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Artists' Papers and Art Patricia C. Willis Twentieth-century writers intersect with their artist-contemporaries, and the collection demonstrates such connections. Mabel Dodge Luhan knew Georgia O'Keeffe, Rebecca Salsbury James, and Marsden Hartley, whose archives are all at Yale. H.D. was a friend of the illustrator George Plank, the artist who decorated her book published by The Brendin Press and whose papers document his career as designer of cover-art for Vogue as well as his years among American writers in England. Henry McBride, the New York art critic and a columnist for The Dial, reviewed exhibitions mounted by Alfred Stieglitz; both their papers are in the collection. The Katherine Dreier papers record the history of her Société Anonyme and the artists she championed, particularly Marcel Duchamp and other European painters. Dreier was an early collector of Wassily Kandinsky, Arshile Gorky, Man Ray, El Lissitzky, Max Ernst, and Abraham Walkowitz. Her collection of paintings has been acquired by the Yale Art Gallery, the Phillips Collection, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and other museums. A number of art works have come to the library through literary archives. Painter and poet Marsden Hartley is represented by four paintings; Charles Demuth, friend of Eugene O'Neill and many other writers, by four "poster portraits," including one of Georgia O'Keeffe, who gave the paintings; Sinclair Lewis gave the library his Childe Hassam paintings; Florine Stettheimer, set designer for the Gertrude Stein/Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts, contributed paintings of Carl Van Vechten, Joseph Hergesheimer, and others. As gifts from Alice B. Toklas came a small Picasso, two French children's chairs upholstered with petit-point designed by Picasso and worked by Toklas, and paintings of Gertrude Stein by Francis Picabia, of Alice B. Toklas by Dora Maar, and of dog Basket II by Marie Laurencin. Elizabeth F. Chapman donated a small Picasso collage featuring Miss Stein's and Miss Toklas's calling card. A portrait sculpture of Gertrude Stein by Jo Davidson is among numerous other images of Stein. In addition, there are more than one hundred paintings by Leo Stein. The collection also includes original drawings and family papers of Peter Newell; Paul Horgan's watercolor drawings of the Southwest--aides memoires for his writings; Miguel Covarrubias's caricatures of Eugene O'Neill and other writers; sculpture by Arnold Ronnebeck, Archipenko, and Noguchi; etchings and other works by Joseph Reed, 1954; and cartoons and paintings by Robert Osborn, 1928. Norman Holmes Pearson's collection of "art for the wrong reasons"--drawings and paintings by writers--contains 68 works by Henry Miller, E. E. Cummings, John Dos Passos, D. H. Lawrence, William Rose Benét, Katherine Ann Porter, and others. The collection contains an abundance of photographs. The largest group was made by Carl Van Vechten, inveterate photographer of his friends, including Sherwood Anderson, W. H. Auden, Tallulah Bankhead, Leonard Bernstein, Marlon Brando, Truman Capote, Charles Demuth, Janet Flanner, Julie Harris, Christopher Isherwood, Mina Loy, Rouben Mamoulian, Marianne Moore, Clifford Odets, James Purdy, Man Ray, Gertrude Stein, Georg Szell, Jessica Tandy, Sigrid Undset, Gore Vidal, and Rebecca West among others. In the Stieglitz-O'Keeffe papers are 65 prints by Stieglitz as well as the "wastebasket collection," small trial proofs which O'Keeffe rescued as Stieglitz discarded them. Photographs by Man Ray, Paul Strand, and Cartier-Bresson are among smaller groups of professional work. Many of the archival collections contain photographs of families and friends, formal portraits, and travel snapshots.  Comments:Ellen R.
Cordes, ellen.cordes@yale.edu |