Class trip to the Morgan Library and the Americans Society

Adelphi University

Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures

Trip to the city: Morgan Library & Americas Society

November 18^th 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.