The RYERSON & BURNHAM Libraries

Selections from the Art & Architecture Libraries and Archives at the Art Institute of Chicago.

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This Memorial Day, Monday, May 27, the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries will be closed in celebration and remembrance of those who have served in the military.

The works you see here are by Jasper Johns and Norman Rockwell. Jasper Johns’ Three Flags (1958) and White Flag (1955) are only two of the many works by the artist that featured the American flag. Johns gave a new form to a familiar symbol that many were starting to look over, causing people to look at it with fresh eyes.

Norman Rockwell was a prominent artist during both world wars, showing his support for the armed forces through his art. The oil painting with the little girl handing the soldier a flower is titled The Tribute. This image was featured on the cover of Judge in August of 1918, shortly before World War I ended. The American Way (1944) is a World War II poster honoring disabled American veterans.

Come view more works by these artists, as well as other works about art and the military, when the reading room opens on Tuesday, May 28, at 1:00pm. These images are from:

Francis, Richard. Jasper Johns. First ed. Modern Masters Series ; v. 7. New York: Abbeville Press, 1984.

Rockwell, Norman, and Rockwell, Thomas. Norman Rockwell : My Adventures as an Illustrator. New York: Abrams, 1988.

Rockwell, Thomas. The Best of Norman Rockwell. Philadelphia, Pa.: Courage Books, 1988.

Thank you for all those who have served and those who continue to serve our country. Thank you to the artists who honor the members of our military forces with their work.

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Please join us this Thursday, April 11, for a lecture on Interior Design in the 1930s -- Making America Modern.

The Ryerson and Burnham Libraries and the Chicago Art Deco Society invite you to join design historian Marilyn Friedman, author of Making America Modern: Interior Design in the 1930s, for a lecture on the development of interior design in America during the 1930s as seen in exhibition displays, model homes, and private commissions.

Friedman’s book demonstrates how fifty designers embraced influences as diverse as art deco, the Bauhaus, the Viennese Secession, Shintoism, and streamlining to create a quintessentially American modern interior design using innovative construction techniques and new materials.

Prior to the lecture some collection materials, including the image shown here (a photograph of the bar in Elizabeth Arden’s penthouse at 834 5th Avenue from our Historic Architecture and Landscape Image Collection) will be on display in the Ryerson & Burnham reading room from 5:00 until 6:00.

This event is free with museum admission, which is free of charge for Illinois residents on Thursdays from 5:00 until 8:00.

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The above illustrations are from the first edition, dating to 1821, of the book Real Life in Ireland, or, The Day and Night Scenes, Rovings, Rambles, and Sprees, Bulls, Blunders, Bodderation and Blarney, of Brian Boru, Esq. and his Elegant Friend Sir Shawn O'Dogherty: Exhibiting a Real Picture of Characters, Manners, &c. in High and Low Life, in Dublin and Various Parts of Ireland: Embellished with Humorous Coloured Engravings, from Original Designs by the Most Eminent Artists by “a Real Paddy.” Despite what you might think by the long-winded title, the book is not a travel guide or history book. It is a satirical tale that follows the adventures of fictitious characters Brian Boru and Sir Shawn O’Doghery throughout Ireland, which is called “Paddy Land” in the text. The “humorous coloured engravings” referenced in the book’s title are hand-colored aquatints that illustrate the pair’s (mis)adventures.

Even though the story and the main characters are fictitious, the locations, events, traditions, and songs/poems mentioned throughout the book are real. Through its caricatures of the Irish, the book takes a critical look at the challenges they faced in the 1820s.

The book is authored by “a Real Paddy,” a pseudonym attributed to journalist Pierce Egan.

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As you shuffle through the Valentine’s Day cards you received this year, you might want to think twice before tossing them out. Valentine’s Day cards have a history that goes back even farther than the first Hallmark greeting cards of the 1910s. Before and during the Victorian era, valentines were no small matter. They were often handmade with elegant designs and filled with poetry that professed the sender’s love.

The book The Valentine and Its Origins outlines the significance of the holiday during the Victorian era. February 14th was the day that gave people free rein to express their love. England’s General Post Office considered Valentine’s Day to be the busiest day of the year, especially due to the popularity of the Penny Post, which charged only one penny to deliver letters.

