In 2003, the Tretiakov Gallery in Moscow commissioned a facsimile reprint of the single issue of the early Russian modernist journal ‘Unovis’. This journal, organized by the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich and produced in 1920 by the staff and students of the Vitebsk Art School, is one of the principal forms of documentation of the…
Ben Shahn at Harvard
The Fine Arts Library holds the collection of Stephen Lee Taller devoted to the American artist Ben Shahn (1898-1969). The Archive contains many thousands of items related to the artist’s work, including books written by and illustrated by Ben Shahn, magazines in which his work was featured, exhibition and auction sales catalogues, commercial work…
Camerawoman revealed
The Fine Arts Library holds a collection of over 10,000 photographs of European medieval monuments taken by Professor Arthur Kingsley Porter (1883-1933) in the 1920s. The Porter collection includes negatives as well as prints and served as the basis for several of his noted publications such as Romanesque sculpture of the pilgrimage roads (1923). Kathryn…
A Medieval Islamic Bestiary
We have a new addition to the Fine Arts Library’s collection of facsimile editions of illuminated manuscripts. The facsimile in this case reproduces the Kitāb al-Manāfi‘ al-Ḥayawān (The Book on the Usefulness of Animals), a collection of texts classifying and describing the varieties of wild and domestic animals, compiled by the medieval Arab scholar Ibn…
Embroidery as artist’s tool
The Fine Arts Library recently acquired a unique artist’s book made from fabric with decorations and text created exclusively through embroidery. Candace Hicks is a Texas-based artist who elevates a common copy book by recreating it with stitchery. Common threads (2011) is one of several sewn books Hicks has made in recent years. For more…
Exhibition Catalog as Artist’s Book
Here are photographs of the unassuming and enigmatic interior of a recently acquired 1977 James Lee Byars catalogue, issued to accompany an exhibition at the Städtisches Museum Mönchengladbach in Germany. A gold box contains a sheet of crumpled black tissue paper with “TH FI TO IN PH” printed in gold, short for ’THe FIrst TOtally…