Companion Volume, Free Lecture Series, and Free Film Screenings, Complement Graphic Modernism Exhibition at The New York Public Library
 

The modernist movements of the early 20th century suffused the arts, the humanities, and the social beliefs of the time. There was a utopian faith in the power of art to transform reality: aesthetically, socially, and politically. In conjunction with the free exhibition Graphic Modernism from the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910-1935, on view from October 5, 2007 through January 27, 2008 at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street, there is an accompanying Graphic Modernism Lecture Series at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library and a film series, Featuring...Modernism in Motion, at the Donnell Media Center, focusing on some of the other elements of this confluence of aesthetics and ethics, progressive design and directed action. A book of the same name, Graphic Modernism from the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910-1935, has been published by The New York Public Library as a companion volume to the exhibition.

Companion Volume

The book Graphic Modernism from the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910-1935, is written by S. A. Mansbach with Wojciech Jan Siemaszkiewicz, with an essay by Robert H. Davis, Jr. and Edward Kasinec. Illustrated in color with more than fifty examples of modernist publications from The New York Public Library's collections, it offers an overview of graphic modernism in eastern Europe, an essay on the growth and development of the Library's collections in this field, a checklist of the exhibition, and suggestions for further reading. Published by The New York Public Library, the book is available in The Library Shop. Open Monday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sunday, 1-5 p.m. , the Shop accepts mail, phone, and Internet orders. For more information, call 212.930.0641 or visit www.thelibraryshop.org.

Graphic Modernism Lecture Series

A related free lecture series is being presented in the Celeste Bartos Education Center at the Humanities and Social Sciences Library, Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street. Seating for these programs is available on a first-come, first-served basis. For more information about these programs, see the Fall-Winter edition of Now, available in Astor Hall or visit www.nypl.org/southcourt.

Thursday, November 15, 2:15 p.m.
Graphic Modernism from the Baltic to the Balkans, 1910-1935
Introduction to the artists and works on view in the exhibition by Steven Mansbach, co-curator of the exhibition and Professor of the History of Twentieth-century Art, University of Maryland, College Park.

Tuesday, December 4 at 2:15 p.m.
The Czech Avant-garde Book
Introduction to Czech avant-garde design of the interwar period by Jindrich Toman, Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The author of Czech Cubism and the Book (Prague, 2004), Professor Toman specializes in modernist book design in Czechoslovakia in the 1920s and 1930s.

Wednesday, December 5 at 2:15 p.m.
Zdrój : Polish Expressionism from the Source
Zdrój was the leading progressive literary and artistic periodical published in Pozna, western Poland, which was part of the Prussian state before Poland regained independence in 1918. Several modernist Polish artistic groups cooperated with the periodical, including Bunt [Revolt], Formisci [Formists], Grupa Zdrój, and Skamander. Lecture by David Goldfarb, Professor of Slavic Literatures, Barnard College, Columbia University.

Saturday, December 8 at 2:15 p.m.
International Constructivism and the Artist Book
This lecture focuses on the activist and tendentious nature of artists' books published in central and eastern Europe in the 1920s, particularly those of Moholy-Nagy, Lissitzky, and Kandinsky. Lecture by Rose-Carol Washton Long, Professor of Art History, The Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Saturday, December 15 at 2:15 p.m.
The New Typography: The Ways and Means of European Modernism, 1910-1935
What types did the modernists use in their Neue Typographie? How did their design principles translate into letterform construction, the structure of the character set, the configuration of the type family, and the relationship of its constituent parts? Presentation by Maxim Zhukov, Professor of Typographic Design, Parsons School of Design, New York, and British Higher School of Art and Design, Moscow.

Tuesday, December 18 at 2:15 p.m.
Building Bridges, Moscow and Berlin - The Golden Twenties
For a few years at the beginning of the 1920s, Berlin became the cultural center of Russian artistic life. Russian writers, actors, and artists supplied Berlin's newspapers, journals, and art exhibitions with an extraordinary array of creative output. Andrei Bely, Ilya Ehrenburg, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Aleksei Remizov, El Lissitzky, Vasily Masiutin, Ivan Puni, and others brought their talents to the West. Thomas Beyer, Professor of Russian, Middlebury College, Vermont, lectures on who they were, why they assembled in Berlin, their contributions to the developments of graphic modernism, and their legacy today.

