Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 48, 3-4, Fall 2009 by Alex Knowlton

Archives of Americ an Art Journ al

BEASTS

From the director

I am secretly afraid of animals—of all animals except dogs, and even of some dogs. I think it is because of the Usness in their eyes, with the underlying not-usness which belies it, and is so tragic a reminder of the lost age when we human beings branched off and left them; left them to eternal inarticulateness and slavery. Why? Their eyes seem to ask us. —Edith Wharton*

Endpapers inspired by Katharine Lane's studies for the doors at Harvard's Biological Laboratory. For a full view of the sketch, see page 26.

Since first coming across this passage, written by Edith Wharton in 1920s, these words have continued to resonate in my mind. To me, they speak with sensitive eloquence of the complex and deeply rooted relationship between humans and animals. Visual artists have probed this relationship from prehistoric times to the present, and the Archives of American Art’s collection is rich with evidence documenting the diverse approaches that artists have used to explore their fascination with the animal world. In this issue of the Journal, we have invited several prominent scholars to delve into our collections and present new research on how artists Martin Johnson Heade, Charles Green Shaw, Joseph Cornell, and Katharine Lane Weems have integrated the animal kingdom into their work. Each of these artists represents a unique point of view, and their respective archives are fertile ground for exploring their fascination with beasts.

* Edith Wharton, Diary titled “Quaderno dello Studente,” 1924, p. [4]. Edith Wharton Collection, Beineke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

ContributOrs

Leonard S. Marcus is a historian and critic, and one of the world’s leading authorities on children’s books and their illustration. His books include Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon; Dear Genius; Golden Legacy; and Minder of MakeBelieve: Idealists, Entrepreneurs, and the Shaping of American Children’s Literature. Christopher Benfey is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College and the author of four books on the American Gilded Age, including, most recently, A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (2008). Deborah H. Dluhy is dean of the School and deputy director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Rebecca Reynolds, an American sculpture specialist, is the curator of the John Paul and Margaret Cassidy Collection. As a former Jean S. and Frederic A. Sharf Fellow, Art of the Americas, at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, she worked extensively with the collection of record for Weems. Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where she also teaches in the film program. The author or editor of more than sixty volumes, she was recently elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Cover: Unidentified print in the source files of the Joseph Cornell papers.

Leslie Umberger is the senior curator of exhibitions and collections at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Umberger specializes in contemporary American art, the art of communally and self-taught artists, and the politics of culture and representation.

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I n T h i s ISSUE

Looking-Glass Modernist: Charles Green Shaw and the Making of “No Such Animal” Leonard S. Marcus

The Audubon of Hummingbirds Christopher Benfey

Some Unusual Animal Not Often Seen Deborah H. Dluhy

Cornell in the Archives Mary Ann Caws

Immortalizing the Northwoods: Fred Smith’s Wisconsin Concrete Park Leslie Umberger

Artists' Gallery: Animal Studies at the Archives of American Art

Artist’s Project Patti Smith

Artists in the Landscape A Project by Pamela Golden

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L o o k i n g - Gl a s s M o d e r n i s t :

Charles Green Shaw and the Making of “No Such Animal” LEonard S. Marcus

In chapter six of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871), a lost and lonely Alice comes face to face with Humpty Dumpty, the aloof, self-satisfied egg of nurseryrhyme renown, and in the course of a hilariously awkward conversation prevails on him to interpret “Jabberwocky,” a puzzling poem she has just learned by heart. “‘Slithy’ means ‘lithe’ and ‘slimy,’” states the imperious egg without a moment’s thought. “‘Lithe’ is the same as ‘active.’ You see it’s like a portmanteau—there are two meanings packed up into one word.”1 The English-language phrase “portmanteau word” derives from this famous passage (a portmanteau being an old-fashioned suitcase with twin compartments joined by hinges and latches), as did two of the many such mongrel words of Carroll’s own invention to

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Opposite: Title Page for “No Such Animal,” 1936. Following pages: Gazellephant, Play-boyster, Unicorncob pipe, Hot-cross-bunny, Pelicantelope, Halibutterfly, Hippo-headed fella (back). From pages 5, 10, 12, and 14 of “No Such Animal,” Charles Green Shaw, 1936.

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enter English—“chortled” (an amalgam of “chuckled” and snorted”) and “galumphing” (from “galloping” and “triumphing”). As memorable as these clever coinages have proven to be, however, their author was clearly intent on something other than conventional communication when he fashioned a poem which, as Alice muses, “seems to fill my head with ideas—only I don’t know exactly what they are!” Formally rigorous and self-referential almost to the point of being content-free, Carroll’s strange literary tour de force raises nonsense to the level of an abstract art. All this was of the greatest possible interest to Charles Green Shaw (1892–1974), New York Café Society wit, early member of the American Abstract Artists group, and from the mid-1930s, author and illustrator of children’s books. An heir to the Woolworth fortune, Shaw came of age with the leisure to do what he wished. On graduating from Yale alongside Cole Porter, he dabbled in architecture and then, following military service during World War I and a brief foray into business, embarked on the first of a series of consequential careers in the arts. Shaw started out during the 1920s as a writer, contributing articles to The New Yorker, Smart Set, and Vanity Fair (for which he sometimes produced his own illustrations), and turning out an occasional novel and play. Before the decade was out, a fateful encounter with George Luks and a visit to Paris in 1929 set Shaw on a new course as a visual artist. Embracing Cubism and exploring biomorphic form (two related tendencies in contemporary European modernist painting) as social realism in American art was on the rise, by 1934 Shaw was ready for a first solo exhibition of canvases he called “semi-abstract.” 2 In April 1936, Shaw launched himself on yet another career, this time as an author and illustrator of children’s books. He did so, he later explained rather unhelpfully to Paul Cummings of the Archives of American Art, because he had “thought it . . . a good idea.” 3 More telling was his professed admiration for the nonsense writings of Lewis Carroll. Seconding the opinion of C. K. Chesterton, in the same interview he declared that he “would have rather written ‘Alice in Wonderland’ than the Encyclopedia Britannica.” 4 “No Such Animal,” an illustrated manuscript intended, as the title page gamely declares, for “sophisticated children of practically any age” and aimed at “proving absolutely nothing,” represented his first attempt at reaching for the Carrollian brass ring. As dummied up by Shaw in the pages of a gray spiral-bound sketchbook and on seven additional loose sheets, “No Such Animal” lays plans for a bestiary comprised of brief, pithy verses and accompanying pen-line and watercolor graphics.5 The animals in question—with names like “Gazellelephant,” “Ham-mock-tur-tle,” “Hot-cross-bunny”—are all imaginary: portmanteau-word creatures, patterned on Looking-Glass world’s own “Rocking-horse-fly” and “Snap-dragon-fly.” In the mix of wobbly-kneed false starts and sly successes that make up this unfinished little book, we find Shaw feeling his way toward a prospective new audience.

