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19/150: Seal of the State of Kansas, Gift of the Sabatini Family. Ad astra per aspera is the state motto (to the stars through difficulty). The Territorial seal used the motto populi voce – “by the voice of the people” as the motto.
49/150: WIBW Radio booklet with information on radio performers. The programs include radio schedules, 1946. The Topeka Room has the whole series.
Visitors explored the exhibitions at the Nasher Museum through hands-on crafts. Photos by J Caldwell
An attentive audience listens to Zan Popp about how paperweights are made and what millefiori means.
Yuji Hiratsuka
Osaka, Japan / New Mexico / Indiana
New Birth (2007)
Intaglio, chine collé
Friends of the Library Purchase Award
Printed Image II Competition
2008.24
Garlinghouse Company calendars on display.
The Topeka Room has a large collection of Garlinghouse material. To find out more about this collection call 785-580-4510 or visit the Topeka Room on the 2nd floor of the library.
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41/150: Garlinghouse home catalog. The Garlinghouse company designed and built homes all over the country.
Manayunk - 1947
Artist: Walter Stuempfig (American, 1914–1970)
"Lots of institutions have works by Stuempfig, but they’re all in storage.2 The Forbes family owned dozens of his paintings, which they displayed from time to time in the ground-floor gallery of the former Forbes Building at Fifth Avenue and West Twelfth Street. But the Forbes’s sold their building to NYU in 2010, moved the magazine to Jersey City, and auctioned off the collection. Stuempfig has a Wikipedia page, but it averages just three visits a day, against fifty for Sheeler, fifty-seven for Pippin, and nearly a thousand for Hopper. In short, Stuempfig is remembered, but only barely.
I do not mean to suggest, by writing about him here, that his paintings are undervalued, that he is a neglected master, that it’s time for an exhibition. For that I’d want to see more. But with this single painting of a working class neighborhood in Northwest Philadelphia, maybe the only work of his on view in a major museum, and surely the only one displayed between paintings by an artist of the stature of Hopper, he holds his own.
Wikipedia has a quote about Stuempfig from Robert Sturgis Ingersoll, longtime president of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
A layman's chat with him would constitute a lesson in late 16th century and early 17th century Italian art. His heroes were Caravaggio, Degas and Eakins. One would risk acrimonious rebuttal if making a disparaging remark with respect to any one of them and earn a more violent rebuttal to a remark in praise of American Expressionism.
Having outed myself, in my discussion of Matisse’s early Nice years, as someone with reactionary tastes, I will further admit that even if I might not have done it myself I love Stuempfig for this standing athwart of history and yelling Stop at admirers of Jackson Pollock. But I’m a little surprised, on the basis of Manayunk, to hear one of his heroes was Caravaggio, because my first thought on seeing the painting was of Vermeer and Proust—there it is, I thought, the little patch of yellow wall.3 And Caravaggio was not a painter of little yellow patches....."
permanentcollections.substack.com/p/yale-university-art-g...
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Yale University has been collecting American art for more than 250 years. In 1832 it erected the first art museum on a college campus in North America, with the intention of housing John Trumbull’s paintings of the American Revolution—including his iconic painting The Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776—and close to 100 of his portraits of Revolutionary and Early Republic worthies. Since then, the collection of the Yale University Art Gallery has grown to include celebrated works of art from virtually every period in American history. Encompassing works like an exquisite 18th-century watercolor-on-ivory memorial portrait of a bride, paintings of the towering grandeur of the American West in the 19th century, and jazz-influenced abstractions of the early 20th century, the Gallery’s collection reflects the diversity and artistic ambitions of the nation.
Superb examples from a “who’s who” of American painters and sculptors—including works by Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, Ralph Earl, Albert Bierstadt, Hiram Powers, Frederic Church, Frederick Remington, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, George Bellows, John Singer Sargent, Joseph Stella, Gerald Murphy, Eli Nadelman, Arthur Dove, Thomas Hart Benton, Edward Hopper, Alexander Calder, and Stuart Davis—bring the complex American story to life. Now these extraordinary works of art are in a new home—the elegantly restored galleries in Street Hall, the magnificent Ruskinian Gothic building designed in 1867 by Peter Bonnett Wight to be the first art school in America on a college campus. Rich in architectural detail and nobly proportioned, these breathtaking spaces allow the American collections to “breathe,” to present new visual alliances, and to create multiple artistic conversations. Under soaring skylights, the uniqueness of vision that generations of American artists brought to bear in the service of their art will be on full display.
