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Humanities and Social Sciences Library 
Current | Upcoming | Past | Online Be sure to check library hours and holidays for important information. Exhibition Hours: Click here for schedule Art Deco Design: Rhythm and Verve What is the reason for the enduring appeal of Art Deco design? The answer lies in the vitality of the decorative style’s visual elements. Art Deco captured the mood of 1920s and 1930s modernism, an age of jazz and streamlined machinery, with designs that are colorful, geometric, and filled with an intense rhythm. This exhibition seeks to give viewers a more intimate exposure to the style’s incredible energy by focusing on boldly graphic plate books, portfolios, and masterworks of the pochoir stencil print technique from the Library’s Art & Architecture Collection. Art Deco’s international flavor has played particularly well in New York, with many examples of landmark architecture and interiors throughout the city. The exhibition offers a reappraisal of the style’s most notable features and its often-overlooked legacy to modern art. Starting with key Art Nouveau designs that reveal the origins of the Art Deco impulse, the exhibition presents developing traits that move through the 1920s and into the next decade. Aspects of the style’s legacy can be seen in the first volume of the significant art journal Verve(1937-60), a review of art and literature that took root from the fertile soil of mature Art Deco, and in the innovative works of Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979), an avant-garde painter and designer, whose brightly colored and geometrically-shaped creations demonstrate the union of fine art and commercial design aesthetics. The Stadium: Daily News Photographs of the House That Ruth Built Yankee Stadium—The Stadium—is arguably the most iconic sports venue in America, and as much a part of the New York landscape as the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty. The 2008 baseball season turned sports spectators into witnesses of history as New Yorkers and Yankee fans the world over watched the last season-opener, the last All-Star game, the final pitch, and the last catch ever to take place in the House That Ruth Built. Yaddo: Making American Culture This exhibition explores the role of Yaddo, the artists‘ retreat, in fostering 20th-century American arts and letters. Founded in 1900 by financier and philanthropist Spencer Trask and his wife, Katrina Trask, Yaddo began receiving guests in 1926 and was immediately hailed by The New York Times as a “new and unique experiment, which has no exact parallel in the world of fine arts.” Since that inaugural season, Yaddo has navigated the roiled cultural and political life of 20th-century America while hosting thousands of artists and writers, including such luminaries as James Baldwin, Saul Bellow, Flannery O’Connor, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, Jacob Lawrence, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Philip Guston and Sylvia Plath. The exhibition is drawn from the intimate letters, papers, photographs, art objects, and ephemera that constitute the Yaddo Records, now in The New York Public Library’s Manuscripts and Archives Division; from collections throughout the Library; and from Yaddo’s own holdings of rare books and artworks. The story of Yaddo and the artists that it has fostered offers a window onto some of the most significant events of 20th-century history: the economic and social turmoil of the 1930s, the destruction and displacements of World War II, the paranoia of the McCarthy era, the “race problem” from Jim Crow segregation through the Civil Rights movement, and the rise of the women’s and gay rights movements – all helped shape Yaddo, the lives of the artists who sought shelter there, and the works they produced. The exhibition explores the multiple ways that Yaddo as an institution, and the artists it supported, were ultimately anything but sequestered from the shifting social, political, and economic crises that marked the 20th century. The exhibition is accompanied by a collection of essays, edited by exhibition curator Micki McGee, published by Columbia University Press. William James Bennett: Master of the Aquatint View During the 1830s and early 1840s, William James Bennett (ca. 1784–1844) made a series of topographical prints that not only celebrated the beauty of the American landscape, but also recorded the young nation’s growing urban centers, with a special focus on New York. Bennett documented the bustling waterfront activity of thriving ports, bathing them in luminous light that unified water, ships, and architecture. Capturing the optimism of the new country, Bennett’s magnificent works—rendered in aquatint, a printmaking process that suggests the fluidity and transparency of watercolor—are regarded as the finest folio views of 19th-century American cities. The 40 prints and watercolors in this exhibition are drawn from the Print Collection of The New York Public Library, many from The Phelps Stokes Collection of American Historical Prints, donated to the Library by I. N. Phelps Stokes in 1930. This exhibition has been made possible by the continuing generosity of Miriam and Ira D. Wallach. Afghanistan, or The Perils of Freedom: Photographs by Stephen Dupont Stephen Dupont is an award-winning photojournalist, documentary filmmaker, and war correspondent who is internationally recognized for his work in some of the world’s most dangerous areas, including Afghanistan, Burma, Cambodia, Iraq, Papua New Guinea, Rwanda, Somalia, and Zaire. This exhibition features selected photographs