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Almost without exception, the illustrations trump the rhymes for comic lightness of spirit. In several drawings—those for instance for the “Pelicantelope” and “Halibutterfly”—Shaw honed in on the broad comedy of mismatched body parts as a source of slapstick humor, to hilarious effect. What child, however, would get the joke in Shaw’s fussy, for-gents-only rhyme about the “Play-boyster,” which features an upright shellfish in a top hat and fancy-dress trousers that is vintage New Yorker spot-illustration material—or respond to the humor in the equally starched and club-y verse about the “Unicorncob pipe”? The best illustrations showcase Shaw’s elegant line work, growing preoccupation with biomorphic forms and flattened perspective, and winking attitude toward subject matter for which, in the wake of a few ill-conceived attempts at pictorial wit in such early Cubist paintings as Untitled (Cubist Teapot) and Untitled (Fourth of July)—both ca. 1934—he must have been glad to have found a more suitable home. As a New Yorker writer, Shaw composed waggish profiles of creative and society folk drawn from his vast circle of friends. In “No Such Animal,” he sportingly turned caricature on himself in an image of a tall, hippo-headed fellow in a Homburg—Cole Porter’s pet name for him at Yale was “Big Boy”—but with incongruously lissome legs. In another sign of the importance he placed on this experiment, Shaw decorated the sketchbook’s covers with an impish horned beast and elegant floating shapes in an unmistakable tip of the hat to an artist acquaintance whose fascination with biomorphic forms and nonsense writing fueled his own, Jan Arp. We know from his diary that in April 1936, after several weeks of work on the book, Shaw presented “No Such Animal” to Harper and Brothers’ president, Cass Canfield, and that (perhaps because Canfield declined to publish it) he also showed the illustrated manuscript to an old friend, T. G. Thomas (identified throughout the diary as “T.G.T.”). Always immersed in a variety of projects, Shaw seems then to have set the book aside, returning to it in February 1939, when he devoted several hours to intensive revision and made renewed efforts at placing it with a publisher. We also know from the diary that, at the time, Shaw had begun to develop a second children’s-book idea involving word play. An unusually expansive entry about the latter project suggests that Shaw now saw a connection between his painting and his new creative venture. He expressed the hope that the as-yet untitled book might “introduce ABSTRACT forms [to children] and perhaps ABSTRACT words.” Possibly alluding to a criticism previously leveled at “No Such Animal,” he added, “I hope it is not too Jaberwockey [sic].” 6 Shaw’s opening to the juvenile publishing world finally came in May of 1939, when Margaret Wise Brown, the editor of William R. Scott and Company, a small children’s-only house with a publishing outlook rooted in progressive education, decided to take him on.7 Brown (soon to be famous as the author of Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny), offered qualified praise for the sheaf of picture-book manuscripts he presented to her. In 1940, she rewarded

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Above: Charles Green Shaw, Untitled (Cubist Teapot), 1934, and, Untitled (Fourth of July), 1934.

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a substantially revised version of one of them, The Giant of Central Park, with publication. Over the next eleven years, Shaw illustrated six books written by others (including two by Brown, whose confidant he also became) and published three children’s books of his own. The best-known work from the latter group, It Looked Like Spilt Milk (1947), makes a beguiling guessing game of a series of biomorphic silhouettes, and remains in print more than half a century later. Notwithstanding the notable increase in recent years in critical interest in Shaw’s painting, it is this sly, utterly childlike creation with semi-abstract illustrations—a book that realizes the promise of such earlier forays into the picture-book genre as “No Such Animal”—which continues to reach the widest audience of all his work in any medium. “No Such Animal” was a stepping-stone, and It Looked Like Spilt Milk the bridge, that linked the Carrollian Charles Shaw with the abstractionist.

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Above: Sheep and Squirrel from Charles Green Shaw’s It Looked like Spilt Milk, 1947.

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1 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, illustrated by John Tenniel (New York: Books of Wonder/William Morrow, 1993), 126–127. 2 Interview with Charles Green Shaw conducted by Paul Cummings, 15 April 1968, Charles Green Shaw papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter cited as Shaw papers), 18. For a detailed chronology of Shaw’s life and work, see Debra Bricker Balken, Charles G. Shaw (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2007), 66–89. Shaw’s first solo exhibition, “Manhattan Patterns by Charles G. Shaw,” was at the Valentine Gallery in New York. 3 Ibid., 18. 4 Ibid., 38. 5 The entire sketchbook and associated loose sheets have been digitized and can be accessed at www.aaa.si.edu, Keyword: No Such Animal. 6 Diary entry, 14 February 1939, vol. 67, box 5, Shaw papers.

7 For an account of Shaw’s relationship with Brown, see Leonard S. Marcus, Margaret Wise Brown: Awakened by the Moon (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 117–118, 192, 217, 223–224, and 279. Shaw published his last children’s book, The Apple That Jack Ate, in 1951. The following year, Brown died unexpectedly, of an embolism, at the age of fortytwo. Brown’s friendship and encouragement had always meant a great deal to Shaw, and in his diary he noted his intense sorrow at her death. Whether or not his withdrawal from the juvenile field was a consequence of that loss we cannot know for sure. True to form, Shaw in any case moved on, finding new creative possibilities and earning fresh recognition for himself between 1959 and his death twelve years later, as the author of three books of poetry.

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Christopher Benfey

The Audubon of Hummingbirds

Opposite: Martin Johnson Heade, Hummingbirds with Nest, 1863.

