Window Picture
Research in Beinecke Library Collections:
Photographic Memory Workshop – Graduate Student Working Group 2011-2012
The Photographic Memory Workshop is pleased to invite graduate students, post-doctoral students and academic fellows of the Yale community to submit presentation proposals to its 2011-2012 Graduate Student Working Group. In addition to our usual calendar of visiting scholar lectures, our workshop series offers members of the Yale community working on photography an opportunity to present and discuss works in progress.
Our aim is to bring together people from a variety of disciplines to give feedback and to inspire productive critical conversation about the visual material.
At each meeting, the speaker will give a 20-30 minute informal presentation centered on a set of photographs, instruments, or materials. These presentations can be formal papers, works in progress, or curatorial projects. Electronic images of the subject being presented (but not the text of the presentation itself) will be pre-circulated to the group by email prior to each meeting. The presentation will be followed by critical conversation and feedback about the speaker’s research project/paper/exhibition.
We are open to any submission related to photography. This includes, but is not limited to, photography’s material processes and cultural history, scientific and applied photography, photographs in books, as well as conceptual, fine-art, and commercial photography. We especially welcome proposals relating to objects in any of the Yale University collections.
Photographic Memory Workshop Meetings:
The Workshop meets several times throughout the semester, generally at 6pm on Wednesdays. Specific dates and time TBA–contact the organizers for details or to receive announcements about meetings and related events.
Submission Guidelines:
Please send a 250-500 word proposal along with a selection of images relating to your research topic by October 1st, 2011 to photographicmemoryworkshop@gmail.com.
About the Photographic Memory Workshop:
This is the thirteenth year of the Photographic Memory Workshop under the mentorship of Professor Laura Wexler. The workshop, which brings together graduate students, faculty, and staff from a wide variety of disciplines, explores the myriad of possibilities inherent in the study of photographs and/or memory. Should you have any questions about the workshop or our activities, please email photographicmemoryworkshop@gmail.com or contact the graduate student fellows at heidi.knoblauch@yale.edu and audrey.sands@yale.edu.
About Photography in the American Literature and Modern Books and Manuscripts Collections:
Photographic materials in the Collections compliment the book and manuscript collections, with a close relationship to archival materials and other primary documentation. Holdings in the collections document the lives of writers and literary communities, cultural spaces, and significant events of various kinds and include everything from snapshots and passport photographs to fine art and portrait photography by some of the most important photographers of the 20th century. Materials in the Modern Books and Manuscripts Collection are primarily from Europe and Africa; photographic materials in the Yale Collection of American Literature document the lives and work of Americans at home and abroad. Brief overviews of the Collections can be found online: Photography in the Modern Books and Manuscripts Collection: http://photostest.odai.yale.edu/directory/dir_single_collection.php?collection_id=14; Photography in the Yale Collection of American Literature: http://photostest.odai.yale.edu/directory.
About Photography in Yale Collections:
A Directory of Yale Photographic Collections provides a portal through which to mine the breadth of the University’s images across repositories and disciplines. The interdisciplinary nature of these resources opens the possibility for endless discoveries of images illustrating sweeping applications of the medium and at the same time presents exciting avenues for the creative use of photographs in object-based learning. http://photostest.odai.yale.edu/directory/index.php
Image:
Jonathan Williams, [Polaroid photo of cat in window], undated. By Permission of Jargon Books/Jonathan Williams Estate.
Jewel Box
“America’s Finest Femme- Mimics” publicity fan from the Jewel Box Lounge, The Most Talked About Nite Club in the Midwest (Kansas City, MO, undated).
The archival component of the Laura Bailey Collection of Gender and Transgender Materials (GEN MSS 787) is now available for research. One of the largest and most diverse collections of its kind, the Laura Bailey Collection of Gender and Transgender Materials consists of a broad range of printed and visual materials, including photographs, postcards, and many types of printed ephemera; manuscript materials, and audiovisual materials. The collection is organized largely as it was received from Bailey, with many materials in binders according to category of gender or transgender culture or performance as assigned by Bailey. Also included is a catalog for the collection compiled by Bailey and the hand-written index cards she used to catalog it. A primary description of the contents of the archival component of the collection is available online here: http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/beinecke.lbailey. Cataloging and description of the printed material is ongoing.
