March 11, 2010
The art of extra-illustration is one of those little side channels of scholarship which the Folger Shakespeare Library pursues without apology. Shakespeare is both a huge subject, as large as the Elizabethan world, which was large indeed, and yet a specialty too. Mounting several exhibitions on subjects related to Shakespeare or his time can’t be easy. But curiosity of the Folger’s curators and guest curators is inexhaustible, and some of their best exhibits are also some of their most arcane.
The current exhibition on extra-illustration—the passion for inserting images and other visual material into old books—covers a small but fascinating chapter in the history of bibliophilia and Shakespeare scholarship. That’s why I enjoyed it so much.
It also fit well with another exhibition, about handcrafted letters sent to Radio Azadi in Afghanistan. This may be even more arcane. But when I visited Afghanistan in 2004, I wrote about a small radio station that also received some of these astonishing homemade works of art. I still have a letter, the back of which is covered in perfectly aligned plastic flowers and the front of which has been carefully decorated along its borders with golden stickers. For the authors of these letters, it’s part of the appeal as they reach out with a tangible written letter to touch the voices that cut through the electronic ether and lessen the isolation of life in a poor and scattered country.
I wrote about both of these exhibitions in today’s The Washington Post.
Illustration: In 1903, Percy Fitzgerald’s Life of David Garrick was expanded by an extra-illustrator from two volumes to 17 volumes. The expanded 1868 biography is on display at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Image courtesy the FSL.
Filed under Art, Culture, Feuilleton, Museums
Tags: decorated texts in Afghanistan, exhibition at the Library of Congress, Expanding the Book: The Art of Extra-lllustration, extra-illustration, Folger exhibition about grangerizing, grangerizing, hand decorated books, hand decorated letters, letters to Radio Azadi, Radio Azadi
March 1, 2010
The young Polish pianist is very much worth hearing. He came through Washington to make his local debut at the Kennedy Center this past weekend. I reviewed it for the Post. One of the things I most enjoyed was his courage to confront what I call Chopin’s “memory effect”:
There is a recurring trope in Chopin’s music that one might call the “memory effect.” Out of inwardness, darkness and anxiety a melody will emerge, simple, childlike, barely adorned, like a nursery rhyme remembered in the midst of a shipwreck. The power of these terrifying flashes of something sweet and uncorrupted embarrasses all too many pianists.
Photo courtesy Washington Performing Arts Society
February 28, 2010
You might easily drive by the little train station near the entrance to James Madison’s Montepelier estate. It is vernacular architecture, built in 1910, to serve the wealthy then-owners of Montpelier, the duPont family. But its restoration, part of Montpelier’s ongoing development of the Madison site, has returned it to its Jim Crow layout, with separate waiting rooms for “colored” and “white” people. That’s a daring move, and an effective one. One must see the obscenity to know its full impact. How odd and tragic that a space which might have been larger and more open and filled with more light was subdivided, to the shame of one group, the insult of another and the inconvenience of both. I wrote about it in Sunday’s The Washington Post and I encourage everyone in striking distance of Orange, VA to pay it a visit. And take in the main Madison house as well, which is looking splendid after the removal of the Pepto-Bismol colored encrustation of the duPont era.
Image by John Strader, courtesy of The Montpelier Foundation
February 25, 2010
I’ve written before about the challenges facing architects who undertake the design of American diplomatic facilities in the age of security madness. The State Department announced on Tuesday that KieranTimberlake, a Philadelphia-based firm, has been chosen to design the new U.S. embassy in London. They won’t have the option of retreating to the exurban frontier and holing up behind blast walls on a vast campus. The design that helped the firm win the prestigious commission looks promising.
February 12, 2010
For a few months shy of a year, I called Detroit home in 1995. I loved the city and the people I met there. I loved its architecture and its sadness, its empty streets and surreal highways. It was an endless phantasmagoria, and I barely scratched the surface of its richness. Detroit is the jumping off point for a PBS documentary, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, that looks into the public transit mess that afflicts so much of the United States. I reviewed the film in today’s Post.
January 20, 2010
The Haiti story touched a nerve, it seems. I spent some time with two journalists from Canal+ today, for a segment which airs in France on Sunday. And tomorrow morning, I’ll be on NPR’s Tell Me More, around 9 a.m
January 19, 2010
My story on the images coming out of Haiti led to an invitation to discuss news coverage of the catastrophe on The Takeaway, a morning radio news and call-in program based in New York. I was joined by Natalie Hopkinson, who wrote a sharp piece on the meaning and use of words such as “looting” in the context of a socially-devastating natural disaster. You can listen here. One caveat: Since I started forcing myself to watch more of the television coverage of the tragedy, I feel the need to say that once again I think newspapers such as the The Washington Post and The New York Times are in a very different league from what is available on the networks and cable. I find much of the televised coverage unbearably narcissistic, saccharine and self-aggrandizing, and that raises very different questions than the boundaries of privacy and photojournalism I discussed on Saturday.
January 18, 2010
WETA will premiere a new documentary about the great, but often neglected architect Benjamin Latrobe, tomorrow evening. I wrote about Latrobe’s masterpiece, the Baltimore Basilica, after it was renovated in 2006. The film is a good primer on what the producers call “America’s First Architect.”
The art of extra-illustration is one of those little side channels of scholarship which the Folger Shakespeare Library pursues without apology. Shakespeare is both a huge subject, as large as the Elizabethan world, which was large indeed, and yet a specialty too. Mounting several exhibitions on subjects related to Shakespeare or his time can’t be easy. But curiosity of the Folger’s curators and guest curators is inexhaustible, and some of their best exhibits are also some of their most arcane.