The meaning of the cards were also essential, as Debra Mancoff notes in her book Love’s Messenger: Tokens of Affection in the Victorian Age. The cards were not only small tokens of love, but were also significant notions of “honorable intentions” of courtship and marriage. Victorians modeled their actions after the romanticized courtship and marriage of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who had a set of souvenir valentines made to honor their first anniversary in 1841.

Victorian valentines continue to be admired today and are occasionally sold at auction. The Ryerson & Burnham Libraries house many auction catalogs and even the occasional exhibition catalog that feature Victorian Valentine’s Day cards, including hand-colored lithographs, chromolithographs, pierced paperlace cards, pop-up cards, and other examples. Cards once intended to privately proclaim lovers’ affections have found new lives in public collections, such as these examples by Joseph Addenbrooke and Thomas Wood from the Art Institute of Chicago’s own collections. 

What will be the fate of your valentines?

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The feasting season is here, and the reading room will be closed for the Thanksgiving holiday on Thursday, November 22, and Friday, November 23. We hope that all of you have a delicious holiday.

All of the artworks shown here are in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago and, although the museum will be closed on Thursday, November 22, the galleries will be open on Friday. Still Life: Corner of a Table (1873) by Ignace Henri Jen Theodore Fantin-Latour is on view in gallery 225. Charles Demuth’s Eggplant and Plums (1922-23), Doris Lee’s Thanksgiving (1935), and Wayne Thiebaud’s Cakes No. 1 (1967) currently are not on view.

The reading room will reopen at 1:00 on Monday, November 26, when you can come in to review Feasting: A Celebration of Food in Art, the 1992 collection catalog that contains the images you see here, as well as other works on food in art, including 2013′s Art and Appetite catalog.

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Welcome back to school, SAIC students! Please come visit the reading room today (until 8:00) and tomorrow (10:30-5:00) to see the exhibition Forever “Egypt!”: Works from the Collection of Harold Allen.  

The exhibition was curated by SAIC students Margarita Lizcano Hernandez and Alejandra Vargas as the culminating exercise in their two-year Mellon Undergraduate Curatorial Fellowship. Here you can see some installation images of the show and the curators, Alejandra and Margarita, introducing the exhibition to a class. Don’t miss your chance to see this thoughtful introduction to Harold Allen, Egyptomania, and the nature of collecting, which closes this Friday, August 31.

The Ryerson & Burnham Libraries will be closed on Monday, September 3, but the reading room will be open for research at 1:00 on Tuesday, September 4, when you can come in to view I’ll Show You: Posters and Promos from Chicago’s Famous Artists, and whet your appetite for Hairy Who? 1966-1969, opening in the museum galleries later next month.

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We’re hoping for a “surging sea of humanity” at tomorrow’s block party! Come join us in the reading room to learn about and view examples of stereocards at 11:00, noon, and 1:00, and to collage a postcard from the World’s Columbian Exposition at 11:30, 12:30, and 1:30.

If you cannot make it tomorrow, please enjoy these stereocards from the World’s Columbian Exposition Collection. We can retrieve these for you to view during our public hours (we keep a stereoscope at the reference desk).

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We aren’t going to let any possible rain on Saturday interrupt our block party; join us in the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries at 11:30, 12:30, and 1:30 to collage your own postcard from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition using copies of images such as these, from The World’s Fair in Water Colors.

At 11:00, noon, and 1:00 join the curators of our current library exhibition, Forever “Egypt!” Works from the Collection of Harold Allen, to view 19th-century stereocards and other library materials depicting the long history of Egyptomania from printed architectural fantasies of the18th century, to the Streets of Cairo at the World’s Columbian Exposition, through the present day.

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The Ryerson & Burnham Libraries will be closed from 4:00 on Friday, June 15, until 1:00 on Monday, June 25. During this time we will be replacing the carpet in the reading room. We hope that you enjoy these images from Étoffes & tapis étrangers, a catalog from the 1925 art deco exhibition in Paris, while we are away. You can keep updated on the carpeting project over on our Facebook page.

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The Reading Room will be closed on Monday, May 28 for Memorial Day. In the meantime, please enjoy these images for Let the Artist Speak: Teacher’s Broadcast Handbook. This mimeographed handbook accompanied a series of broadcasts on Chicago’s WIND radio station that were designed to interest 7th, 8th, and 9th-grade students in art. Here you see the cover, the credit page for the cover design, and a page of text and two images associated with the “Soldier Artists: Art in the Camps” broadcast that aired on January 6, 1943.