Amid news of the Civil War—the Battle of Gettysburg had been fought barely a month earlier—came the announcement that the artist Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904), aged forty-four and a crack shot with hunting rifle or pistol, was launching his own private campaign. “M. J. Heade Esq., the artist so well known for his landscapes,” the Boston Transcript reported on 12 August 1863, “is about to visit Brazil, to paint those winged jewels, the hummingbirds, in all their variety of life as found beneath the tropics.” After observing the birds in their native habitat, according to the newspaper report, Heade intended “to prepare in London or Paris a large and elegant Album on these wonderful little creatures, got up in the highest style of art.” 1 Grandiose plans were typical of Heade, who arrived in Rio de Janeiro in September with letters of introduction to the Emperor Pedro II, an amateur naturalist who enthusiastically signed on as a

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subscriber to Heade’s projected album, to be titled “Gems of Brazil.” Although he brought his gun, Heade’s hunting was restricted to the market in Rio, where he bought hummingbird skins from local traders. By February 1864, he had completed a dozen painted “gems,” which he exhibited at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rio. At some point in his travels, either in Brazil or in England, where he hoped to find subscribers and a publisher, Heade also began drafting a fragmentary introduction to his album, which fills forty-six manuscript pages in a notebook in the collection of the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian.2 “From early boyhood I have been almost a monomaniac on hummingbirds,” Heade wrote.3 It is clear from the scope of the projected album that Heade aspired to be the Audubon of hummingbirds. He had assessed the competition and saw an opening. John Gould, the British ornithologist who had helped Darwin sort out his famous finches, had compiled his own widely admired album of hummingbirds in 1861. And yet, as Heade pointed out, Gould’s “great work on hummingbirds was not made up from personal knowledge of their character and habits, but gathered from travelers and explorers.” Gould, he added scornfully, “never set foot on South American soil,” where the vast majority of hummingbirds are found.4 Audubon, who did paint from observation in the wild, had restricted his own work to the birds of North America, and the handful of species of hummingbirds found there. “Of all the naturalists,” Heade wrote, “Audubon has written of them with the greatest feelings.”5

“Of all the naturalists, Audubon has written of hummingbirds with the greatest feelings.”

Martin Johnson Heade, Rio de Janeiro Bay, 1864.

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Martin Johnson Heade’s manuscript, ca. 1881. John James Audubon, Ruby-throated Hummingbird, ca. 1827–1830.

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For a variety of reasons—the limitations of color-printing technology, the paucity of British subscribers, the popularity of Gould’s work, and, possibly, Heade’s own waning confidence in the images of hummingbirds he had produced so far—the “large and elegant Album” never materialized. In retrospect, the aborted “Gems of Brazil” can be seen as a preliminary stage in Heade’s late-blooming career as the greatest painter of hummingbirds who ever lived. The surviving images from the “Gems of Brazil” project suggest that Heade, circa 1864, was committed to a particular concept of hummingbird life that might be described as cozy domesticity. He found confirmation from Audubon, whom he quotes at length in his manuscript introduction: “Reader, all these proofs of the sincerity, fidelity, & courage with which the male assures his mate of the care he will take of her while sitting on the nest have been seen but cannot be portrayed.”6 In his “Gems,” Heade sought to portray hummingbirds as affectionately loyal pairs sharing the work of rearing their young. Such a view corresponded to the sentimental notion of home life in the novels of Heade’s friend Harriet Beecher Stowe.7 In fact, as the Heade scholar Theodore Stebbins notes, “in all hummingbird species, the female associates with a male only long enough to fertilize her eggs; she builds the nest, incubates the eggs, and cares for the young entirely on her own.”8 Another supposed feature of hummingbird life that Heade mentions in the introduction, their apparent eroticism, is barely conveyed in the Sunday-best decorum of the surviving “Gems.” He quotes Audubon on “how full of ecstasy” the male bird seems “when his caresses are kindly received.”9 It was another five years or so before Heade found the expressive means to portray hummingbirds in their lushly tropical realm, while conveying the dynamic interchange of birds and tropical flowers, primarily orchids and passion flowers, as well as the fierce and fleeting intimacy of the birds themselves. This is what he achieved in his remarkable paintings of the 1870s, unclassifiable masterpieces that, with their dramatic lighting, partake of American “Luminist” tendencies as well as Darwinian notions of evolutionary flux. “For one who is in the least degree attuned to poetic feeling,” Heade wrote in his “Gems of Brazil” introduction, hummingbirds “have a singularly fascinating power, which the subtlest mind is unable to explain, but which all who have studied them must acknowledge to have felt.”10 Early in his life, Heade had hoped to be a poet. As a young man growing up near Philadelphia, he came under the spell of John Greenleaf Whittier and published some verse in local newspapers. As a piece of writing, Heade’s fragmentary introduction, part poetic

“Hummingbirds have a singularly fascinating power, which the subtlest mind is unable to explain, but which all who have studied them must acknowledge to have felt.”

Martin Johnson Heade, Sappho Comet (male),drawing from Brazilian Sketchbook and Journal, 1865. Opposite: Martin Johnson Heade, Amethyst Woodstar, ca. 1863–1864. Photograph by Dwight Primiano.

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Martin Johnson Heade, Cattleya Orchid and Three Brazilian Hummingbirds, 1871. Opposite: Martin Johnson Heade, Sunset: A Scene in Brazil, 1864–1865.

evocation and part scientific analysis (despite its opening denial of “assuming for this monograph the importance of a scientific character” 11), suffers from divided loyalties. It eventually breaks down in a tangled and heavily corrected attempt to make sense of the hummingbird diet, specifically the question whether hummingbird beaks were designed (a question that Darwin addressed in several of his books) to probe flowers for pollen or to catch insects or both. Late in life, as he settled into comfortable domesticity in Florida, with a young wife (he married for the first time at age sixty-four) and a job as the developer Henry Flagler’s artist-in-residence at the Ponce de Leon luxury hotel in St. Augustine, Heade continued to write magazine articles on the joys of hummingbirds. But it is in his remarkable paintings that the “singularly fascinating power” 12 of these tiny birds is on dazzling display.

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1 Theodore E. Stebbins, Jr., The Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade: A Critical Analysis and Catalogue Raisonné (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), 61. 2 Heade, “Notebook on Hummingbirds,” ca. 1881, Martin Johnson Heade papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter Heade papers). The entire notebook has been digitized and can be accessed at www.aaa.si.edu/ collectionsonline/headmart/ container206193. The catalogue of the Archives of American Art ascribes a date of 1881. Entries later in the notebook, including references to “game monopolies” and painting sales, seem related to events in 1881. There seems little reason, however, to believe that Heade would be drafting an introduction to his “Gems of Brazil” after his return from England in 1865, when the failure of the album must have been clear. Stebbins also identifies this manuscript as the introduction to “Gems of Brazil.” See Stebbins, Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade, 185, note 2.