Tuesday, January 8, 2008 at 2:15 p.m.
Foto: Avant-garde Photography
In the 1920s and 1930s, photography fired the imagination of hundreds of progressive artists in Austria, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Hungary, and Poland; provided a creative outlet for thousands of devoted amateurs; and became a symbol of modernity for millions through its use in magazines, newspapers, advertising, and books. In this lecture, Matthew Witkovsky, Assistant Curator of Photographs, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., aims to recover the crucial role played by photography in this period, and in so doing to delineate a central European model of modernity.

Film Series: Featuring...Modernism in Motion

Free screenings of cinematic works of the 1920s and 30s that reflected, were influenced by, or involved practitioners of the era's various modernist art movements, ranging from silent comedy and avant-garde shorts to European and Hollywood features of the period will be held at Donnell Library Center, 20 West 53 Street on Wednesdays, October 3, 10, 17, 24, and 31 at 2:30 p.m. The films included in this series go an extra step towards subverting 19th century narrative, artistic, and social conventions. From Buster Keaton to Betty Boop, and from Luis Buñuel to Busby Berkeley, these films are dynamic examples of modernism in motion. This series is programmed by John Calhoun of the Donnell Media Center. All films are included in the collection of the Donnell Media Center. Programs are subject to last-minute change or cancellation.   For more information, visit www.nypl.org or, for the film series only, call 212.691.0609.

Wednesday, October 3, 2007 at 2:30 p.m.
Ghosts Before Breakfast , 16mm film, b&w, silent, 7 minutes. Directed by Hans Richter, 1927.
Ballet Mécanique , 16mm film, b&w, silent, 12 minutes. Directed by Fernand Léger, 1924.
Entr'acte , 16mm film, b&w, silent, 13 minutes. Directed by René Clair, 1924.
L'Âge d'or , 16mm film, b&w, 60 minutes. Directed by Luis Buñuel, 1930 (In French with English subtitles).

Each of the pioneering avant-garde films in this program is notable for the creative participation of artists from other forms. Visual artist Hans Richter brought his Dada sensibility to Ghosts Before Breakfast, while the style of painter Fernand Léger's mechanical period found cinematic expression in Ballet Mécanique . The cast of René Clair's absurdist short Entr'acte , created for a ballet with music by Erik Satie, includes Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Satie himself. Surrealist painter Salvador Dalì co-wrote the scenario for Buñuel's L'Âge d'or , which mocks the sacred cows of church, state, and social mores, and was banned in France as punishment for its transgressions.

Wednesday, October 10, 2007 at 2:30 pm
The Electric House, DVD, b&w, silent, 23 minutes. Directed by Edward F. Cline and Buster Keaton, 1922. Starring Buster Keaton and Virginia Fox.
À nous la liberté, 16mm film, b&w, 99 minutes. Directed by René Clair, 1931. Starring Raymond Cordy and Henri Marchand (In French with English subtitles)

Man's struggle with mechanization is the theme of this program. In The Electric House, Buster Keaton is mistaken for an electrical engineer and is hired to thoroughly modernize a mansion, with hilariously catastrophic results. René Clair's satiric À nous la liberté , shown here in its complete original release version, pits two ex-cons against the forces of industrialization. Certain similarities between Clair's film and Chaplin's 1936 Modern Times led the producers of the former to bring suit, though Chaplin claimed never to have seen Clair's film.

Wednesday, October 17, 2007 at 2:30 pm
Fall of the House of Usher, DVD, b&w, silent, 13 minutes. Directed by James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber, 1928. Starring Herbert Stem, Hildegarde Watson and Melville Webber.
The Blue Angel, DVD, b&w, 106 minutes. Directed by Josef von Sternberg, 1930. Starring Marlene Dietrich, Emil Jannings, Kurt Gerron and Hans Albers (In German with English subtitles).

One defining current of modernist art was a probe into psychological states, along with an attendant sexual frankness. Something unsavory is definitely implied in the abstract morass of James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber's Fall of the House of Usher. American amateur filmmakers influenced by German Expressionist contemporaries, Watson and Webber used skewed angles, distorting lenses, and optical superimpositions to create a disorienting universe for their version of the Edgar Allan Poe tale about sickly twin siblings Roderick and Madeline Usher. In Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel, brazen cabaret performer Lola Lola (Marlene Dietrich) catches stern Professor Rath (Emil Jannings) in her thrall and leads him into a shocking state of masochistic degradation. The film made Dietrich an international star, and represented a late Weimar-era gasp of glory for both Jannings and Germany's U.F.A. Studios.