Day at the Beach
Lawrence Langner, Fania Marinoff (Mrs. Carl Van Vechten), Eugene O’Neill , Armina Marshall (Mrs. Langner) (ZA Van Vechten)
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Stieglitz family (YCAL MSS 85)
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Natalie Paley (GEN MSS 574)
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[Photograph of Anne [Gathorne-Hardy], Ruth [Gathorne-Hardy?], John Spencer Churchill, and unidentified woman on the beach near Snape] (GEN MSS 476)
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[Photograph of Meschrabpom's American Film Group on the beach] (JWJ MSS 26)
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[Photograph of Henry Geldzahler and Marty Edelheit on the beach]. (UNCAT MSS 30)
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Gerald and Sara Murphy (UNCAT MSS 101)
Multitudes
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then . . . . I contradict myself;
I am large . . . . I contain multitudes.
Walt Whitman, from Leaves of Grass, 1855
Founded in 1911 when Yale College graduate Owen Franklin Aldis donated his distinguished library of first editions of American fiction, drama, and poetry to the Yale Library, the Collection of American Literature stands as one of the most important collections of its kind. In the century following Aldis’s gift, the Collection has continued to grow, building on core areas and expanding to include complementary materials, from individual manuscripts to expansive literary archives, from little magazines and lively ephemera to high-tech artists’ books. The highlights exhibited in Multitudes: A Celebration of the Yale Collection of American Literature, 1911–2011 reveal areas of bibliographic strength and new development while demonstrating the Collection’s extraordinary richness, eclecticism, and depth. From the colonial period to the present, the Collection celebrates American Literature as a living art form with a complex history. Its evolving and vibrant traditions are a subject worthy of both rigorous scholarly attention as well as leisurely pursuit for the general reader.
Image: Samuel Hollyer, lithograph from a daguerreotype of Walt Whitman by Gabriel Harrison, 1855. Title page, Leaves of Grass, first edition 1855. An example of the Yale Collection of American Literature’s great strength in printed, manuscript, and visual materials documenting American Poetry is its outstanding collection of materials relating to the life and writing of Walt Whitman. One of the most important works of American Literature, Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a celebration of the democratic spirit, the emotional and intellectual power of literature and art, and of the poet himself. In this work, Whitman introduced a new mode of writing and of expression. In the 150 years since it was first published, Leaves of Grass and its author have played a crucial role in shaping American literature and America’s literary imagination. The Beinecke’s Whitman holdings contain copies of all major editions of Leaves of Grass, including five copies of the extraordinarily rare first edition, published in 1855, and several copies of the 1856 second edition, featuring a quotation from a letter Whitman received from Ralph Waldo Emerson in response to the first edition: “I greet you at the beginning of a great career…” In addition to printed works, the Library’s Walt Whitman Collection contains letters, manuscripts, photographs, art, and other material dating from 1842-1949, and features the Whitmania of Yale benefactors Owen Aldis, Louis Mayer Rabinowitz, Adrian Van Sinderen and others. Outstanding manuscripts include Whitman’s early 1850s text “Pictures,” often called a prototype for poems in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass because its expansive energy predicts the experimental free verse that characterizes Whitman’s work. The Collection also includes numerous photographs of the poet. Whitman was quite conscious of his public persona and understood the powerful role that photography, still a new and developing technology, could play in helping him to reach his American audience. From the “rough” depicted in the portrait on the title page of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, to the respectable bard appearing in the edition published five years later, to the “Good Gray Poet” that emerged in the 1860s, Whitman’s photographic image evolved over the course of his career as a writer and public figure. The Whitman Collection also includes artworks and objects such as bronze medallions and Whitman’s own eyeglasses.
For more information about the Yale Collection of American Literature, contact Louise Bernard, Curator of Prose and Drama (louise.bernard@yale.edu) or Nancy Kuhl, Curator of Poetry (nancy.kuhl@yale.edu). Multitudes: A Celebration of the Yale Collection American Literature was organized with the assistance of Charlotte Parker, Y’2013.
Announcing the Windham-Campbell Literature Prizes
Yale Establishes Literature Prizes
to Implement Extraordinary Legacy
of Novelist and Memoirist Donald Windham
New Haven, Conn. June 21, 2011 — Yale University President Richard C. Levin today announced the establishment of The Donald Windham – Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes. The prizes, which will be administered by Yale, are funded by a significant bequest from noted American writer Donald Windham, who died on May 31, 2010 at the age of 89. In his will, Windham also donated the remainder of his literary estate to Yale, completing a collection that was initiated with his original gift to Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 1989.
The prize program will award seven to nine $150,000 prizes annually, in fiction and non-fiction categories. In addition to the prestige the prizes will bestow on recipients, Windham wished to ensure that the prizes would be substantial enough to enable each recipient to spend a full year writing, unencumbered by financial concerns.