3 Heade quoted in Stebbins, Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade, 61. 4 Heade quoted in Stebbins, Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade, 70. In his introduction to the “Gems of Brazil,” Heade wrote that most hummingbirds live in “regions so remote from civilization” that knowledge of their habits “must depend upon the Indians and Negroes employed by naturalists in their capture.” www.aaa.si.edu/ collectionsonline/headmart/ container206193.htm, image 2. 5 Heade, “Notebook on Hummingbirds,” Heade papers, www.aaa.si.edu/ collectionsonline/headmart/ container206193.htm, image 6. 6 Ibid., image 9. 7 Senator and Mrs. Bird, two characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, provide a protective “nest” for the escaped slave Eliza. In the third of her House and Home Papers (1864), in which she described the perfect furnishings for a modern home, Stowe wrote: “We have that lovely golden twilight sketch of Heade’s.” Stowe’s brother Henry Ward Beecher, the famous minister, owned at least two of Heade’s paintings. Christopher Crowfield (Harriet Beecher Stowe), House and Home Papers (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1869), 95.

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8 Stebbins, Life and Work of Martin Johnson Heade, 76. 9 Heade, “Notebook on Hummingbirds,” Heade papers, www.aaa.si.edu/ collectionsonline/headmart/ container206193.htm, image 8. 10 Ibid., image 6. 11 Ibid., image 1. 12 Ibid., image 6.

S ome U nusual A nimal N ot O f ten S een

Debor ah H. Dluhy

The following is based on comments offered by Deborah H. Dluhy, dean of the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in honor of sculptor K. Lane Weems and the rhinos Bess (Bessie) and Victoria at Harvard University’s Biological Laboratories, 11 May 2007. I was pleased to be there, in spring 2007, to celebrate the seventieth birthday of Bessie and Victoria, two imposing, indomitable females of Harvard—and their creator, Katharine “K.” Lane Weems (1899–1989), whom I had the good fortune to know during the last decade of her life, the 1980s.1 K. Lane belonged to one of Boston’s privileged families. Her mother was Emma Louise Gildersleeve; and her father, the financier Gardiner Martin Lane, served as the president of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1907 until his death in 1914. When K. wrote her autobiography, she proudly recounted that as a trustee, her father’s support of the museum’s many archaeological expeditions to Egypt helped make its collections second only to those found in Cairo. It was his more routine service to the MFA that turned out to be important for his daughter.

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Katharine Lane, ca. 1915.

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On Sundays, K. accompanied her father to the museum, where she played and drew in the galleries, which became her earliest art classrooms. In 1914, at the age of fifteen, she accompanied her parents to London, where they visited the studio of John Singer Sargent. (Sargent had been commissioned to do the murals for the Boston Public Library, and Gardiner Lane hoped to persuade him to do decoration for the museum’s new building.) In Sargent’s studio, K. admired a plaster anatomical figure of a horse. As a remembrance of the trip, her father bought her a similar model, a present that she treasured throughout her lifetime and which forecast what became the focus of her artistic life’s work.

Studies for the doors at Harvard's Biological Laboratory. Opposite: The completed decorative frieze at the Biological Laboratory.

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With her father’s death in the fall of 1914, shortly after their return from London, K.’s mother enrolled the aspiring artist in drawing classes at the museum, where she was taught to draw from plaster casts. Not only was the museum a happy place for K. Lane—one associated with her father—but she took to drawing and art more than to academic studies. Following her debut in 1917—a mandatory ritual for a person of her social class at that time—K. was given some clay by a sculptor who was working on a commission for her mother. K. went to work copying a small figurine in the house, and when her mother expressed admiration for the little statue, K. convinced her mother to allow her to take the next step. This new phase of her studies got under way in 1918 when she reentered the museum school. K. was excited to work from live models, not just classical sculpture and casts, and she met Charles Grafly, a teacher and artist who was centrally important in her life for the next decade. Grafly was a sculptor based at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, who came to Boston on Wednesdays to critique student work. He was a tough critic, but he encouraged K. to persevere.

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There were other artists who saw a particular passion and talent in the young sculptor. One, Anna Hyatt, provided early encouragement and particularly helped K. to follow her interest in modeling animals—slapping her on the back and telling her to “stick at it.”2 Others, like Brenda Putnam, taught K. anatomy during stays in New York, where the young animalier also frequented the Bronx Zoo and Central Park. K. was deeply serious about this work, and pursued it single-mindedly despite pressure from family and acquaintances to lead a more conventional life. K. continued her studies during the summers, modeling animals in Manchester, Massachusetts. By the mid-1920s she had produced two very successful pieces that brought her notice, her Baby African Elephant (1926) and a beautiful sculpture of a whippet (owned by Harry Crosby, visiting from Paris), entitled Narcisse Noir (1927). A sleek, taut, beautifully composed sculpture that Grafly reported was considered “good enough to go anywhere in the world,”3 Narcisse Noir was acquired by the MFA along with the Baby African Elephant, which was based on her studies at the Bronx Zoo. In 1930, K. was given the largest commission of her career: the decoration of the Biological Laboratory complex at Harvard, three large brick wings arranged around a quadrangle. She described the huge buildings as “humorless,” and to save them from looking like a factory, she and the architects designed an elaborate sculptural program to relieve the broad expanses of the exterior walls.4 The scheme included a 400-foot-long frieze of animals and birds carved into the brick; blank areas between the friezes carved with animals representing the polar, temperate, equatorial, and marine zones of the earth; and doors depicting the life forms of the sea, air, and land. Two monumental bronze figures were planned for either side of the main entrance: a pair of life-sized Indian rhinoceroses.

Pencil drawing of a rhinoceros. Left: K. Lane [Weems] working on a clay model. Opposite: Sketches for the doors at Harvard's Biological Laboratory.

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“ W ith humans you are always working on the same f undamental chassis , but with animals — f orever in movement — variation in composition is in f inite . A nd you never have the relatives to contend with .”

— K. Lane Weems*

1 Katharine Lane married F. Carrington Weems in 1947. 2 Katharine Lane Weems, Odds Were Against Me: A Memoir (New York: Vantage Press, 1985), 28; Anna Hyatt married Archer Huntington in 1918. 3 Ibid., 66. 4 Ibid., 87. 5 The MFA school has a fiberglass copy of a Harvard rhino. 6 Louise Todd Ambler, Katharine Lane Weems: Sculpture and Drawings (Boston Athenaeum, 1987), 44.