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artgallery.yale.edu/collection?f%5B0%5D=on_view%3AOn%20vi...
The early years of the 20th century were characterized in the visual arts by a radical international reassessment of the relationship between vision and representation, as well as of the social and political role of artists in society at large. The extraordinary modern collection at the Yale University Art Gallery spans these years of dramatic change and features rich holdings in abstract painting by artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Wassily Kandinsky, as well as in paintings and sculptures associated with German Expressionism, Russian Constructivism, De Stijl, Dada, and Surrealism. Many of these works came to Yale in the form of gifts and bequests from important American collections, including those of Molly and Walter Bareiss, B.S. 1940s; Stephen Carlton Clark, B.A. 1903; Mr. and Mrs. Paul Mellon, B.A. 1929; Katharine Ordway; and John Hay Whitney.
Art from 1920 to 1940 is strongly represented at the Gallery by the group of objects collected by the Société Anonyme, an artists’ organization founded by Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp with Man Ray. This remarkable collection, which was transferred to Yale in 1941, comprises a rich array of paintings, drawings, prints, and sculptures by major 20th-century artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Constantin Brancusi, El Lissitzky, and Piet Mondrian, as well as lesser-known artists who made important contributions to the modernist movement.
The Gallery is also widely known for its outstanding collection of American painting from after World War II. Highlights include Jackson Pollock’s Number 13A: Arabesque (1948) and Roy Lichtenstein’s Blam (1962), part of a larger gift of important postwar works donated to the Gallery by Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935. Recent gifts from Charles B. Benenson, B.A. 1933, and Thurston Twigg-Smith, B.E. 1942, have dramatically expanded the Collection with works by artists such as James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, and Wayne Thiebaud.
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Yale University Art Gallery is the oldest college art museum in America. The Gallery’s encyclopedic holdings of more than 250,000 objects range from ancient times to the present day and represent civilizations from around the globe. Spanning a block and a half of the city of New Haven, Connecticut, the Gallery comprises three architecturally distinct buildings, including a masterpiece of modern architecture from 1953 designed by Louis Kahn through which visitors enter. The museum is free and open to the public.
www.archdaily.com/83110/ad-classics-yale-university-art-g...
Yale University’s School of Architecture was in the midst of pedagogical upheaval when Louis Kahn joined the faculty in 1947. With skyscraper architect George Howe as dean and modernists like Kahn, Philip Johnson, and Josef Albers as lecturers, the post-war years at Yale trended away from the school’s Beaux-Arts lineage towards the avant-garde. And so, when the consolidation of the university’s art, architecture, and art history departments in 1950 demanded a new building, a modernist structure was the natural choice to concretize an instructional and stylistic departure from historicism. Completed in 1953, Louis Kahn’s Yale University Art Gallery building would provide flexible gallery, classroom, and office space for the changing school; at the same time, Kahn’s first significant commission signaled a breakthrough in his own architectural career—a career now among the most celebrated of the second half of the twentieth century.
The university clearly articulated a program for the new gallery and design center (as it was then called): Kahn was to create open lofts that could convert easily from classroom to gallery space and vice versa. Kahn’s early plans responded to the university’s wishes by centralizing a core service area—home to the stairwell, bathrooms, and utility shafts—in order to open up uninterrupted space on either side of the core. Critics have interpreted this scheme as a means of differentiating “service” and “served” space, a dichotomy that Kahn would express often later in his career. As Alexander Purves, Yale School of Architecture alumnus and faculty member, writes of the gallery, “This kind of plan clearly distinguishes between those spaces that ... house the building's major functions and those that are subordinated to the major spaces but are necessary to support them.” As such, the spaces of the gallery dedicated to art exhibition and instruction are placed atop a functional hierarchy, above the building’s utilitarian realms; still, in refusing to hide—and indeed, centralizing—the less glamorous functions of the building, Kahn acknowledged all levels of the hierarchy as necessary to his building’s vitality.
