Adelphi University
Department of Languages,
Literatures & Cultures
Trip to the city: Morgan Library & Americas Society
November 18th
from 2 pm to 5pm.
1)
Morgan Library.
-We will meet at the
Morgan Library in Manhattan at 1:50 pm (225 Madison Avenue, NY. Check the map
attached for directions).
-We will visit the
following expositions with an audio tour guide:
-“Word and Image: Martin Luther's
Reformation”: Five
hundred years ago a monk in a backwater town at the edge of Germany took on the
most powerful men in Europe: the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope…and he won.
Martin Luther’s Reformation is one of the most successful media campaigns in
history and an event that completely altered the course of western history. To
celebrate the 500th anniversary of Luther posting the Ninety-Five Theses to the
church door in Wittenberg, this exhibition explores how the Reformation was
launched and propagated through Luther’s strategic use of media: printed books,
prints, paintings, and music. Luther’s thoughts on Scripture and man’s
relationship to God were revolutionary, but the way that text and art were
employed to disseminate his message was equally ground-breaking. The inception
and development of the Reformation will be illustrated in Word and Image with
about ninety works of art and objects, the majority of which are from museums
in Germany and which have never been seen before in North America. Exceptional
highlights include a rare printed copy of the Ninety-Five Theses, nearly forty
paintings, prints, and drawings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther’s manuscript
draft of his Old Testament translation, Conrad Meit's exquisite statues of Adam
and Eve, and over thirty of Luther’s most important publications and the ones
that led the pope to excommunicate Luther and make him the most successful
heretic in history.
-“Dubuffet Drawings, 1935–1962”: In the mid-1940s, French
artist Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) shocked the art establishment with his
paintings inspired by children’s drawings, graffiti, and the art of psychiatric
patients. Rejecting conventional notions of beauty and good taste, Dubuffet
asserted that invention and creativity could only be found outside traditional
cultural channels. In his efforts to emulate the immediacy of the untrained and
untutored, he often turned to drawing, a medium in which he could indulge his
passion for research and experimentation. Dubuffet Drawings, 1935–1962 is the
first museum retrospective of the artist’s works on paper.
-“Charlotte Brontë: An Independent
Will”: From
the time Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre was first published in 1847,
readers have been drawn to the orphan protagonist who declared herself “a free
human being with an independent will.” Like her famous fictional creation,
Brontë herself took bold steps throughout her life to pursue personal and
professional fulfillment. Charlotte Brontë: An Independent Will traces the
writer’s life from imaginative teenager to reluctant governess to published
poet and masterful novelist. This exhibition celebrates the two-hundredth
anniversary of Brontë’s birth in 1816, and marks an historic collaboration
between the Morgan, which holds one of the world’s most important collections
of Brontë manuscripts and letters, and the Brontë Parsonage Museum, in Haworth,
England, which has loaned a variety of key items including the author’s
earliest surviving miniature manuscript, her portable writing desk and
paintbox, and a blue floral dress she wore in the 1850s. The centerpiece of the
exhibition is a portion of the original manuscript of Jane Eyre, on loan from
the British Library and being shown in the U.S. for the first time, open to the
page on which Jane asserts her "independent will." Also shown for the
first time in America will be the only two life portraits of Brontë, on loan
from London’s National Portrait Gallery.
-Morgan Library Permanent
Collection.
-At 3:00 pm in the
Morgan Library Cafeteria, we will have an informal conversation with the
Ecuadorian writer Wladimir Chávez. (Beverages and food aren´t include in the
entrance fees).
2)
At 4:15 pm we will meet
at The Americas Society (680 Park Avenue. Check the map attached for
directions). We will visit the exposition “Told and Untold: The Photo Stories
of Kati Horna in the Illustrated Press”. Free entrance.
For
several decades Kati Horna (née Katalin Deutsch, Budapest, 1912–Mexico City,
2000) photographed a cross-section of Mexico’s cultural life. As the first solo
show dedicated to the photographer in the United States, Told and Untold will
feature Horna’s photographs displayed alongside the newspapers and magazines
that put them in circulation. Through the display of photographs, contact
sheets, montage cuttings, periodicals, and personal albums of her work, the
show will give viewers the chance to understand Horna as a female artist who
thrived in collaborative environments—or, as she preferred to call herself, una
obrera del arte (an art worker). Horna’s practice was rooted in her upbringing
in Budapest and her studies in Berlin, where she lived in the early 1930s to
pursue a radical political education. As a member of a small group of activists
close to the German theoretician Karl Korsch and the dramatist Bertolt Brecht,
Horna became interested in fields such as psychoanalysis and anarchism. She
became a photographer in the midst of photojournalism’s expansion as a
phenomenon of mass culture, and was able to seize the opportunities for
professional, aesthetic, and political engagement offered by the European
illustrated press of the interwar period. Shortly after the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War in 1936, she made her way to Barcelona where she worked in
the production of a wide range of propaganda materials supporting the
Anarchists’ complex position in the conflict. Horna’s photographs appeared in
numerous brochures, newspapers, and magazines that denounced the war while
promoting an anarchist social revolution. Benefiting from recent archival
research, the show challenges previous characterizations of Horna as a passive
bystander during the war—presenting instead how the circumstances of her active
engagement bore heavily on her subsequent practice in exile. In 1939, following
the war’s end, Horna and her husband—the Spanish artist José Horna—settled in
Mexico City, where she soon began collaborating with the country’s illustrated
press. Registering the city’s rapid transformation and vibrant cultural life in
the mid twentieth century, Horna’s series and photo essays appeared on the
pages of magazines such as Nosotros, Arquitectura México, and Mujeres:
Expresión Femenina. In Mexico, she was active in several artistic and
intellectual circles. This included her friendships with Leonora Carrington and
Remedios Varo, as well as her association with Mathias Goeritz, a lesser-known
connection that proved one of the most fruitful partnerships of her career. In
the 1960s, Horna went on to produce a remarkable body of deeply personal work,
some of it as fantastic photo stories for magazines such as S.nob. Pondering on
issues of gender, transience, and desire, these stories testify to Horna’s
creative flourishing as a maturing artist in exile.