For this last challenge she focused on her earlier studies at the Bronx Zoo, and in particular on an Indian Rhinoceros unicornis named Victoria, which she had modeled in 1921. She proposed the Indian rhino for its imposing size (it is the fourth largest animal on earth after three elephant species), its beautiful armor, its dramatic large horn, and its rarity. (In 1930 there were just five in captivity and only two hundred were thought to exist in the wild.) Work on the rhinos began in 1933. Moving methodically from sixinch-high clay models, through several increasingly large versions up to eight feet from which the life-size bronzes could be produced (see pages 31–33), K. did some of the initial work in New York, then much of the final work at her studio in Manchester, even enlarging her studio door to allow the huge models to be brought in. The rhinos were unveiled on the day George VI was crowned king of England, 12 May 1937, and have been popular ever since. In her diaries, the artist recorded with amusement that the rhinos quickly gained the spirited and playful attention of the students, who painted their toenails and decorated them with jack-o’-lanterns and Christmas wreaths. Later students—including the artists at the MFA school5—have paid tribute to her creations with May Day bonnets, clay fecal mounds, and food baskets. I close by remembering with respect, and with affection, Katharine Lane Weems. Seventy years on, her “unusual animals not often seen,”6 Bess and Victoria, continue to inspire with the clarity, vigor, and life that is the legacy of art. They have outlived George VI, and blessedly, there are nearly 2,400 rhinos on earth, if Google is to be believed. Happy birthday, girls.

* Odds Were Against Me: A Memoir (New York: Vantage Press, 1985), 67.

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The Making of Bess and Victoria K. Lane Weems’ monumental bronze Indian Rhinoceroses began life as six-inch clay sketches. Weighing in at three tons each, the finished pieces represented three years of the sculptor’s creative effort. In all, K. and skilled craftsmen fabricated sixteen models before life-sized rhinos were cast. To confirm the suitability of the subject, the six-inch figures were incorporated into a scale model of the site. K. then created a two-foot study of the Bronx Zoo’s rhino that served as her model. Next, a full–size photographic enlargement of this study was placed on one

of the pedestals at Harvard. Once the figures were approved for the site, workers cast the two-foot study in plaster and enlarged the cast, generating a clay model measuring four feet. Two copies of this enlargement were made so that Weems could create two unique rhinoceros figures. Workers enlarged the figures two more times, first to eight feet and then to life size—thirteen-feet (horn to tail). At each step, they made molds of her clay models from which plaster casts were made, and then they scaled up the plaster again in clay. This method of gradually enlarging the figure (clay-plaster-clay, etc.) allowed the sculptor to study the model at different sizes, permitting her

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An enlarging machine, visible on the left, was used to create the life-size model.

Clockwise from top left: A workman applies clay to the openweave slat armature. The metal shims on the clay model serve as dividing lines, along which the mold pieces were separated once the plaster had hardened. Workers apply plaster and an outer iron armature to the life-size clay model. Workmen remove plaster pattern pieces, bearing the shapes and surface articulations of the clay form, from the armature.

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to observe and correct mistakes before they were cast in bronze. The artist worked on the eight-foot models for seven months, refining the figures and perfecting details. Once she was satisfied, the men enlarged the models to life size in clay and made final plaster molds. At this stage, the men cut the last set of molds into sections and made separate plaster patterns that they used to make foundry sand molds for the head, front and back quarters, base, nose, tail, and ears. The sand molds were used for the final process of casting the huge bronze figures. Each animal’s head and body parts were cast in halves. To prepare a complete mold for each section, workers pressed plaster patterns for each side into separate boxes filled with a special sand that retained exact negative details. For example, the left and right sides of the head were made using a single plaster placed in two boxes; and the left and right sides of the animal’s back end were made using two separate plaster patterns.

Then, workers laid wax in the negative space imprinted by each plaster pattern and pressed more of the special sand to establish the other side of the mold. The sand molds were taken apart and the wax removed to create cavities for the bronze, which on casting would be the thickness of the wax. Last, the foundry men poured molten bronze into the molds and placed them in a heated kiln to slowly cool and harden. Once out of the kiln, the sand molds were sacrificed and chipped off. To assemble the rhinos, workers connected the bronze plates of the heads and bodies with pins, welded the seams, and attached the noses, tails, and ears, all of which had been cast separately in single molds. The last steps the foundry men took were to chase and patinate the surface of the bronzes. Although the rhinos were cast at two different foundries, both were patinated by Roman Bronze, thereby insuring that the end results would be compatible.

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Rebecca Reynolds

One cast rhinoceros leaves the foundry. Below: Receipt from Berthold Nebel, who created the enlarging device.

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M a ry A n n C aw s

C OR N E L L in the ARCH I V ES

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Throughout his life, Joseph Cornell (1903–1972) clipped, ripped, cropped, and cut around thousands and thousands of images, which he carefully stockpiled for use in his work. We asked scholar Mary Ann Caws to take a The extraordinary richness of the Joseph Cornell papers at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art sets the mind to wandering—a habit akin to Cornell’s own. I have taken the liberty of contemplating various images in his archive as catalysts for my own mental voyage around his work. Of course, there is far, far more material than he could ever use, but something about that is already full of emotional weight.1 Beginning, then, with a small boy on the steps gazing out into some speculative universe, I thought of the particular ways Cornell might have imagined and seen and collected the massive quantity of images and texts we can consult. That little boy’s world might be, as Cornell’s seems to have been, one of innocence. The teddy bear in the small cart, with the alphabet block, is redolent of the innocent games of childhood, as is a fragment of a paper label that reminds us of that famous French biscuit the Lu, appropriate for a man who loved sweet things above all, his life long. Cornell often used the block form, always reminiscent of childhood, in the bottom corner of various boxes, as if to demonstrate that childlikeness never leaves us entirely. Cornell used the face of the Parmigianino girl—wistful and touchingly pure and chosen among all the other faces in the painter’s Madonna with the Long Neck (1534–1540)—in one of his most moving constructions, Via Parmigianino (for Allegra) (1956). She is as close to the spirit of the artist, at least, as I imagine it, as is humanly and aesthetically possible. The mixture of sad wisdom and stubborn certainty gives to that unforgettable face a light at once tragic and permanent in its youthfulness. Cornell was able to take from the paintings of the past just the desired mood of his icons and keep them for us. The face of the Caravaggio boy, captured in another box, is looking away from us,

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look at a selection of material drawn from the artist’s files on birds and animals and share her impressions.

