Recently in Exhibitions Category

Our display of pre-cinema optical devices will be on view in the second floor cases of Rare Books and Special Collections in Firestone Library for two more months. Included is this nineteenth-century French toy magic lantern projector with hand-colored slides. RBSC galleries are open to the public weekdays 8:30-4:30 and weekends 12:00-5:00.

If you are interested in these devices, you should consider attending the International Magic Lantern Society conference in Washington D.C. July 10-13, 2008. Many of the performances are free and open to the public. The entire series of scholarly lectures can be attended for only $10. For more information, see http://www.magiclanternsociety
.org/convention08.html

One month from now, Jonathan Fisher’s historic painting of Nassau Hall will disappear from the walls of Firestone Library and reappear down the street at the Morven Museum and Garden. Beginning June 1, 2008, it will be a part of Morven’s exhibition Picturing Princeton 1783: The Nation’s Capital celebrating the 225th anniversary of the coming of the Continental Congress to Princeton, New Jersey. The exhibition includes paintings, sculpture, books, manuscripts, and historical documents, with loans from Princeton University Library, Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton Historical Society, and dozens of other museums and archives around the country.

As explained on Morven’s website

Princeton made an ideal temporary meeting place. It was centrally located to all of the colonies, but far enough removed from the mutinous troops to be considered safe. Another attraction was that Elias Boudinot had close family ties in Princeton - his recently widowed sister Annis Boudinot Stockton lived at Morven, a large mansion near the center of town. Her husband Richard Stockton, who had died in 1781, had been a member of Congress and signer of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. Elias Boudinot initially took up residence with his sister at Morven and entertained members of Congress there, including hosting an Independence Day Jubilee. … Residents of Princeton enthusiastically welcomed Congress with a proclamation of support and opened their doors for lodging and victuals. Overnight, Princeton was transformed from an obscure village into the nation’s capital.

For more information on community-wide events, visit http://revolutionaryprinceton.org/index.html

The opening of the exhibition Notre Livre: À toute épreuve. A Collaboration between Joan Miró and Paul Éluard will be celebrated on Sunday, March 9, 2008, with a lecture and reception. Elza Adamowicz will speak on “The Surrealist Artist’s Book: Beyond the Page” in the Betts Auditorium, School of Architecture, at 3:00. A reception will follow at 4:00, in the Leonard L. Milberg Gallery for the Graphic Arts on the second floor of Firestone Library.

Elza Adamowicz is a Professor of French Literature and Visual Culture and the Chair of French Department at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research specialisations are Dada and Surrealism and her work, among other things, has offered a reflection on the relationship between literature and art, and text and image in these movements. Her publications include: Surrealist Collage in Text and Image: dissecting the exquisite corpse (Cambridge University Press 1998); Ceci n’est pas un tableau: les écrits surréalistes sur l’art (L’Age d’Homme 2004); Surrealism: Crossings/Frontiers (edited book, Peter Lang 2006) and Buñuel and Dali: Un Chien andalou (forthcoming 2008). She has also published numerous articles on topics such as Claude Cahun, André Breton, Joan Miró, collage and Surrealist maps. In 2006, she co-organised a conference on Dada entitled “Eggs laid by tigers: Dada and Beyond” at Swansea University. She is currently researching on a book on Dada bodies: ‘Dada’s exquisite corpses: between battlefield and fairground’.

The exhibition continues in the Milberg Gallery through June 29, 2008, open Monday to Friday, 9:00-5:00, Wednesday 9:00-7:45, Saturday and Sunday 12:00-5:00. The exhibition is free and open to the public.

This spring, we are celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of À toute épreuve, one of the most beautiful books of the twentieth century, created by the French poet Paul Éluard and the Catalan artist Joan Miró. The entire unbound volume is on exhibit in the Milberg Gallery for the Graphic Arts, Firestone Library, through June 29, 2008.

The exhibition opening will be celebrated on Sunday, March 9, 2008, with Elza Adamowicz, Professor of French and Visual Culture, School of Modern Languages, Queen Mary, University of London, presenting the talk “The Surrealist Artist’s Book: Beyond the Page” in the Betts Auditorium, School of Architecture, at 3:00. A reception will follow at 4:00, in the Leonard L. Milberg Gallery for the Graphic Arts on the second floor of Firestone Library.

