[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
[GBW] FW: New Grolier Club exhibition
New exhibition on view at the Grolier Club in NYC:
Facing the Late Victorians:
Portraits of Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection
at the Grolier Club
February 21 April 26, 2008
The Grolier Club is pleased to present an exhibition that examines noted
Victorians through portraits. Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of
Writers and Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection, curated by
Margaret D. Stetz, Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women's Studies at the
University of Delaware, provides the opportunity for visitors to come face
to face with famous British poets, painters, novelists, playwrights and
illustrators.
The exhibition takes audiences back more than one hundred years to explore a
phenomenon that seems astonishingly modern and familiar. Like the world we
know now, Britain at the end of the nineteenth century was a nation filled
with images. Whether circulating by means of posters, books, newspapers,
magazines, cards, and advertisements, or hanging on the walls of art
galleries and of private homes, images were everywhere. As is true today,
what people most wanted to see then were images of faces and bodies,
especially those of celebrities. A visual industry arose in the late
Victorian period to satisfy the demand for portraits in every medium, from
photographs to drawings and paintings, and to reproduce these on a mass
scale. Pictures of monarchs and stage performers, of course, were in great
demand; more surprisingly, so were portraits of what we might call cultural
celebrities that is, writers and artists.Figures such as Oscar Wilde, Robert
Louis Stevenson, Aubrey Beardsley, J. M. Whistler, W. B. Yeats, ³George
Eliot,² and the feminist ³New Women² writers were as famous for the way they
looked and dressed as for anything they created.
Just as the twenty-first century requires us to decode images, so life in
the late Victorian age required portrait literacy. The public learned to
read representations of faces for their social meaning, in order to glean
information about the class, the economic success, the degree of masculinity
or femininity, and the special temperamental qualities of the persons
depicted. When looking at pictures of writers and artists, however, what
spectators hoped most to find was visual evidence of that elusive thing
called ³genius.² It was up to the makers of the images, therefore, to
provide what audiences wanted and to create visible signs of genius, just as
it was up to the subjects of the portraits to compose themselves and their
surroundings in a way that would send desirable messages. Writers and
artists trafficked in commodities, and they became commodities. Their
portraits also provided material for other workers in this industry, such as
caricaturists, who knew that the public took just as great a delight in
seeing its cultural heroes skewered as idealized. These caricature artists,
in turn, became celebrities themselves thanks to the ³New Journalism,² which
was eager to circulate unflattering images of the same poets and painters it
made famous.
Facing the Late Victorians features portraits of dozens of well-known
figures such as George Bernard Shaw, J. M. Barrie, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan
Doyle, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, and John Singer Sargent, who dominated the
world of the arts, along with pioneering children¹s book authors and
illustrators, such as E. Nesbit and Kate Greenaway. Many of these are rarely
seen images, such as the unpublished sketches of themselves that Rudyard
Kipling and Aubrey Beardsley included in letters to friends; the comical
drawing of William Morris that the painter Edward Burne-Jones added to his
guest-book; or Max Beerbohm¹s savage caricature of Oscar Wilde¹s head, which
seems to decay before our eyes faster than did Dorian Gray¹s face. But the
show ranges widely to include photographs and drawings of many lesser lights
whose work was important in advancing British art and literature once
celebrated writers such as the feminist novelist Olive Schreiner and the
Catholic poet Alice Meynell, as well as the artists Walter Sickert and
William Rothenstein.
The show draws its eighty items from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection,
which has been assembled over the past thirty years by one of the premier
authorities on nineteenth-century book history. That collection of first
editions, presentation copies, authors¹ correspondence, and works of art and
design is on loan to the University of Delaware Library. Margaret D. Stetz,
the exhibition¹s curator, is the Mae and Robert Carter Professor of Women¹s
Studies and Professor of Humanities at the University of Delaware.
Catalogue: Facing the Late Victorians is accompanied by a lavishly
illustrated book by Margaret D. Stetz, published by the University of
Delaware Press. Copies are available on site at the Grolier Club or may be
purchased from Associated University Presses, 2010 Eastpark Boulevard,
Cranbury, NJ 08512; Tel. (609) 655-4770, e-mail aup440@xxxxxxx, web
www.aupresses.com ($49.00. ISBN: 978-0-87413-992-1).
Location and times: Facing the Late Victorians: Portraits of Writers and
Artists from the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection will be is view at the
Grolier Club, 47 East 60th Street, New York, NY through April 26, 2008.
Hours: Monday-Saturday, 10 AM 5 PM. Open to the public free of charge. For
more information call the Grolier Club at (212) 838-6690 or send e-mail to
Megan Smith, msmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx High-resolution images from the
exhibition are available. Visit the Grolier Club website:
www.grolierclub.org.
Illustration: Sir Max Beerbohm (1872-1956), Oscar Wilde. Pencil, ink, and
watercolor, [ca. 1894-1900] © Estate of Max Beerbohm. Mark Samuels Lasner
Collection, on loan to the University of Delaware Library
Exhibitions Coordinator
The Grolier Club
47 E. 60th Street
New York, NY 10022
Tel: 212-838-6690
Fax: 212-838-2445
e-mail: msmith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
****************************************************
GBW: The email list for GBW member communications
GBW Standards - October 18-20, 2007
Dallas, TX - More info at http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byorg/gbw/standards.shtml
The GBW website is supported and maintained by
Conservation OnLine http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byorg/gbw
To post messages, email to GBW@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
For problems, contact Eric Alstrom, List Manager:
gbwlist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
For info about the list, visit http://mailman.lib.msu.edu/mailman/listinfo/gbw
****************************************************