Pages 34-35, 38-39, 43: Source materials from the Joseph Cornell Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Opposite: Joseph Cornell , Via Parmigianino (for Allegra), 1956. Art © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Above: Photograph of Joseph Cornell with Object, ca. 1940.

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the left side of his visage lost in shadow, and his sensual mouth fixed in an expression of surprise and, perhaps, covetousness, that is no less powerful. On the other side of wistfulness, covetousness, and sad wisdom, I see Cornell delighting in the funny and happy images so numerous in the plethora of pictures he saved of the animal world. I think of the smiling frog, the grinning deep-sea anglerfish, the deliriously cheerful kitten yawning, and the willfully lazy sloth glorying in his laziness. The strange grace of Cornell’s images of birds in all their multiplicity is remarkable. Of course the swan sailing along is familiar to us from his Swan Lake for Tamara Toumanova: Homage to the Romantic Ballet (1946). But the grace of the creature’s neck directs our gaze to all those other graceful birds in the files, with their long necks turned in directions we might not have anticipated. The best-known bird boxes are, of course, the parrot boxes, like the famous ones for Juan Gris, and the owl boxes, the material for which is abundant, and easily found, in the archives. Surprisingly, the major element in the many animal pictures is the frequency with which their throats are open, the birds clearly singing for the life of them, as is the singing kitten. It makes us wonder at Cornell’s desire for his own communication with the outside world. If the boxes have been interpreted as frames to hold in those mementos of the nineteenth-century performers he cared so much about—ballerinas, singers, actresses—they can also be seen as display cases for those mementos—and ways to share them with us. Like the open mouths and beaks, like the various birdsongs they suggest, these indications of his intimate and ultimate desire for spreading out beyond his famously limited actual world on Utopia Parkway are as numerous as they are convincing. Something as appealing as the animal and human forms, as joyous as their occasional smiles, as wise as the Renaissance figures, marks many of the images and their worlds. Something as simple as a bird nibbling at an orange rind carries a wealth of meaning and has the same sweetness as the adorable puppies and the fuzzy kitten. What Cornell dreams, he shares. The one finished soap bubble set and the lovely blue globe of the same form that Cornell stored away in a folder are ways also of dreaming this other alternate universe as history comes across in these collections. Like a globe world of the mind. The various sun patterns and peacock tails, spreading out,

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Joseph Cornell, A Swan Lake for Tamara Toumanova: Homage to the Romantic Ballet, 1946. The Menil Collection, Houston, gift of Alexander Iolas. Art © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

Previous page: Joseph Cornell, Cockatoo: Keepsake Parakeet, 1949–1953. Smithsonian American Art Museum, partial and promised gift of Donald Windham. Art © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY.

show the expansiveness of this aesthetic world, while the many images of constellations—whose mythical figures take their mythical stances, and whose traces of celestial voyages are marked—show us the upward-aspiring desires of this artist, as earthbound as we are, all of us, but with his imagination unfettered and unbound. One last important point: what Cornell collects and builds into collages and boxes shows his clever thinking, so that there is rarely a charge of sentimentality. Let me take as an example the extraordinary image he clipped of the cat perceiving itself doubly and triply in a mirror, itself heavily framed. In it, Joseph Cornell knows exactly what he is constructing as an image of the self through his boxes of the other. The Cornell shown to us by the collections he treasured feels as genuine as any work of art: he is, in a sense, framed by what he gathered and exhibited, by the ways he used these images in his boxes, with his glorious imagination opened to us precisely by what he held on to. And, in so doing, he shared it with us and the generations to come.

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1 Cornellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s papers comprise about 25.5 linear feet. The digitized collection (38,502 digitized images, including the source files) and finding aid can be found at http://www. aaa.si.edu/collectionsonline/ cornjose.

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The Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr., Papers Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr.—known as Bert—was a pioneering collector of American folk art. His career followed a trajectory familiar to anyone who studies the history of collecting: a period of experimentation; a long phase of avid, audacious acquisition; a creative and influential tenure, in Hemphill’s case, as a founder and then curator at an important institution—what was then called the Museum of American Folk Art. Hemphill started, he said, with bubble gum cards and marbles, and graduated to “Post-Impressionist prints and drawings . . . African and Pre-Columbian sculpture.” 1 With an odd (for the times) taste, little money, and a drive to buy, he began to collect American folk art seriously. Hemphill acquired what nobody else looked at—or had rejected. As a teenager, he had been impressed by the early American works he saw illustrated in books by early popularizers Jean Lipman and Sidney Janis. Later, on discovering contemporary self-taught artists, Hemphill expanded his range and sought newer objects. Pictures of his apartment show a crush of things from all eras—canes, salt-glazed jugs, advertising signs, mangers, weathervanes, dolls, articulated figures, quilts, nudes, rugs, portraits, and animals and monsters of every kind. The collection, he said, was “a kind of alter ego,” and the apartment existed as “a very private preserve—my own secret environment.”2 Hemphill’s papers at the Archives of American Art document all of his activities, and they include a wealth of photographs that show something of his day-to-day life as a collector.3 In long car trips to all parts of the country, Hemphill obsessively looked—as all dyed-in-the-wool collectors do—for objects that inspired him. Traveling with friends (Hemphill did not drive), he “found himself going hardily into strange neighborhoods, browsing in the dusty corners of hitherto ignored junk shops, invading attics, scouting out country fairs and auctions, and searching through with Holmesian intensity . . . boring outdoor art show[s].”4 In the 1970s Hemphill was introduced to environments made by self-taught artists, and he added many of these sites to his itineraries. A dip into the correspondence in Hemphill’s papers does not nail down when he visited Fred Smith’s Concrete Park in Wisconsin, but it appears to have been some time in 1977.5 These photographs show what he saw there and catch something of what it was like to be with Hemphill as he traveled.

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1 Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr., “The Desire to Collect Folk Art,” undated manuscript, box 9, folder 35, Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr., papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution (hereafter Hemphill papers); and American Folk Art: The Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr. Collection (Milwaukee, Wis.: The Milwaukee Art Museum, 1981), 8. 2 Ibid., 12. 3 Hemphill donated the papers in five installments between 1988 and 1996. 4 Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr., "How to Buy Folk Art," typescript, box 9, folder 36, Hemphill papers. 5 The slides of Concrete Park in Hemphill’s papers are dated August 1977. Hemphill was invited to a lecture on the environment in March 1979 (Linda Franklin to Hemphill, 9 March 1979, box 2, folder 45, “February–March 1979”); and in June 1979 he was asked to write in support of grassroots preservation projects, in a letter that made reference to Concrete Park (Gail Wentzel et al., 1 June 1979, box 2, folder 47, “June–July 1979, Hemphill papers).

