon the students the idea that there was also a darker side to these expositions as the nations participating in the early exhibitions used the occasion to propagandize the audiences. In addition to the ubiquitous nationalistic “chest-beating” and games of one-upmanship played by rival countries, the West also used the fair to sell the attendees on the legitimacy of colonial and imperial projects. Many colonial expositions lauded the achievements of civilized nations and the “white man’s burden” of Christianizing and civilizing pagan “primitives” around the world. Many of these fairs shared the Orientalist tendencies of the age and “represented” colonial peoples as “others” in order to justify their economic imperialism under the guise of humanitarian campaigns. Other popular exhibits in these early fairs were those which glorified war by showcasing the latest military technological weaponry and warships. Even the entertainment provided in the Midways was far from politically-correct by today’s standards, perpetuating stereotypes with exhibitions of human oddities and zoos where “freaks” and “primitives” could be gawked at by “civilized” spectators.

World’s fairs organized during the worldwide depression were often courted by cities anxious to provide work for the idle and unemployed, to stimulate tourism, and to provide at least some temporary boost to the economic doldrums. The corporate presence and pavilions at these later fairs often rivaled those sponsored and built by many smaller nations and reflect their growing influence in modern society, economy, and life.

WOLFSONIAN LIBRARIAN NICOLAE HARSANYI DELIVERS TWO PAPERS

2010-01-09T13:00:00.003-05:00

Wolfsonian rare books cataloguer Dr. Nicolae Harsanyi spent part of the winter break between Christmas and New Year’s Day presenting papers at two different panels organized by the Romanian Studies Association of America, of which he is a life member. On Dec. 29-30, 2009, Dr. Harsanyi participated in the Annual Convention of Modern Language Association (MLA) held in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he delivered a paper entitled: “Romanian Pavilions at Word’s Fairs between the two World Wars.” This paper used sources available in the Wolfsonian library, where we have extensive primary source holdings of World’s Fair and international exposition materials.

Romania’s Pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition

Source: Exposition internationale, Paris, 1937. Participations étrangères, Editions Alexis Sinjon, Paris, 1937, pl. 39.

The second paper presented was “Programmatic Discourse and Problematic Realities” and focused on the rhetoric and legacy of the Proclamation of Timisoara (Romania) issued in March 1990. The latter presentation required little in the way of reading from his presentation paper as Dr. Harsanyi was able to rely on his own personal memories as a founding member of the society which issued the Proclamation, on the political and societal urgencies that engendered this document, as well as on the textual structure of it.

Both panels were attended by approximately fifteen scholars hailing from various universities across the United States.

VISIT BY FIU ARCHITECTURE FACULTY AND STUDENTS

2010-01-08T10:00:00.002-05:00

Earlier this week, thirty-three students from Florida International University’s School of Architecture came to the Wolfsonian museum and library for a tour of the facilities and a look at some of the 11,000 vintage postcards in our collection. Professors Claudia Busch, Eric Peterson, and Michelle Cintron brought their students over to the beach so that they could get an idea of exactly what would be involved in designing a museum that would have to house and exhibit a large postcard collection. After their tour of the gallery spaces, the students came down to the main reading room of our special collections and rare books library to view some of the more unusual postcards in our collection and to listen to and participate in a discussion about some of the less obvious environmental, storage, lighting, and other considerations that would be involved in designing a museum exclusively devoted to preserving and exhibiting vintage postcards in the subtropics. One important preservation and access idea that proved popular was the idea of digitizing and projecting images of postcards on the gallery walls to avoid exposing the fragile originals to damaging UV light. Since postcards were originally designed for travel, one of the professors suggested the possibility of creating a non-static display in which images of postcards might zip around the gallery spaces as if they were flying through post office sorting machines. All of us here at the Wolfsonian look forward to the students’ future research visits this semester and to seeing the final projects dreamed up by these budding architects.