From its humble beginnings in 1930 as a plain paper miniature, this simple collection of poems was transformed into an extraordinary deluxe edition folio. The cries of loneliness expressed in Éluard’s verse, “Je suis seul je suis seul tout seul” (I am alone I am alone all alone), are answered on each page with the buoyant companionship of vibrantly colored prints, resulting in a new sense of wholeness and optimism. The title of the work, roughly translatable as “ready for anything” or “foolproof,” conveys a sense of durability and perseverance. Éluard’s poems represent strength in the face of emotional turmoil just as the book survived production challenges and setbacks to become a monument to the art of bookmaking and the possibilities of collaboration.

The project began in 1947, when the Swiss publisher Gérald Cramer approached Éluard with the idea of publishing an illustrated edition of his poetry. For the art, Éluard suggested his friend Miró, with whom he had already collaborated. It took Miró eleven years to create the 233 blocks needed to print 79 woodcuts. He used planks of wood collaged with plastic, wire, old engravings and bark paper to achieve images that practically dance across the page. “I am completely absorbed by the damn book,” wrote Miró to his publisher, Gerald Cramer, “I hope to create something sensational… .” The final volume has a brilliance of invention and a vitality of form and color, rarely found inside the cover of a book.

Special thanks go to Ainsley Brown, Ph.D. candidate, Department of French and Italian, for her work on all aspects of this exhibition and its keepsake. In the gallery, we will offer English language translations of the poetry, some by Ms. Brown and some by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, who was a great admirer of Eluard’s work. Here is a sample:

L’univers-Solitude 2 Villages de la lassitude Où les filles ont les bras nus Comme des jets d’eau La jeunesse grandit en elles Et rit sur la pointe des pieds. Villages de la lassitude Où tous les êtres sont pareils. Paul Eluard

Universe-Solitude 2 Villages of weariness Where the arms of girls are bare As jets of water Where their youth increasing in them Laughs and laughs and laughs on tiptoe. Villages of weariness Where everybody is the same Translation by Samuel Beckett

I can count on one hand the number of practicing collotypists in the United States and still have enough fingers left to write down their names. Master printers Accra Shepp and Edward Fausty have been working on campus all semester with a small group of students to revitalize this forgotten technique. Their finished project, an artist’s book called Atlas, is on view in the Princeton Atelier at 185 Nassau Street through January 17.

For more information, see http://www.princeton.edu/arts/events/archive/collotypeandtheartists1/

There are several different ways of making a collotype, each one more difficult than the next, but if done correctly the process results in a photomechanical image with soft, continuous tone because it is made without the use of a half-tone screen. In general, a metal plate is coated with a light-sensitive gelatin solution and exposed to light through a photographic negative. The gelatin is hardened in exposed areas and is then soaked in glycerin, which is absorbed most in the non-hardened areas. The hardened areas accept the ink, and the plate can be printed just like an etching or engraving.

Paul Éluard (1895-1952). À toute épreuve. Gravures sur bois de Joan Miró. Première édition illustrée. Geneva: Gérald Cramer, [1958]. 79 woodcuts by Joan Miró, printed in Paris at Atelier Lacourière; text printed by Marthe Fequet and Pierre Baudier. Image copyright Artists Rights Society (ARS)	The Princeton University Library is pleased to announce the acquisition of one of the most beautiful books created in the twentieth-century, À toute épreuve, with text by the French poet Paul Éluard and 79 original woodcuts by the Catalan artist Joan Miró. The entire volume can be seen in the upcoming exhibition entitled, Notre Livre: À toute épreuve. A Collaboration between Joan Miró and Paul Éluard, in the Milberg Gallery for the Graphic Arts, Firestone Library, from February 22 to June 29, 2008.

To create this book, Miró cut over 233 woodblocks working over the better part of eleven years. He used planks of wood collaged with plastic, wire, old engravings and bark paper to achieve images that practically dance across the page. "I am completely absorbed by the damn book," wrote Miró to his publisher, Gerald Cramer, "I hope to create something sensational. . . ." The final volume has a brilliance of invention and a vitality of form and color, rarely found inside the cover of a book.

The exhibition opening will be celebrated on Sunday, March 9, 2008, with Elza Adamowicz, Professor of French and Visual Culture, School of Modern Languages, Queen Mary, University of London, presenting the talk "The Surrealist Artist's Book: Beyond the Page" in the Betts Auditorium, School of Architecture, at 3:00. A reception will follow at 4:00, in the Leonard L. Milberg Gallery for the Graphic Arts on the second floor of Firestone Library.