Immortalizing the Northwoods: Fred Smithâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Wisconsin Concrete Park Leslie Umberger

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Fred Smith, East Deer Plaque, 1948–1951. Photograph by Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr.

In 1948, shortly after he retired, Fred Smith (1886–1976) started work on the place he devoted over twenty years to constructing: his Wisconsin Concrete Park. Drawing on tall tales, local history, and his own experience, Smith immortalized, in life-sized and over-lifesized concrete figures, characters and animals he had known or imagined, hoping that passersby would be lured into stopping by the astonishing sight of his tableaux. Smith began working as a lumberjack in the forests of northern Wisconsin when he was still in his teens, spending over fifty years as a woodsman before retiring. During those years he and his wife raised five children and homesteaded 120 acres. Smith also built and ran a tavern where he served beer made in the nearby town of Rhinelander. Arthritis eventually slowed Smith and prevented him from keeping up with younger jacks, but it did not prevent him from embracing his new avocation.

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Fred Smith with Tiger, 1948–1964. Photograph by Robert Amft, 1962– 1964. © Friends of Fred Smith, Robert Amft Archive.

Fred Smith, Moose, 1948–1964. Photograph by Ron Byers.

Fred Smith, Oxen, 1948–1964. Photograph by Ron Byers.

Smith appreciated the rich life he had lived and all that he had seen over the years. His sculptural groups started as monuments to specific people and events. As the idea of memorializing people developed in Smith’s mind, though, he devised a more ambitious plan. Aware that the regional culture was changing before his eyes, Smith decided to commemorate the customs, myths, characters, and creatures that had defined life in the Wisconsin Northwoods as he had known it. Gradually, his sculptural project became all encompassing. Smith’s figures became large and complex, bearing painted faces and attire inlaid with stones, fragments of glass collected from the tavern’s empty beer bottles, bits of mirror, marbles, and other found materials. Some of Smith’s most expressive works at the Concrete Park are of the animals—wild and domestic—that populated the Northwoods. From woodland creatures to oxen pulling lumber carts and teams of

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Fred Smith, Tiger, 1948–1964. Photograph by Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr.

horses drawing wagons and carriages, Smith’s full-scale animals are uncanny in their lifelike qualities. He achieved this in part by using, whenever he could, the actual bones of the animal being portrayed. Smith was familiar with the basics of taxidermy, and he was inspired to collect animal skulls to use in his wooden armatures. For example, Smith often used deer or moose skulls with intact antlers; by covering the skulls with concrete but leaving the racks exposed, Smith captured an essential realism. After a lifetime working with and observing animals, Smith was also masterful at capturing an animal’s stance, attitude, and character. To further enhance this lifelike presence, he often dressed the horses and oxen in appropriate tack such as bridles and harnesses. A few of Smith’s animals—namely, his Tiger, Lion, and Angora Cat—were not Northwoods regulars. This small grouping of exotic creatures was inspired instead by the work of self-taught painter

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Fred Smith, Cow and Calf, 1948– 1964. Photograph by Herbert Waide Hemphill, Jr.

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Morris Hirschfield, whose works of felines (also Angora Cat, Tiger, and Lion) Smith saw pictured in Sidney Janis’s They Taught Themselves.1 Smith was impressed that a fellow untrained artist had his work in a book and wanted to prove that his work was as fine as Hirschfield’s. Unlike Hirschfield’s work, however, Smith’s was very often humorous. One muskie, in particular, is a beast worthy of legend: measuring some eighteen feet in length, Smith shows it being hauled out of the lake by a team of horses. Fred Smith depicted his animals in the roles they filled in real life, from the loyal dog to the hardworking draft animal to the wild creature catching a scent on the breeze. In all cases, Smith’s artistry captured their essence, conjuring them back to life in new and magical forms in which animals do far more than play a supporting role to a human cast of characters; they are the foundation of life in a Northwoods paradise.

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1 Sidney Janis, They Taught Themselves: American Primitive Painters of the Twentieth Century (New York: Dial Press, 1942), 27, 29, 31.

ANIMAL STUDIES at the Archives of American Art

In putting together this issue on Beasts, we found that collections in the Archives contain hundreds of animal images by American artists of every eraâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;many more than we could ever reproduce. These animals can be found in a variety of media and formats. We have (among other forms) colored prints, watercolors, photographs, and pen and pencil drawings depicting birds, camels, rhinos, horses, cows, cats, dogs, and elephants. Pets occur in large numbers, and common and exotic animals grace studies for elaborate decorative schemes, doodles, sketches, and several anatomical drawings. Most, but not all, of these works tend to the casual: Thomas Hart Benton, for instance, made quick sketches of rodeo horses in motion; and since the 1970s artists from all over the world have circulated variants of Ray Johnsonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s bunny motif. In contrast, professional animaliers like Paul Bransom, Katharine Lane Weems, and Benson Bond Moore filled many pages in their sketchbooks with closely observed renderings of unusual animals like apes, parrots, and antelopes to reproduce in books and prints. Because of their number, it is probably impossible to give a comprehensive idea of these idiosyncratic holdings, and so the following is a selection of some of the beasts we liked best.

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54 3

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“Animals never pose... You have to watch the muscles all the time.”

—Anna Hyatt Huntington

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“It is difficult to study the anatomy of the head of a dolphin because of the speed at which they move and disappear under the water; plus, the colour, which looks like form...is not,”

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65 23

68 30

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Paul Bransom (tiger drawing, above) and Benson Bond Moore (all other drawings on this spread) were longtime friends. As children, both demonstrated artistic talent in the rendering of animals, and Bramsom recalled in an interview for the Archives how, during his teens, he was envious of a drawing Moore had made of a rabbit.

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77 46

EditorIAL

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All inquiries regarding subscriptions, back issues, and manuscript submissions should be sent to: Editor Archives of American Art Journal P.O. Box 37012 MRC 937 Washington, DC 20013 T. 202.633.7971 Manuscripts submitted for publication should be based in part on materials in the Archives. Full text of volumes 2–43 (1962–2004) available online through JSTOR. Articles published in the Journal are abstracted and indexed in the Art Index and in Historical Abstracts America: History and Life. Opinions expressed in the Archives of American Art Journal are those of the authors and not necessarily of the editors or the Archives of American Art. ©2009 Smithsonian Institution.