Wednesday, October 24, 2007 at 2:30 pm
The Smiling Madame Beudet, 16mm film, b&w, silent, 25 minutes. Directed by Germaine Dulac, 1923. Starring Germaine Dermoz and Alexandre Aquilliere.
Trouble in Paradise, 16mm film, b&w, 86 minutes. Directed by Ernst Lubitsch, 1932. Starring Miriam Hopkins, Herbert Marshall, Kay Francis, Charles Ruggles,Edward Everett Horton, and C. Aubrey Smith.

In The Smiling Madame Beudet, French avant-garde filmmaker Germaine Dulac adopts a subjective point of view to convey the title character's frustration with her coarse-grained husband and stifling bourgeois existence. Jean Renoir credited German émigré Ernst Lubitsch with inventing the modern Hollywood. The sexual sophistication, Continental elegance, and fluid technique collectively known as "the Lubitsch touch" highlight the pre-Code masterpiece, Trouble in Paradise . Gaston Monescu and Lily Vautier (Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins, respectively) are thieves who fall in love in Vienna, and move on to ply their trade in Paris, where beautiful perfume heiress Mariette Colet (Kay Francis) complicates matters by threatening to make an honest man of Monescu. Edward Everett Horton and Charles Ruggles supply hilarious support, and Paramount art department chief Hans Dreier supplies the ravishing deco design.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007 at 2:30 pm
The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra, 16mm film, b&w, silent, 11 minutes. Directed by Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich, 1928.
Boop-Oop-A-Doop, 16mm film, b&w, 8 minutes. Directed by Dave Fleischer, 1932.
Gold Diggers of 1933, 16mm film, b&w, 98 minutes. Directed by Mervyn LeRoy, with dance direction by Busby Berkeley, 1933. Starring Warren William, Dick Powell, Ruby Keeler, Ginger Rogers, and Joan Blondell.

While the century's new artistic movements reached their full flower in Europe, a more homegrown modernism is on view in this program. In The Life and Death of 9413: A Hollywood Extra , Europeans Robert Florey and Slavko Vorkapich explore a quintessential American dream turned to nightmare. Boop-Oop-A-Doop finds jazz baby Betty Boop at the circus, where she tames lions, walks the tightrope, and resists the clutches of the ringmaster who threatens to take her "boop-oop-a-doop" away. Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler's backstage romance furnishes Gold Diggers of 1933 with its slender plot, but it is Busby Berkeley's kaleidoscopic choreography in such musical showpieces as "Shadow Waltz" and "Pettin' in the Park" that lend the proceedings a surrealist air. Depression-era realities and the shade of World War I also infuse the numbers "We're in the Money" and "Remember My Forgotten Man."

Complementary Exhibitions

Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945
October 12, 2007-January 13, 2008
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue (at 89th Street)

This groundbreaking exhibition, organized by the National Gallery of Art, examines how photography developed into an immense phenomenon in central Europe between the two world wars.

Breaking the Rules: The Printed Face of the European Avant Garde, 1900-1937
November 7, 2007-March 30, 2008
The British Library, St Pancras, 96 Euston Road, London

This exhibition explores the creative transformation that took place in Europe during the first four decades of the 20th century.

About The New York Public Library
The New York Public Library was created in 1895 with the consolidation of the private libraries of John Jacob Astor and James Lenox with the Samuel Jones Tilden Trust. The Library provides free and open access to its physical and electronic collections and information, as well as to its services. It comprises four research centers - the Humanities and Social Sciences Library; The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts; the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; and the Science, Industry and Business Library - and 87 Branch Libraries in Manhattan, Staten Island, and the Bronx. Research and circulating collections combined total more than 50 million items. In addition, each year the Library presents thousands of exhibitions and public programs, which include classes in technology, literacy, and English as a second language. The New York Public Library serves over 16 million patrons who come through its doors annually and another 25 million users internationally, who access collections and services through its website, www.nypl.org.

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 Press Contact: Rima Corben,  212.592.7700 | rcorben@nypl.org
rc:   10.2.07 | nypl063