Please come in to view this and other works about art and the armed forces when our reading room re-opens at 1:00 on Tuesday, May 29. Thank you to all those artists who have served and who continue to serve our country.

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In 2016, historian David Garrard Lowe, author of Lost Chicago, donated a collection of approximately 1,100 photographs and ephemeral items, ranging in date from the 1880s to the 1980s, to the Ryerson & Burnham Archives of the Art Institute of Chicago. The collection currently is in the process of being digitized, and a selection of materials is on display through June 15 in an exhibition in the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries' Franke Reading Room.

The exhibition, “Memoir of a City”: Selections from the David Garrard Lowe Historic Chicago Photograph Collection, follows the table of contents in Lost Chicago, organizing the cases thematically around pre-Fire Chicago; culture and recreation in the city; residential architecture; transportation and infrastructure; government and commercial architecture; the 1893 and 1933 World's Fairs; and significant Chicago people and events.

Viewers can explore a variety of primary source materials from the collection, including photographs that have not been published previously. Here you see an example of a photograph from the collection that was featured in Lost Chicago, Henry Ives Cobb’s Federal Building: US Post Office, Courthouse, and Customhouse, completed in 1905 and demolished in 1965. Below that is a design for a “Modern Christmas Tree,” a 1930 work by John Wellborn Root, David F. Leavitt, and Richard McPherren Cabeen. The exhibition also features the advertisement for this tree, which some scholars have suggested provided Irving Berlin with the inspiration for the song “White Christmas.” Other materials on display include menus, playing cards, postcards, and souvenir books.

If you’re planning to visit to view the exhibition, please join us for a conversation with David Garrard Lowe, "Lost Chicago"—The Past, Present, and Future of Historic Preservation, in the Morton Auditorium at 6:00 on Thursday, May 24. Lowe will be joined by author and former Art Institute of Chicago curator John Zukowsky; Founding Partner and Design Principal of the architecture, interiors, and urban planning firm UrbanWorks, Patricia Saldaña Natke FAIA; and School of the Art Institute professor and former director of research for the city's Department of Planning and Development Historic Preservation Division, Terry Tatum, for a lively discussion on the history and future of historic preservation in Chicago’s rich architectural environment. He will also discuss Lost Chicago, and his gift to the Ryerson and Burnham Archives.

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We wish Loyola University, one of our university partners, all the best in the NCAA Final Four Tournament!

Here you see an illustration of Andrea Pozzo’s portrait of Loyola from the Altar of St. Ignatius in the Chiesa del Gesú in Rome. This image comes from the library’s copy of Pozzo’s Perspectiva pictorum et architectorum Andreae Putei e Societate Jesu, Part 2, published in Rome by Jo. Jacobi Komarek, 1700.

This altar in color is a visual spectacle. The entry in Oxford Art Online states:

In 1695 Pozzo was given one of the most prestigious commissions of the period: the creation of the altar for the tomb of Ignatius Loyola in the left transept of the Gesù. His design was the result of a long-drawn-out competition, in which 12 of his designs contended against those by Sebastiano Cipriani (fl 1696–1733) and Giovanni Battista Origone. An exceptionally large number of sculptors and craftsmen worked on this project, which was supervised by the Jesuit brother Carlo Mauro Bonacina with Pozzo as artistic director. The result was one of the most sumptuous and complex works of altar architecture of the Italian Baroque. The architectural setting of the large wall altar, gently convex, an aedicula with columns and broken pediment, was kept relatively plain but was built from precious materials (e.g. rare marbles, lapis lazuli, precious metals) and embellished with rich sculptural ornament that extended to the surrounding chapel walls. In the centre is a niche for sculpture, which can, alternatively, be covered over with an oil painting by Pozzo. The splendid materials and brilliant technique overwhelm the viewer and are intended to arouse wonder and admiration. Yet, the orchestration of the whole remains clear and decisive; the rich colours of varied materials are handled with extraordinary subtlety, and the ornamentation, to the most minute detail, is of the highest artistic order.