Edwin Lord Weeks, pencil sketch.

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Archives of american art

THE ARCHIVES OF AMERICAN ART , founded in 1954 and a unit of the Smithsonian Institution since 1970, provides researchers with access to the largest collection of documents on the history of the visual arts in the United States. The collection, which now totals more than sixteen million items of original source material, consists of the papers of art-world figures and the records of art dealers, museums, and other art-related businesses, institutions, and organizations. Original material can be consulted, by appointment, in Washington, DC; the most actively used holdings are available on microfilm through Interlibrary Loan or at Archives offices in Washington and New York, and at affiliated research centers in Boston, Fort Worth, San Francisco, and San Marino, California. The Archives is part of one of the world’s great research centers for the arts and sciences. In addition to its federal funding, the Archives raises a portion of its annual budget from private sources, including its membership program and contributions from individuals and organizations. Mission statement: The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art enlivens the extraordinary human stories behind America’s most significant art and artists. It is the world’s largest and most widely used resource dedicated to collecting and preserving the papers and primary records of the visual arts in America. Constantly growing in range and depth, and ever increasing in accessibility to its many audiences, it is a vibrant, unparalleled, and essential resource for the appreciation, enjoyment, and understanding of art in America. Re f erenc e s erv ic e s: The catalogue of the Archives’ holdings is available nationwide and internationally through the Smithsonian Institution Research Information Service (SIRIS). Reference requests can be sent by fax or mail to Reference Services at the Washington office or via e-mail at: http://www.aaa.si.edu/askus. Unrestricted microfilms and transcripts of oral history interviews are available through interlibrary loan. Requests can be sent to the Washington office by mail, fax, or through our website, where an online order form is available at: www.aaa. si.edu/interlibraryloan. Publication of the archives of American Art Journal is underwritten in part by the William E. Woolfenden Fund, an endowment established in honor of the Archives’ second director, and with the support of the Henry Luce Foundation Sponsors

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credits

Cover: Joseph Cornell Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Pages 4–10, 12, 14: Charles Green Shaw Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 11, Untitled (Cubist Teapot), 1934, oil on canvas, 18 x 15 in., signed. Courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY; Untitled (Fourth of July), 1934, oil on canvas, 30 x 22 in., signed. Private Collection, Houston, TX, courtesy of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, LLC, New York, NY; Page 13: copyright 1947 by Charles G. Shaw. Renewed 1975 by Ethan Allen. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. Page 17: Photograph © 2009 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, bequest of Maxim Karolik, 64.429, oil on canvas, 12 x 101/8 in.; Page 18: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, gift of the Avalon Foundation, image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, oil on canvas, 17 15/16 x 35 7/8 in. unframed; Page 19: Martin Johnson Heade Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; and Smithsonian Institution Libraries, National Museum of National History, Washington, DC, Birds of America (New York: J. J. Audubon, 1840, plate 47); Page 20: Photograph © 2009 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, gift of Richard and Susanna Nash, 1997.296, graphite and ink on paper, sketchbook 6 5/8 x 41/2 in. closed; Page 21: Anonymous, Photograph by Dwight Primiano, oil on canvas, 12¼ x 10 in.; Page 22: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, gift of the Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation, image courtesy of the Board of Trustees, oil on wood, 13¾ x 18 in. unframed; Page 23: Arader Galleries, New York, NY, oil on canvas, 19¼ x 34 in.

Page 34–35, 38, 40, 42–43: Joseph Cornell Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 36: Photograph courtesy Sotheby’s. Art © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; Page 37: Photograph courtesy of Joseph Cornell Study Center, Smithsonian American Art Museum; Page 39: The Menil Collection, Houston, gift of Alexander Iolas. Art © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY; Page 41: Smithsonian American Art Museum, partial and promised gift of Donald Windham. Art © The Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation/ Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY. Page 44: Photograph © Martha Cooper; Pages 45–47, 49–50: Herbert Waide Hemphill Papers; Page 47: Photograph by Robert Amft. © Friends of Fred Smith; Page 48: Photographs © Ron Byers; Page 51: Photograph © Jonathan P. Blumb.

Pages 24–29, 31–33: Katharine Lane Weems Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution; Page 30: Photograph by Kelly Casteel, 2009.

Pages 52–78: All images are in the collections at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. 1 Benson Bond Moore Papers2 Honoré Sharrer Papers 3 Toshiko Takaezu Papers 4 Mary Fanton Roberts Papers 5 Honoré Sharrer Papers 6 Herbert Waide Hemphill Papers Deer Burrt, Hopi Burrthday two ewe. Bee ewershelf fourever and eye will bee ewer friend fourever. Ewers, Lindow. 7 Edwin Lord Weeks Papers 8 Paul Bransom Papers 9 Katharine Lane Weems Papers 10 John Held Papers Relating to Mail Art 11 Elisabeth Rungius Fulda Papers 12–13 Paul Bransom Papers 14–15 Harrison Cady Papers Anna Hyatt Huntington quote: Interview conducted with Anna Hyatt Huntington by Dorothy Seckler, 14 December 1964, Archives of American Art 16 Forbes Watson Papers 17, 19 Chuck and Jan Rosenak Research Material 18 Marion Sanford and Cornelia Chapin Papers 20–23 Katharine Lane Weems Papers Katharine Lane Weems quote: Letter, Katharine Lane Weems to Mr. Cassattari, 29 December 1978, box 9, folder 1, Katharine Lane Weems Papers. 24 Abbott Handerson Thayer Papers 25 Walt Kuhn, Kuhn Family Papers, and Armory Show Records 26 Anna Hyatt-Huntington Papers 27 Forbes Watson Papers 28 Sara R. Currie Papers about Alfred Lenz 29 Photograph by Guillermo Zamora, Florence Arquin Papers 30–33 John Held Papers Relating to Mail Art 34 Robert Smithson and Nancy Holt Papers 35 John Held Papers Relating to Mail Art 36–37 Paul Bransom Papers 38 Honoré Sharrer Papers 39 Paul Bransom Papers 40–45 Benson Bond Moore Papers Paul Bransom quote: Interview conducted with Paul Bransom by Helen Ireland Hays, Helen Ireland Hays Papers Concerning Paul Bransom. 46 Katharine Lane Weems Papers Page 78: Edwin Lord Weeks Papers

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