Within the open spaces enabled by the central core, Kahn played with the concept of a space frame. He and longtime collaborator Anne Tyng had been inspired by the geometric forms of Buckminster Fuller, whom Tyng studied under at the University of Pennsylvania and with whom Kahn had corresponded while teaching at Yale. It was with Fuller’s iconic geometric structures in mind that Kahn and Tyng created the most innovative element of the Yale Art Gallery: the concrete tetrahedral slab ceiling. Henry A. Pfisterer, the building’s structural engineer, explains the arrangement: "a continuous plane element was fastened to the apices of open-base, hollow, equilateral tetrahedrons, joined at the vertices of the triangles in the lower plane.” In practice, the system of three-dimensional tetrahedrons was strong enough to support open studio space—unencumbered by columns—while the multi-angular forms invited installation of gallery panels in times of conversion.
Though Kahn’s structural experimentation in the Yale Art Gallery was cutting-edge, his careful attention to light and shadow evidences his ever-present interest in the religious architecture of the past. Working closely with the construction team, Kahn and Pfisterer devised a system to run electrical ducts inside the tetrahedrons, allowing light to diffuse from the hollow forms. The soft, ambient light emitted evokes that of a cathedral; Kahn’s gallery, then, takes subtle inspiration from the nineteenth-century neo-Gothic gallery it adjoins.
Of the triangulated, concrete slab ceiling, Kahn said “it is beautiful and it serves as an electric plug." ] This principle—that a building’s elements can be both sculptural and structural—is carried into other areas of the gallery. The central stairwell, for example, occupies a hollow, unfinished concrete cylinder; in its shape and utilitarianism, the stairwell suggests the similarly functional agricultural silo. On the ceiling of the stairwell, however, an ornamental concrete triangle is surrounded at its circumference by a ring of windows that conjures a more elevated relic of architectural history: the Hagia Sophia. Enclosed within the cylinder, terrazzo stairs form triangles that mimic both the gallery’s ceiling and the triangular form above. In asserting that the stairs “are designed so people will want to use them,” Kahn hoped visitors and students would engage with the building, whose form he often described in anthropomorphic terms: “living” in its adaptability and “breathing” in its complex ventilation system (also encased in the concrete tetrahedrons).
Given the structural and aesthetic triumphs of Kahn’s ceiling and stair, writing on the Yale Art Gallery tends to focus on the building’s elegant interior rather than its facade. But the care with which Kahn treats the gallery space extends outside as well; glass on the west and north faces of the building and meticulously laid, windowless brick on the south allow carefully calculated amounts of light to enter.
Recalling the European practice, Kahn presents a formal facade on York Street—the building’s western frontage—and a garden facade facing neighboring Weir Hall’s courtyard.
His respect for tradition is nevertheless articulated in modernist language.
Despite their visual refinement, the materials used in the gallery’s glass curtain walls proved almost immediately impractical. The windows captured condensation and marred Kahn’s readable facade. A restoration undertaken in 2006 by Ennead Architects (then Polshek Partnership) used modern materials to replace the windows and integrate updated climate control. The project also reversed extensive attempts made in the sixties to cover the windows, walls, and silo staircase with plaster partitions. The precise restoration of the building set a high standard for preservation of American modernism—a young but vital field—while establishing the contentiously modern building on Yale’s revivalist campus as worth saving.
Even with a pristinely restored facade, Kahn’s interior still triumphs. Ultimately, it is a building for its users—those visitors who, today, view art under carefully crafted light and those students who, in the fifties, began their architectural education in Kahn’s space. Purves, who spent countless hours in the fourth-floor drafting room as an undergraduate, maintains that a student working in the space “can see Kahn struggling a bit and can identify with that struggle.” Architecture critic Paul Goldberger, who studied at Yale a decade after Kahn’s gallery was completed, offers a similar evaluation of the building—one echoed by many students who frequented the space: “its beauty does not emerge at first glance but comes only after time spent within it.”
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Debbie and Delmo Tarsitano
Italy / New York NY
untitled paperweight (20th c)
Glass
2007.3
A father and daughter, Debbie and Delmo rarely worked together on the same weight. This shows off both of their talents.
–Sherry Best
Live personal soundtrack at the permanent collection at the Hammer Museum, 11.11.2010.
Machine Project / Hammer A.I.R.
Photo by Marianne Williams.