Blog Posts by Subject: Art History

In Sex and the City: The Movie, Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) ascends the iconic marble steps of The New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street wearing a stunning Vivienne Westwood wedding gown. Her bridesmaids Miranda (Cynthia Nixon), Charlotte (Kristin Davis), and Samantha (Kim Cattrall) — all wearing vibrant designs by Zac Posen — are at Carrie's side as she enters the landmark building and prepares to exchange vows with Mr.

First published on February 1st, 1963, The New York Review of Books has been hailed to be one of the world's leading intellectual literary magazines. Known for its sharp and critical insights, commentaries and book reviews on culture, literature and current affairs, The NYRB has had much success in gaining attention from and written contributions by eminent scholars, intellectuals and writers such as Margaret Atwood, Noam Chomsky, Harold Bloom, John Updike, Gore Vidal, Joan Didion, (who also recently came to LIVE from the NYPL on November 21, 2011, to talk to Author Sloane Crosley) and Mary Beard (who will also be coming to LIVE from the NYPL on November 30, 2011, to 

Jefferson Market Library's Summer Art Display, Valhalla Hospital: The Art of the Moody Wallen Band, exhibits over 50 line drawings, watercolors, acrylics, and oil paintings throughout the entire building, as well as a visual installation display and rotating video program every Thursday from 5 to 6 p.m. through August 18, inside the program room.

Did you know that The New York Public Library has an official color? I didn't either, and I've worked here since the Dark Ages (before the Internet). But we do, as I found out when I ordered new business cards recently. The color is red.

That's fine with me—I've always liked red (political considerations aside), and besides it gives me an excuse to select as the Spencer Collection Book of the Month for April a small volume containing two illustrations in vivid red. It is appropriate also because Easter falls in April this year.

About a week after my most recent post, something extraordinary happened. Regina Fiorito, a representative of the Estate of Martin Kippenberger (represented by the Galerie Gisela Capitain in Cologne) contacted the Library about it. "We would like to be in touch with Kathie Coblentz from the Spencer Collection, we read her blog today about a Kippenberger book. We (The Estate of Martin Kippenberger) were thrilled and have a missing piece of information for her." 

Black ink soaks through a transparent canvas to form an image drawn by the master, Pablo Ruiz Picasso. 

In Le Mystere de Picasso (1956), director Henri-Georges Clouzot creates a new type of art documentary: one which manages to capture art at the very moment of conception. The transparent canvas allows the camera to capture each stroke of the artist's brush in real-time, beginning in stark black-and-white, but then moving on to color. Later, Clouzot employs stop animation to account for the mixing and application of color in several pieces.  

When is a book not a book? For this month's Spencer Collection Book of the Month, I have a couple of answers in mind.

From the point of view of contemporary art, the answer might be, "When it's a book object."—"Art which makes use of the book format or the structure of the book; typically ... unique sculptural works that take the form of, or incorporate, books but that do not communicate in the ways characteristic of a conventional book." The Spencer Collection and the Library's other special collections possess a number of such works, and like snowflakes or unhappy families, no two are alike.

The permeable concepts of fame, publicity, and exhibitionism in the age of reality television and social networking are some of the themes explored in the exhibit The Talent Show—on view at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, through April 4, 2011.

After I'd spent four Sunday evenings in January engrossed in the doings of the Earl of Grantham and his household on the PBS "Masterpiece Classic" series Downton Abbey, this month's choice for Spencer Collection Book of the Month was obvious: a book that lingered for more than three centuries in the company of barons and earls, before being exiled from their presence in exchange for cold, hard cash.

When I started blogging last May, I hoped to post frequently, but my "day job" of cataloging the books I'd like to write about kept getting in the way. This year, I made a New Year's resolution to blog more regularly. To get started, I thought I would pick a "Spencer Collection Book of the Month" at the beginning of each month and write a short post about it—just enough to share with my readers some of the things that make it special, because the Spencer Collection is a Special Collection at the New York Public Library, and so all of our books are special. Or above average, anyway. (For those not familiar with the Spencer Collection, see my first post: "A 

Pull out your black turtleneck and a beret! The Musuem of Modern Art presents through April 25, 2011 the exhibit Abstract Expressionist New York. Whether or not you think a painting by Jackson Pollock is a work of genius, or something your kid brother could easily do, this exhibit is a treat for the eyes. Suitable for the whole family, consider a visit sometime during or after the Holiday season.

New York in the 1970s, without cellphones, the internet, globalization, etc., was a very different place and arguably more vibrant (though I'm glad Central Park isn't like it used to be.)  Photographer extraordinaire Peter Moore tirelessly went about the City capturing just about everyone and everything, and became particularly known for his thorough photojournalism of the avant-garde scene, which included such influential groups as Fluxus and the Judson Dance Theater.  Tuesday will feature one facet of this multi-talented man's enormous body of work—The Avant Garde Festivals of Charlotte Moorman.

Tuesday is the second of the Wertheim Study scholars' lecture series: Singular and Collective: Radical Women Artists [in NYC during the 1970s].  This one, by Dr. Aseel Sawalha, is the collective part.  She's going to examine the scene from the perspective of anthropology, focusing on two women's arts collectives: The New York Feminist Art Institute (still going strong) and Heresies, which was both a school and a magazine, available at the Library and at home with a library card.   I'll bring the bound printed journal on Tuesday.

I'm looking forward to Tuesday.  Wouldn't you like to meet an artist who draws herself with bunny ears?

Katarina Bishop grew up all over Europe, but she isn’t an heiress. She has a Faberge egg, but she isn’t a Romanov. Kat is used to looking at a room and seeing all the angles, but that was before she stole a whole other life at the Colgan School only to walk away from it months later without a trace.

That was before everything went sideways.

He came from my hometown. As a teenager, he collected photographs of movie stars. A few years later, I clipped fan zines featuring Hayley Mills and the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and the Dave Clark 5 and Star Trek, which last title had a lot to do with his obsessions.

Those who use the resources of the Art & Architecture Collection come in splendid variety: old and young, sophisticated and naive, happily curious and relentlessly searching. We love it, for where else could you be asked "just what is that building in back of that Madonna" followed by a search for more of Grandmama's old Limoge china (oh, those porcelain marks - so confusing!).

It is 8th Street, but from Third Avenue to Avenue A it is called St. Marks Place and is named for St. Mark’s Church in-the-Bowery, which is not even on 8th Street, or St. Marks Place, but at the intersection of 10th Street, Second Avenue, and Stuyvesant Street. The land there has been a site of Christian worship since 1660. The history of St. Marks Place doesn’t go back that far, but a surprising amount of history has happened on these four blocks.