In the gallery, we will offer English language translations of the poetry, some by the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, who was a great admirer of Eluard's work. Here is a sample:

L'univers-Solitude 2 Villages de la lassitude Où les filles ont les bras nus Comme des jets d'eau La jeunesse grandit en elles Et rit sur la pointe des pieds. Villages de la lassitude Où tous les êtres sont pareils. Paul Eluard

Universe-Solitude 2 Villages of weariness Where the arms of girls are bare As jets of water Where their youth increasing in them Laughs and laughs and laughs on tiptoe. Villages of weariness Where everybody is the same Translation by Samuel Beckett

Several portfolios from our Charles Rahn Fry Collection of Pochoir are now on loan to the exhibition, Fashioning the Modern French Interior: Pochoir Portfolios in the 1920s at the Wolfsonian at Florida International University, Miami Beach, Florida through May 11, 2008. http://www.wolfsonian.org/exhibitions/upcoming/index.pochoir.html

The official press release for the exhibition sets the stage:

In order to market the moderne interior design aesthetic on the rise in the 1920s, French publishers produced limited-edition portfolios using a traditional technique--known in France as pochoir. The technique, which involved the hand application of color to a print using a series of carefully cut stencils (pochoirs), produced luminous images ideal for promoting the new approaches to interior design. The exhibition brings to light the tensions between traditional and modern design that existed in the period, and provides design solutions that will delight today's audiences.

Dozens of books, portfolios, and journals printed in the pochoir technique remain available to Princeton University readers and can be seen in the reading room of rare books and special collection. Among these:

La Guirlande is one of the rarest of the Art Deco magazines with pochoir plates by Barbier, Brunelleschi, Taquoy, Vallée, Bonotte, Domergue, and others, printed by Jean Saudé.

The stunningly colorful Papillons holds 20 pochoir prints illustrating a total of 81 butterflies. The purpose of the volume, beyond creating something of astonishing beauty, was to record rare or exotic specimens from museums and privates collections that would inspire decorative arts designers. Séguy produced eleven albums of illustrations and pattern, offering examples of design for textiles, ceramics, wallpaper, advertisements, and other utilitarian applications.

Other images from our Pochoir collection can be seen at: http://libweb5.princeton.edu/visual_materials/pochoir/p/ThumbnailFrame.html

On Sunday, October 7 at 3:00, Mexican novelist, poet, and playwright Carmen Boullosa will give a talk entitled “The Struggle is on the Walls: Antecedents and Inheritors of the TGP,” in conjunction with the opening of the exhibition El Taller de Gráfica Popular / The Workshop of Popular Graphic Arts. The talk will be held in Aaron Burr Hall, Rm. 219, and is open to the public free of charge. A reception will follow the lecture at 4:00.

The Graphic Arts collection is fortunate to have acquired a small group of posters and fliers by the TGP (http://diglib.princeton.edu). A selection are on view until February 10, 2008 in the Milberg Gallery for Graphic Arts. The exhibition and associated events are made possible with the joint support of the Friends of the Princeton University Library and the Program of Latin American Studies. For more information, see http://www.princeton.edu/rbsc/exhibitions/milberg.html.

The collective printmaking workshop, Taller de Gráfica Popular (TGP), was founded in 1937 by Leopoldo Méndez, Pablo O’Higgins, and Luis Arenal. During the progressive era of post-revolutionary Mexico, TGP quickly grew into Mexico’s foremost political printshop. It was a vibrant collective of both established and emerging artists who were committed to the direct use of visual art in the service of social change.

TGP printed posters and broadsides in support of unions and agricultural workers; endorsed movements for social justice; and condemned fascism. In the tradition of José Guadalupe Posada, they produced a constant stream of handbills and fliers using witty corridos (topical songs) and satirical calaveras (skeletons) to caricature politicians and corrupt officials.

The Graphic Arts collection is fortunate to have acquired a small group of posters and fliers by the TGP (http://diglib.princeton.edu). A selection will be exhibited from September 21, 2007 to February 10, 2008 in the Milberg Gallery for Graphic Arts.

To open the exhibition, the Friends of the Princeton University Library and the Program of Latin American Studies, are sponsoring a lecture at 3:00 on Sunday 7 October 2007. Mexican novelist, poet, and playwright Carmen Boullosa will give a talk entitled “The Struggle is on the Walls: Antecedents and Inheritors of the TGP,” followed by a reception in the gallery.