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EXHIBITIONS:
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CURRENT EXHIBITIONS
Rachel Carson
April through June 2006
An exploration of the life and writing of Rachel Carson, who fostered American awareness
of the natural world's magnificence and vulnerability through her gifts for exact science
and elegant prose. [ca. 200 items]
Tending toward 50: A History of Chelsea Review,
featuring author portraits by Gerard Malanga
April through early June 2006
Since its establishment in 1958 as Chelsea Review, the literary journal has served as an
important voice for original poetry, fiction, and works in translation. As the 50th
anniversary of Chelsea approaches, an exhibition will highlight the evolution of the
journal. Accompanying the archival items on display will be a group of photographic
portraits of Chelsea contributors by Gerard Malanga, acclaimed poet and filmmaker. [ca.
60 items]
UPCOMING EXHIBITIONS
Medieval Manuscripts from Christian Communities in the Middle East
June through August 2006
This exhibition highlights manuscripts in the Beinecke Library from the tenth century to
the nineteenth, in Coptic, Ethiopic, Georgian, Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian,
documenting the activities of Christians in the Middle East. [ca. 20 items]
Breaking the Binding: Printing and the Third Dimension
July through August 2006
Since the advent of printing on paper, attempts have been made to show dimensionality.
Drawn from the Beinecke’s collections, this exhibition will show the many interesting
ways that the two-dimensional format has been manipulated to add depth, perspective,
and motion. On view will be flap books, pop-ups, perspective books, panoramas, and
peep-shows – delightful and colorful inventions for visitors of all ages. [ca. 120 items]
PAST EXHIBITIONS
Mozart
January 17 - March 31, 2006
This exhibition, celebrating the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, features two music manuscripts in the composer's own hand, as well as a variety of early prints, biographies, and materials from his family and associates. The manuscripts come from the Frederick R. Koch Collection at the Beinecke Library and from the Opochinsky Collection at the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library. [ca. 30 items]
100 Years of American Poetry Broadsides
February - March 2006
A selection of single-sheet poems from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including examples ranging from hand printed and illustrated broadsides to commercially printed posters, mimeographed and photocopied flyers, and postcards. [ca. 150 items]
African Americans Write for Young Readers
February - March 2006
Well-known writers such as Langston Hughes, Arna Bontemps, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Jessie Fauset, and Shirley Graham Du Bois turn their talents to works for children and young adults. Drawn from the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of African American Arts and Letters and the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection of American Children’s Literature. [ca. 30 items]
Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass at 150
Ending January 31
Celebrating the first publication of Leaves of Grass in 1855, the exhibition includes copies of the rare 1855 edition of this ground breaking work, as well as some of the many revised editions Whitman published during his lifetime. Manuscripts, correspondence, and photographs of the poet were also on display. [ca. 30 items]
A Book of Her Own
Ending January 31
Books tell us many things beyond what their authors write in them. Single copies of books, for instance, often reveal their particular history-who owned them, who read them, who gave them as gifts, how they changed hands over the years.
The current Beinecke Library exhibition, A Book of Her Own, explores an unusual aspect of book history: all of the books in the display, based on various sorts of evidence contained in the books, were owned by women before the year 1700. The exhibition includes some of the Beinecke Library's most richly illuminated medieval manuscripts, such as Christine de Pisan's Livre des toirs virtues (France, 15th century), shown here.
The 80-age illustrated guide to the exhibition is available at the Beinecke Library for $15.