from his work in Afghanistan, where he has covered everything from civil war and the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s to the launch of Operation Enduring Freedom and the ongoing war on terrorism. Also included are photographs from the series Axe Me Biggie, a phonetic rendering of the Dari for “Mister, take my picture.” Dupont made these portraits during the course of one day (March 13, 2006) with a Polaroid camera in a makeshift studio in the streets of Kabul. Together, these photographs tell a story of poverty, warfare, and broken promises, but also of perseverance and hope, as they refocus attention on the state of Afghanistan today. This exhibition, drawn from the Library's Photography Collection, is Dupont’s first solo show in the United States. Dupont was born in Sydney, Australia, in 1967. His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Newsweek, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and Vanity Fair, among numerous other publications. He has earned many of photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America; a Bayeux War Correspondent’s Prize; and first places in the World Press Photo contest, Pictures of the Year International competition, the Australian Walkley Award, and the Leica/CCP Documentary Photography Award. In 2007, he was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanitarian Photography to continue Narcostan or The Perils of Freedom, a multimedia project documenting the effects of the rampant drug trafficking that has developed in Afghanistan since 2001. In April of 2008, he survived a suicide bombing while traveling with an opium poppy eradication team in Kabul. This exhibition has been made possible by the continuing generosity of Miriam and Ira D. Wallach. Stephen Dupont is represented by the Booklyn Artists Alliance. A Literary Christmas Miscellany from the Berg Collection Special Display: This holiday display features Charles Dickens’s prompt copy of A Christmas Carol, from which he gave his public readings; books with Christmas themes by T.S. Eliot and Edmund Wilson; Christmas greetings by James Joyce, Sean O’Casey, E.E. Cummings, and Maurice Sendak; and a Christmas letter from Jack Kerouac to his future wife, Stella Sampas. William Godwin's Juvenile Library William Godwin is often remembered as a supporting cast member in the lives of more famous British Romantic figures: as the husband of proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft; as the father-in-law of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley; or as the father of novelist Mary Shelley, author of Frankenstein. During the political turmoil in England precipitated by the French Revolution, however, Godwin managed to make a name for himself as a great radical thinker with his Political Justice (1793), considered to be the first expression of modern anarchist philosophy. Godwin also wrote novels and plays, with varying levels of success, but his most popular works were the children’s books he wrote and published pseudonymously to avoid the stigma of his controversial reputation. The books he published through his Juvenile Library imprint, and sold in his bookshop of the same name, boldly exemplify his then highly contested belief that, rather than to moralize and teach practical facts, the goal of children’s literature should be to inspire the imagination. This exhibition, drawing primarily from the Library’s Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, uses a selection of illustrated children’s books, as well as prints, manuscripts, and realia, to introduce visitors to Godwin, his extraordinary family, and his Juvenile Library, in the context of the children’s book trade in early 19th-century London. Between Collaboration and Resistance: French Literary Life Under Nazi Occupation The defeat of France by Germany in May–June 1940 transformed the lives of French writers and publishers. Freedom of expression, almost achieved after centuries of struggle, was now set aside. Writers matter in France, and writers were deeply implicated in the changes of 1940. Some of their colleagues were silenced for racial or political reasons. How should they respond? Should they collaborate? Resist? Wait and see? Or follow some more complicated pathway through the changing course of the war? All of them risked being used by one side or another. Yet they were expected, in a nation that placed a high value on its intellectuals, to offer moral leadership in a time of doubt and uncertainty. Between Collaboration and Resistance begins with a look at the effects of World War I, the decline of the Third Republic, and the installation of the Vichy regime, followed by thematic sections examining everyday life, collaboration, resistance, the Holocaust, and international solidarities. It features often unique and largely unpublished contemporary documents concerning collaborators like Céline, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and Robert Brasillach; resistors like Louis Aragon, Jean Paulhan, and Robert Desnos; and writers who changed their minds like Paul Claudel. One of the exhibition’s most remarkable items is the manuscript of Irène Némirovsky's Suite française. Diaries, manuscripts, books, maps, letters, photographs, and other materials are drawn from the collections of The New York Public Library, the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine, the Mémorial de Caen, and other institutions and private collections. This exhibition has been organized in partnership with the Institut Mémoires de l’édition contemporaine [IMEC] and the Bibliothèque nationale de Québec, with the cooperation of the Mémorial de Caen. |