In making the announcement, Levin said, “It is our hope and expectation that the prizes, together with the collection of the author’s papers that are already a treasured part of Yale’s Beinecke Library holdings, will draw deserved attention to Donald Windham’s literary accomplishments and preserve them for years to come.”
Born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1920, Windham spent most of his adult life in New York and his fiction works and memoirs are noted for their portraits of mid-20th century literary and artistic life in the city. He counted among his close friends Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and other such noted figures as Lincoln Kirstein, a founder of the New York City ballet, photographer George Platt Lynes, writer E.M. Forster, and the artists Joseph Cornell and Paul Cadmus. With the young Tennessee Williams he collaborated in writing the play “You Touched Me,” based on a D.H. Lawrence short story, which opened on Broadway in 1945.
Windham’s first novel, “The Dog Star,” published in 1950, was considered by Thomas Mann the finest American novel of 1950. E.M. Forster was so impressed with his work that he asked to write the introduction to Windham’s short-story collection, “The Warm Country,” which was published in 1962.
Windham is perhaps best known for his memoirs, which include “Emblems of Conduct” (1964), about his early life in Atlanta, “Tennessee Williams’ Letters to Donald Windham, 1940-1965″ (1977), the publication of which caused a rift between the two men, and “Lost Friendships” (1987) an account of his friendships with Capote and Williams.
The Donald Windham – Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale honor both Windham and his longtime partner, a Princeton undergraduate who he met in 1943 and who published the first editions of many of his books through his press, the Stamperia Valdonega in Verona, Italy.
The Windham – Campbell Prizes were established with the guidance of Jeffrey Peabody and Eugene Kokot, co-executors of the Windham estate. The prizes will be awarded annually and will recognize both established and promising English language writers in fiction, non-fiction, and drama. Poetry may be added as a fourth category at a later time. Not having had any academic affiliation himself, Windham stated a particular interest in ensuring that writers who are academically unaffiliated are included for consideration.
According to his friend and co-executor of his estate, Eugene Kokot, “Donald’s decision to establish the prizes at Yale and to donate the remainder of his estate to the University was in large part due to his trust in and warm relationship with the institution that had been such good stewards of his literary collection for so many years.”
The Donald Windham – Sandy Campbell Collection is part of the Yale Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Library. It is a rich and diverse trove of correspondence between Windam and Campbell and Williams, Forster, Capote, and Isherwood, as well as other notable writers such as Carson McCullers, Marianne Moore, Graham Greene, Isak Dinesen and Paul Bowles. Also in the collection are photographs by George Platt Lynes and Carl Van Vechten. The bequest adds additional writings, correspondence with literary luminaries, photographs, and artwork, including the gift of a Paul Cadmus painting to the Yale University Art Gallery. In addition to donating a significant collection of his literary papers, Donald Windham’s early gifts to Yale established an endowment for curatorial support of the collection. His bequest also included an additional contribution to the curatorial endowment, ensuring permanent support for the collection at the Beinecke Library.
Image: Donald Windham, second from left, in 1949 at Cafe Nicholson in Manhattan with, from left, the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, the artist Buffie Johnson, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal (Photo: Karl Bissinger).
PRESS CONTACT: Robin Hogen 203-432-5423
Celebrating Stieglitz & O’Keeffe
Wednesday, June 8, 2011 at 4:00 pm
Please join us for a reception at the Beinecke to celebrate several exciting Library-sponsored projects drawing on materials in the Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive, including the publication of My Faraway One: Selected Letters of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz: Volume One, 1915–1933, edited by Sarah Greenough and jointly published by the Beinecke Library and the Yale University Press with the support of a generous gift from William Reese, Y’77. The event also celebrates the Library’s large-scale Stieglitz/O’Keeffe Archive digitization projects, which make images of the letters between Stieglitz and O’Keeffe freely and readily available online through various direct resources.
My Faraway One: http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300166309
Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive Finding Aid, including folder-level links to images of Stieglitz-O’Keeffe correspondence: http://hdl.handle.net/10079/fa/beinecke.sok
Alfred Stieglitz/Georgia O’Keeffe Archive Image Guide: http://beinecke.library.yale.edu/digitallibrary/asgo.html
Framing in Good Taste
A bill made out to Alfred Stieglitz for materials and framing of paintings by John Marin.
From the Alfred Stieglitz / Georgia OKeeffe archive.
Dress
Fragment of the wedding dress of Sarah Pierpont Edwards, from the Jonathan Edwards Papers: GEN MSS 151.