Here are a couple of the more unsual poscards (made of leather and wood) seen by this group:

EXHIBITION EXTENDED AN EXTRA WEEK

2010-01-07T15:43:00.007-05:00

ONE MORE CHANCE TO GET ANOTHER DOSE OF FDR'S "ALPHABET SOUP" CURE FOR THE GREAT DEPRESSION

The student-curated exhibition on display on the second floor of the Green Library on the Modesto Maidique campus of Florida International University was originally slated to come down on January 5th, but has been extended to the 12th of this month. The display features rare books and ephemera from the New Deal era selected, described, and interpreted by Mariana Clavijo, Jessica Tejeiro, Michelle Zavala, Christie Vina, Kevin Pineiro, Maria Aliano, and Miriam Kashem. These undergraduate students taking a course on the Great Depression and New Deal period in film and history this last fall opted to do an exhibition project using primary source materials garnered from the Wolfsonian-FIU library. This display examines several of the Roosevelt administration’s programs, including: the NRA (National Recovery Administration), the AAA (Agricultural Adjustment Administration), the FAP (Federal Arts Project), the FWP (Federal Writers’ Project), the FTP (Federal Theatre Project), the FMP (Federal Music Project), the NYA (National Youth Administration), the CCC (Civilian Conservation Corps), and the WPA (Works Progress Administration).

There is also a large flat screen virtual display of the exhibits created by six students taking the same course in the fall of 2008. Mario Montoya selected original programs and exhibition catalogs promoting the arts in various federal art galleries and government supported community art centers. Al Pena and Nicole Saltzmann, on the other hand, exhibited the politically-charged artwork of Socialist and Communist artists Lynd Ward, Giacomo Patri, and Hugo Gellert, whose artwork was critical of Roosevelt’s reforms as being insufficiently radical and transformative. Michelle Narganes and Brian Villar focused on the worst ecological catastrophe of the twentieth century–the dust storms that rolled across the Great Plains during the so-called dirty thirties. Finally, Robert Gueits used museum artifacts to bring to light the treatment and experiences of those African Americans enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps—the program which set three million young men to work planting trees and otherwise laboring to address the ecological crisis.

MORE HOLIDAY CHEER FROM THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU LIBRARY

2009-12-22T17:29:00.005-05:00

LIBRARY OBJECT(S) OF THE WEEK

Have a happy Christmas holiday with these beautiful postcards illustrated by Lajos Kozma (1884-1948). Blog you next year!

DONATION OF RARE HUGO GELLERT PORTFOLIO TO THE WOLFSONIAN LIBRARY

2009-12-18T13:52:00.010-05:00

We are delighted to be able to recognize the donation of an extraordinarily rare oversized portfolio to the Wolfsonian library collection by Elinor Brecher of Miami, Florida. Entitled, Century of the Common Man: two speeches by Henry A. Wallace, this portfolio contains double-page plates with excerpts of Vice President Henry Wallace’s speech and full-page silk-screened illustrations on the facing pages drawn by artist/activist Hugo Gellert (American, born in Hungary, 1892-1985). The portfolio was published in a limited edition of fifty-four, numbered and autographed by the artist. Hugo Gellert was an unabashedly outspoken member of the Communist Party of the United States of America and he lent all of his artist talents to championing that political cause.

This particular portfolio was published during the brief period of cordial U.S.-Soviet relations following the German invasion of Russia during the Second World War. After the invasion, Stalin deemed it expedient to seek the support of any and all left-leaning, liberal and "Popular Front" groups arrayed against the fascists. This latest donation joins two other oversized portfolios illustrated with lithographs by Gellert: Karl Marx Capital in Pictures and Comrade Gulliver: an Illustrated Account of Travel into that Strange Country the United States of America. These poster-sized portfolios comprise three of some thirty-four Gellert titles in our library. Several of his works were exhibited in a display organized by two Florida International University students last fall, and can be seen on line in a virtual display of their exhibition presently on view on the second floor of the Green Library on the Modesto Maidique Campus or accessible at the following web address:

http://www.librarydisplays.wolfsonian.org/Great%20Depression/GD%20displays.htm

Our thanks go out to Elinor Brecher for her generosity in donating this wonderful portfolio. As a repository with a wide range of Gellert materials in our collection, we hope to be able to organize an exhibition sometime in the future that will make these materials presently available to visiting scholars in our library, accessible to the general public visiting our galleries as well.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM THE WOLFSONIAN-FIU LIBRARY

2009-12-16T13:42:00.005-05:00

LIBRARY OBJECT(S) OF THE WEEK

In celebration of the Christmas holiday, I thought I’d share with you a few vintage postcard images from the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. These two anti-fascist postcards were published by the Secours Populaire de France in Paris with the aim of showing solidarity with the Spanish Republic. This group raised money and collected gifts to be sent at Christmas time to boost the morale of the children of Spain suffering the hardships of war.