This video discusses the altar’s decoration, while this video shows how the altar "arouses wonder and admiration,” just like the 2018 Ramblers basketball team. “Go forth and set the world on fire,” Ramblers! Your friends at the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries are cheering you on.

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Architect of Empires: Highlights from the Library of Pierre Fontaine opens tomorrow. We’re excited to announce a public program being held in conjunction with this exhibition, Percier & Fontaine: A Master Class in Architectural Prints and Drawings, which will take place at 6:00 on Thursday, February 8.

Join Iris Moon, assistant curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum, for the illustrated talk "Building between the Leaves: The Post-Revolutionary Architectural Interior in the Books of Percier and Fontaine." Following the talk meet in the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries to view and discuss the exhibition Architect of Empires: Highlights from the Library of Pierre Fontaine and to look at additional library materials with our speaker and the exhibition curator, Alyse Muller, research associate in the Department of European Painting and Sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago. Then proceed to the Print Studio of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for a demonstration of printing techniques by Shaurya Kumar, associate professor in the Department of Printmedia, to learn how the illustrations in the books of Percier and Fontaine were created.

Registration is required for the library and print studio portions of the event. To register, please email [email protected].

Here you see two plates from Percier and Fontaine’s Recueil de décorations intérieures... (Paris: Chez les Auteurs, 1812.), as well as an image of Louis Messidor Lebon Petitot’s painted plaster sculptures,  Bust of Pierre François Leonard Fontaine (1839) and Bust of Charles Percier (1838).

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In honor of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries will be closed on Monday, January 15. We will re-open for public hours on Tuesday, January 16, at 1:00. 

This linoleum print by Elizabeth Catlett, titled “My Right Is a Future of Equality with Other Americans,” comes from The Negro Woman portfolio of 1946-1947. The image of a woman looking forward to a brighter future calls to mind Dr. King’s dream that: 

"One day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: - 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal’.”

The image is reproduced from the 2005 exhibition catalog Elizabeth Catlett: In the Image of the People, which is available in our reference collection.

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The staff of the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries wishes you a happy new year! The reading room will be closed on Monday, January 1, re-opening at 1:00 on Tuesday, January 2. In the meantime, here are some 15th-century New Year’s greetings:

A woodcut from 1466 with an image of a ship reading “A good new year;”

a woodcut from 1470 depicting the new year, in the form of a child, at the city gate;

a woodcut from 1482, printed by Peter Drach, of Speyer, from a drawing by the Master of the Housebook;

a woodcut dated between 1450 and 1465 with an image of a ship and a child bringing good luck for the new year; and

The title page for Paul Heitz’s 1917 book, in which these images are found.

The publication consists of a brief essay on the New Year’s greeting tradition, followed by a checklist and a series of plates illustrating 30 examples of these greetings, most of which feature the Christ child representing the promise of the new year. These ephemeral prints would be given to friends on single sheets, or used by printers to decorate calendars.

We wish all of you exciting research voyages and the very best of luck in 2018.

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These  Christmas cards were made by Clara Powers Wilson, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, in the 1950s. The staff of the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries wish you a warm and wonderful holiday. The Reading Room will be closed for the holiday on Monday, December 25, and Tuesday, December 26, but if you would like to see Wilson’s scrapbook, we will look forward to seeing you when we open on Wednesday, December  27.

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Happy Thanksgiving from the Ryerson & Burnham Libraries. The reading room will close one hour early, at 4:00, on Wednesday, November 22, and will remain closed Thursday, November 23 and Friday, November 24 for the holiday. Please come in during our public hours on Monday, November 27, when you can request the book containing these images, John James Audubon’s Birds of America from Drawings Made in the United States and Their Territories.

Information on the turkey appears in volume five, which was published by V. G. Audubon and C. S. Francis and Company in New York in 1855. John James Audubon wrote the text in this edition, incorporating research as well as his own observations of the birds from his travels. He was impressed by the turkey, noting:

The great size and beauty of the Wild Turkey, its value as a delicate and      highly prized article of food, and the circumstance of its being the origin of the domestic race now generally dispersed over both continents, render it one of the most interesting of the birds indigenous to the United States of America.

Here you see two of Audubon’s images of the turkey: Wild Turkey, Male and Wild Turkey, Female & Young, in lithographs printed and colored by J. T. Bowen of Philadelphia.

Have a delicious Thanksgiving!