For Grace
From: Frank O’Hara, Meditations In An Emergency, N. Y.: Grove Press, (1957); copy 4, from the special edition of fifteen copies containing an original drawing by Grace Hartigan and signed by the poet; title page, Hartigan drawing/collage, O’Hara’s “For Grace, after a Party.”
A Woman of Genius
Dust jacket for: A Woman of Genius by Mary Austin, Doubleday, Page & Company,1912.
Survivor
Mahala Dutton Benedict Douglas (1864-1945) photographed by Carl Van Vechten, New York, November 22, 1935.
Douglas survived the sinking of the Titanic. Her husband, Walter Donald Douglas, an heir to the Quaker Oats Company, went down with the ship, April 14-15, 1912
Photographs by Carl Van Vechten are used with permission of the Van Vechten Trust; permission of the Trust is required to publish Van Vechten photographs in any format. To learn more, contact the Curator, Yale Collection of American Literature.
The Skeleton in Armor
Morris & Co. and Walter Crane Crossing the Pond
March 24, 2011 marked the 177th anniversary of the birth of William Morris (1834-1896), the incredibly versatile and prolific British poet, artist, manufacturer, socialist, and designer. Morris is perhaps most commonly remembered as the designer of brightly colored textiles and wallpapers, however, his breadth of artistic vision encompassed much, much more and reached into virtually all possible areas of production. Just as abstraction and nature intermingled in Morris’s and his associates’ work, so too were literature and history, myths and legends interwoven with real life.
In the early 1870s, Morris became intensely interested in Iceland, learning and translating the language and, in 1871, traveling to Iceland in order to experience the culture and folkloric history for himself. By that time, Morris had already lived by his own maxim, “Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.” Since his student days at Oxford, he and his fellow student and roommate Edward Burne-Jones had been designing unified decorative schemes and decorating their own living spaces with handpainted murals and handcrafted furniture.
It is particularly fitting, then, that a little over a decade later the products designed and sold by Morris & Co., or ‘the Firm,’ were gaining widespread popularity in England. They were also increasingly garnering attention in the U. S., which led to a number of commissions in the States. By the 1880s, Newport, Rhode Island – a bustling port city – was attracting the Gilded Age elite in droves. Many built summer “cottages” on the water. In 1882, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe – then the single richest woman in America - commissioned the American architectural firm of Peabody & Stearns to build her dream house, and ‘the Firm’ of Morris & Co. was chosen to provide much of its interior decorative scheme. Lorillard Wolfe admired the Old Stone Mill in the center of Newport, which was thought to be evidence of the Viking settlement along the North American coast. In 1841, the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a poem “The Skeleton in Armor,” in which he refers to Newport’s Old Stone Mill and intertwines this architectural ruin with news reports of a skeleton outfitted in armor which had been unearthed in Fall River, Mass in 1832. With all of these influences in mind, Lorillard Wolfe named her Newport cottage “Vinland,” in honor of this Nordic past, and its architectural details and interior design were directly inspired by this surge in interest in Viking history.
Fittingly, Morris & Co. worked on various aspects of this commission, including stained glass windows, carved furnishings, and textiles. Beinecke owns a key part of this puzzle. Walter Crane, the renowned British artist and socialist, agreed to provide a large-scale mural for Vinland, painting a frieze that went around the upper border of the dining room. Beinecke has a series of preparatory drawings or black and white illustrations by Crane which tell Longfellow’s story of the Viking Bride. Thus we can see this legend of the romance between a “blue-eyed maid” and her beloved Viking soldier come to life. –Adrienne Sharpe (adrienne.sharpe@yale.edu)
For more information: Adrienne Sharpe, “Rediscovering Vinland, Pre-Raphaelite Society Newsletter, Summer 2007.
Images: Crane portfolio (above: Uncat MS Vault Crane); Longfellow’s Skeleton in Armor, Boston: Osgood & Co., 1877 (below: Za L860 877s)
Adrienne Sharpe has an MA in Design History from the Bard Graduate Center in NYC, and is a Governing Board member of the William Morris Society in America. More information on Morris and the Morris Society in the US can be found here: http://www.morrissociety.org/; http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-William-Morris-Society/138704472341?ref=mf
A reading of letters between psychoanalyst and patient
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A. A. Brill and Mabel Dodge Luhan: A Reading from their Correspondence by Patricia Everett and Paul Lippmann Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 5:00 pmPsychoanalyst A. A. Brill maintained an active correspondence with his patient Mabel Dodge Luhan, a writer and New York salon hostess. Luhan’s analysis began in June 1916 and continued until she moved to Taos, New Mexico, in December 1917, after which analyst and writer corresponded for nearly thirty years. This reading from the Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers presents a selection of letters that reflect the highly personal, expressive, and exploratory nature of their correspondence. Luhan recounted her dreams and reported on her current mental states. Brill responded with advice, warmth, and forceful interpretations. These letters provide views into often inaccessible aspects of analytic relationships.