XB1991.1170 ; XB1991.1171

RECEPTION FOR FIU STUDENT-CURATED EXHIBIT IN GREEN LIBRARY

2009-12-11T09:48:00.010-05:00

Last evening, the student curators of a New Deal exhibit installed on the second floor of the Green Library on the Modesto Maidique campus were treated to a reception hosted by FIU Dean of Libraries Laura Probst and head of Special Collections Vicki Silvera. There the students had the opportunity to speak with Steve Sauls, Wolfsonian museum founder Mitchell Wolfson, Jr., museum director Cathy Leff and other library, history, architecture, and Honor’s College faculty and students in attendance about their curatorial experience and their displays. All of the items in the exhibits were selected by students taking my Great Depression and New Deal Era in Film and History class this fall semester, and utilized rare books and ephemera from the Wolfsonian-FIU library as well as items on loan from the Mitchell Wolfson, Jr. Private Collection in Miami.

At the close of the reception, the student curators were presented with tee shirts from the museum gift shop and copies of the poster for the exhibit created by the Wolfsonian’s own art director, Tim Hossler.

The eleven display cases filled by these students were supplemented by a virtual display of the exhibits created by the previous year’s class which were shown on a continuous loop on a large flat-screen monitor in the same section. Two of the student curators of that exhibit, Al Pena and Robert Gueits, were also on hand to discuss their displays dealing with the radical response of Leftist critics of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the experiences of African Americans enrolled in the Civilian Conservation Corps.

My special thanks to Laura Probst and Vicki Silvera for their support in providing the display space for this exhibition and for putting this reception together and providing refreshments. We look forward to working together with Vicki in planning some new collaborative exhibition projects.

COLLECTIONS CARE AND PREVENTIVE CONSERVATION ASSESSMENT

2009-12-10T13:57:00.009-05:00

This Wednesday, the Wolfsonian-FIU Library closed to the public so that rare books cataloguer Dr. Harsanyi and I could join other museum staff in attending an all-day, in-house session with two conservators visiting from the Williamstown Art Conservation Center. The visit, funded by an IMLS grant, allowed the Wolfsonian to bring Leslie Paisley, Senior Conservator for Works on Paper and Adam Nesbit, Assistant Objects Conservator down from the frigid temperatures and snowstorms of New England to South Beach to help us assess and address our present and future conservation needs. They have spent much of their visit this week walking through the museum facilities and storage spaces, and interviewing senior staff about museum environmental concerns, conservation and stabilization policies and practices, and other issues relating to the care, handling, and storage of rare and fragile materials in the collection. Yesterday’s meeting provided museum staff with a bibliography of printed and online conservation resources; samples of materials useful for archival storage; and many useful suggestions for handling, re-housing, and storing rare materials so as to minimize risk of damage and to prolong their life as objects of study.

Although the library does not presently have the trained staff or resources to undertake aggressive conservation treatments of some of the fragile and brittle works in the collection, we have been actively moving forward with a collection stabilization program. Given our location in the subtropics, donations and new acquisitions are screened for evidence of bookworm and silverfish activity. Suspect items are isolated and frozen in a special low-temp freezer at our off-site annex to prevent the possible transfer of insect infestations to the library. Library interns and volunteers have also been trained to create archival-quality, custom-fit Melinex sleeves for the delicate ephemera in the library collection using an ultrasonic polyester encapsulation machine put together on the premises by inventor William Minter a couple of years ago. This rather expensive machine—(partially funded by a generous Capital Development grant from Miami Dade County’s Department of Cultural Affairs)--has allowed us to produce inexpensive enclosures that provide brittle items with added tensile strength and protect them from the oils naturally found on our fingers. We have also recently ordered archival drop front storage boxes in order to re-house and better preserve the thousands of cruise ship industry promotional materials recently added to our collection by the donation of Dr. Laurence Miller.