Friedrich Schiller
November - December 2005
To mark the 200th anniversary of Schiller’s death, the library presented an exhibition that included first editions of Schiller’s works, musical settings of texts by Schiller, and evidence of his reception in the English-speaking world, including books, playbills, chapbooks, and ephemera. [ca. 35 items]
Beinecke Library Resources for Native American Studies: A Sampler
September - October 2005
Drawn from diverse collections of printed, manuscript, and graphic material, this exhibit suggested the variety of themes and topics in Native American Studies that can be explored at Beinecke. [ca. 35 items]
Don Quixote in Beinecke Library
September - October 2005
This exhibition showed the profound impact that this truly novel novel had on world literature, drama, and the public imagination. On display were first editions of Don Quixote in Spanish, important translations, illustrations for deluxe versions, and adapted texts. [ca. 30 items]
Alexis de Tocqueville, Gustave de Beaumont, and the Challenge of Democracy
August - October, 2005
By common consent, Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, published in 1835,
is the greatest work on the United States ever written by a foreign observer. To mark
the bicentennial of Tocqueville’s birth, the Beinecke Library will hold a two-day
international conference devoted to the French author on the weekend of
September 30/October 1. The Beinecke exhibition “Tocqueville and Beaumont and the
Challenge of Democracy” will remain on display at the library through October 24.
Robert Dahl, Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science, will give the conference keynote
address on Friday, September 30. Entitled “Political Equality in America: Tocqueville and Today,”
Professor Dahl’s lecture will take place at the Beinecke Library at 4:00 p.m. Conference sessions,
running from 9:00 a.m. through 3:30 p.m. on Friday, September 30 and from 9:15 a.m. to 12:45 p.m. on
Saturday, October 1, will include speakers from the United States, Canada, and France. To view a detailed
program, please visit the Beinecke Library website http:\\www.library.yale.edu
and click on “Lectures and Conferences” in the right column. The conference is free and open to the public, but
registration is required for planning purposes.
In exploring why a young Frenchman of the early nineteenth century wrote one of the most penetrating
analyses of Jacksonian America and the phenomenon of modern democracy, the Beinecke exhibition ranges
from Tocqueville’s original working draft of Democracy in America back to the political and literary
sources he studied as a young man—such as Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1748) and Rousseau’s Social
Contract (1792) —and forward to contemporary works about America that served as supplementary sources to
his own observations, such as Joseph Story’s commentary on the United States constitution (1833).
Pivotal to the story of Tocqueville and his traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont are two handwritten
letters in the exhibition, dated 27 January 1831 from the French Ministry of Justice, giving the men
leave to travel to the United States, with the assignment to conduct research into American prisons.
Having landed at Newport, R. I., they visited New York, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky,
before sailing down the Mississippi to New Orleans, where Tocqueville noted the same diversity we know
today: “faces of all shades of colour. Language French, English, Spanish, Creole. General appearance
French; and yet signs, commercial posters usually in English. . . ." Along the way, both made notes about
prisons; among those selected for the exhibition are comments on the prison in Wethersfield, Connecticut.
Upon their return to France, it was Beaumont who completed most of the prison report while Tocqueville
pondered the greater meaning of democracy in its New World setting.
“I admit that I saw in America more than America,” Tocqueville wrote. “It was the shape of democracy
itself which I sought, its inclinations, character, prejudices, and passions; I wanted to understand it
so as at least to know what we have to fear or hope therefrom.” Professor Frank Turner, who arranged the
exhibition, points out that Tocqueville’s experience in America was informed not only by his extensive
reading but also by a tradition of French-American relations going back to the American Revolution and
particularly by the history of the democratic experiment in France. “The excesses of the French Revolution
had confirmed in modern times the dangers and tumult of democracy,” Professor Turner writes.
“America,” he continues, “provided Tocqueville with the opportunity to examine democratic
structures outside the context of either the ancient republics or the ongoing trauma of French
political life.”
That this is the third Tocqueville exhibition to be held at the Beinecke Library in the last thirty
years is no coincidence. Yale scholars have been essentially responsible for a revitalized appreciation
of Tocqueville and his writings in the twentieth century. It began when a young history instructor named
Paul Lambert White (1890-1922) visited the Tocqueville family château in Normandy after the First World
War. After White’s untimely death, two other Yale scholars, John Allison (1884-1944) and George W. Pierson
(1904-93) took up the Tocqueville connection. Pierson’s book Beaumont and Tocqueville in America (1938),
based on his Yale dissertation, marked the beginning of the modern study of Tocqueville. It was Pierson
who arranged Yale’s acquisition of the manuscript of Democracy in America. The Tocqueville/Beaumont
collection now housed in the Beinecke Library is the largest publicly available assemblage of such
material in the world.