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Psyche & Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul An exhibition on view through June 13 Psyche & Muse explores the influence of cultural, clinical, and scientific dialogues about human psychology on twentieth-century writers, artists, and thinkers. Tracing important themes in the lives and work of key figures and artistic communities represented in the Beinecke Library’s Modern European and American Literature collections, the exhibition documents a range of imaginative encounters involving the arts and the study of the mind. The books, manuscripts, and visual works in Psyche & Muse represent aesthetic and philosophic lineages from the late nineteenth century to the post-war era; the exhibited materials reveal ways in which the study of psychology and core concepts of psychoanalysis were both intertwined with and opposed to artistic production throughout the twentieth century. Psyche & Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul features materials from the Beinecke Library’s twentieth-century collections, including the Modern European Books and Manuscripts Collection, the Yale Collection of American Literature, and the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters; figures represented in the exhibition include: Lou Andreas-Salomé, Antonin Artaud, James Baldwin, Andre Breton, A. A. Brill, Herman Broch, H. D., Mable Dodge Luhan, Max Ernst, Michel Foucault, Sigmund Freud, George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, Moss Hart, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, George Platt Lynes, Eugene O’Neill, Jean Toomer, Glenway Wescott, Richard Wright, and Gregory Zilboorg.
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All events and exhibitions are free and open to the public. Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library | 121 Wall Street | New Haven | Connecticut |
Psyche & Muse Online
Detailed information about collection materials featured in the current exhibition, Psyche & Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul are now available online: Psyche & Muse online .
Books, manuscripts, correspondence, photographs, and objects described in the Exhibition Checklists & Object Descriptions may located by consulting the Library’s primary finding tools: Orbis, the catalog for books; Yale’s Finding Aid Database for manuscript materials; and the Beinecke Digital Library.
Psyche and Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul explores the influence of cultural, clinical, and scientific dialogues about human psychology on twentieth-century writers, artists, and thinkers. Tracing important themes in the lives and work of key figures and artistic communities represented in the Beinecke Library’s Modern European and American Literature collections, Psyche and Muse documents a range of imaginative encounters involving the arts and the study of the mind. On view from January 28 through June 13, 2011 at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Yale University, 121 Wall Street, New Haven. Free and open to the public.
Image: Aldo Piromalli, Psychiatry, or Death of the Soul, Amsterdam: Vrije Vogel Pers, 1977. A tiny fold-out flier, this colorful comic strip expresses Piromalli’s personal frustration, exiled in Amsterdam on pain of incarceration in a mental asylum should he return to Italy. But it also echoes the broader revolt against psychiatric norms and inhuman treatment that ignited social protest across Europe in the sixties and seventies. Here Piromalli objects to the label “schizophrenic” and singles out “brain-slicing operations.” Other frames in the strip portray electroshocks and drug therapy in equally graphic ways.
Historic Dress
Photographs of friends and family from the papers of poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) and related archives; posted in honor of the Beinecke Library’s first annual staff H.D. & Co. Costume Party.
[Photograph of Gilbert, Harold and Hilda Doolittle, 1888].
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Hilda Doolittle, inscribed to Marianne Moore.
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Ezra Pound, passport photo
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[Photographs of Richard Aldington, 1928-30]
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D. H. Lawrence, photographed by Nikolas Muray
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[Profile photograph of Robert McAlmon]
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Bryher, Perdita Aldington, and H. D.
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Production still from Borderline, featuring Bryher, 1929
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[Photograph of Bryher, Kenneth MacPherson and Robert Herring in Advent Bay, 1929.]
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Norman Douglas in Venice, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1935
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Hanns Sachs with a monkey at Kenwin
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Marianne Moore and her mother, photographed by Cecil Beaton
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Searching for Peace of Mind?
Psychoanalysis, NY: Tiny Tot Comics, c1955, volumes 1-4 (call number: Za Zp956); featured in the Beinecke Library’s current exhibition: Psyche & Muse: Creative Entanglements with the Science of the Soul. For information about exhibition-related events, visit: Psyche & Muse Events.
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