It is our hope that the conservation assessment made by Leslie and Adam will provide the museum staff with a better sense of what we are doing right, and in what directions we need to go to continue to preserve this important patrimony of the state of Florida.

THEY DID NOT DIE!

2009-12-05T14:59:00.009-05:00

TWO SCHOLARS VISIT TO REVIEW OUR RARE SCOTTSBORO BOYS MATERIALS

After a late night Art Basel event in which 192 visitors flooded into the library for a look at some of highlights from our collection of rare books, it was a relief to have only a single appointment with two visiting scholars to contend with this Saturday morning. James Arthur Miller, professor of English and American Studies at the George Washington University, and Susan Dabney Pennybacker, Professor of European History at Trinity College came to the library with an interest in seeing materials related to the infamous Scottsboro trial. Nine African American youths riding the rails in search of work during the Great Depression were pulled from the train in Scottsboro and unjustly accused of raping two white girls also discovered on the train. Narrowly escaping a lynching, the youths were tried and condemned to death by an all-white jury in a sham court trial. Eager to expose Southern racism, Capitalist labor exploitation, and to recruit new party members among African Americans, the legal branch of the Communist Party of the United States of America, (the ILD, or International Labor Defense), took on their case and demanded a retrial. As the resultant court cases and appeals dragged on for several years, the Party organized an international propaganda campaign and demonstrations across the globe in support of the “Scottsboro Boys.” Both of the visiting scholars have written important monographs on the subject published by the Princeton University Press in paperback: Professor Miller’s work is entitled Remembering Scottsboro: The Legacy of an Infamous Trial, and Professor Pennybacker’s history, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain.

Among the Scottsboro-related materials in our own collection is one particularly rare and possibly unique item of interest: a mock-up for a linoleum block book designed by Lin Shi Khan for the Communist Party, but which was apparently never published at the time. Our block book has original notes for captions scrawled on the pages opposite the linocut illustrations, with some editorial comments and corrections. (A later version of the block book prototype was later discovered among the personal papers of the Communist journalist and editor of the New Masses, Joseph North with abbreviated lino-cut captions, and some omitted and some added plates, which was reprinted in 2002 by the New York University Press). Our own copy can be seen in its entirety online at the following web address: http://www.wolfsonian.org/collections/c9/index.html

The scholars were also thrilled to see our extensive holdings of the work of Hugo Gellert, and a portfolio of his work recently donated to the collection—but more about that in another blog.

VISIT BY HISTORY OF GRAPHIC DESIGN CLASS

2009-11-30T14:37:00.017-05:00

This morning the Wolfsonian-FIU Library hosted a visit by Rosanne Gibel and a couple of students enrolled in her History of Graphic Design class at the Art Institute of Ft. Lauderdale. Ms. Gibel and her students were treated to a guided tour through our public galleries and were given a privileged “sneak peek” at some of the artwork gracing the floors and walls of our administrative office spaces. Once in the library, the class had the opportunity to view close hand some rare exemplary graphic design materials from the late Victorian period, and examples of Art Nouveau, Arts & Crafts, Art Deco, Futurism, Vorticism, Constructivism, and other important artistic movements. Some highlights of the survey included: materials drawn from our collection of the work of Bill Bradley (1868-1962). Bradley, who was deeply influenced by British Arts & Crafts movement, was dubbed the “American Beardsley” and reputedly was the first American to dabble in the Art Nouveau style.

The students were also exposed to the work of Peter Behrens (1868-1940), a founding member of the Darmstadt Artists’ Colony in Germany and early advocate of design reform. On account of his pioneering work designing the entire corporate identity of AEG (Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gessellschaft), he is generally considered to be the world’s first industrial designer.

After viewing some Futurist and Constructivist masterpieces by Fortunato Depero (1892-1960) and El Lissitsky (1891-1941), the class ended their tour with an examination of some advertising designs from an archive of Herbert Bayer (1900-1985). Bayer, a student of the Weimar Bauhaus, became a prominent graphic designer in Berlin, and, after moving to the United States in 1938, organized the “Bauhaus 1919-1928” exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art and an important exponent of the New Bauhaus school in America.