The exhibition “Tocqueville and Beaumont and the Challenge of Democracy” continues at the Beinecke
Library through October 24. Exhibition hours: Mondays through Thursdays, 8:30 a.m.-8:00 p.m.;
Fridays, 8:30 a.m.-5:00 p.m.; Saturdays, 10:00 a.m-5:00 p.m. The exhibition brochure “Tocqueville
and Beaumont and the Experience of Early Nineteenth-Century Democracy” by Frank M. Turner, director
of the Beinecke Library, is available free to visitors.
Further highlights of the Tocqueville exhibition:
- Beaumont’s sketchbook of the American journey
- Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, 1794
- A long autograph letter from John Quincy Adams to Tocqueville, 12 June 1837, in which the former
president corrects some of Tocqueville’s statements about his presidency and offers comments on the
French Revolution
- A Daumier caricature of Tocqueville from 1849, when Tocqueville served briefly as
French Minister of Foreign Affairs
- Beaumont’s sketches of the house in Cannes where Tocqueville died in 1859
- Beaumont’s manuscripts for his book on Ireland (1839) and for his novel Marie, ou
l‘esclavage aux États-Unis (1835), which addresses the problem of slavery in the United States
The Stolen Texts of Molière
July - August, 2005
This exhibition examines how seventeeth-century publishers
pirated, plagiarized, and mis-appropriated Molière's plays.
Drawing on the Walter L. Pforzheimer Molière Collection,
it will feature rare first editions displayed alongside even rarer
counterfeit editions. The exhibition traces the production and
distribution of these illegal copies. There will be a lecture in
conjunction with the opening of this exhibit. [About 30 items]
Parliaments, Peoples and Power
April - July, 2005
The exhibit brings together an unusual group of materials from several
Beinecke collections, among them the Osborn Collection, the Rochambeau
cartographic collection, and the library's extensive collection of
broadsides. It will include parliamentary papers, travel journals,
theoretical tracts, literary satires, political caricatures, maps,
and engravings of various aspects of government related to the countries
of Western Europe, the British Isles, Scandanavia, and the New World
in the early modern period. [About 30 items]
Red Letters / Blacklists: Communism and
Literary America
May 6 - late July, 2005
This exhibition explores the ways Communism and related political
movements influenced the work and lives of American writers,
dramatists, editors, publishers, and artists in the first half
of the twentieth century, while documenting the careers of radical
literary figures, such as John Reed, Max Eastman, Muriel Draper,
Michael Gold, and Genevieve Taggard, among many others. Red Letters
/ Blacklists examines the art and literature inspired by key events,
from the trial of the Scottsboro Boys to the House Committee
on Un-American Activities hearings. In addition, the exhibition
will include a variety of lists naming people who were thought
to be associated with Communist front organizations; these documents,
published by the House Committee, anti-Communist groups, and
private citizens, were used to blacklist writers, actors, and
other artists during the "Red Scare" of the 1950s. [About 150
items]
My
Heart in Company: The Work of J. M. Barrie and the Birth of
Peter Pan
3 February 2005 - 23 April 2005
The life and work of James Matthew Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, will be
highlighted in an exhibition at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library
in early 2005. On view will be original manuscripts, photographs, documents detailing
the influence of the young Llewelyn Davies brothers on the creation of Peter
Pan, and artifacts, including Barrie's key to Kensington Gardens. The exhibition
will open to the public on Thursday, February 3, 2005 and run through April 23,
2005. News Release.
For information, contact: Timothy Young,
Assistant Curator of Modern Books and Manuscripts, (203) 432-8131
or email timothy.young@yale.edu
Sheet Music From the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection
On Exhibition in February 2005
An exhibition of sheet music representing all the major African American musical
genres of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including ragtime, black musical
theater, folk songs, spirituals, the blues, and jazz. Major black composers and
lyricist represented include Eubie Blake, Cab Calloway, Paul Laurence Dunbar,
Duke Ellington, James Weldon and John Rosamond Johnson, Noble Sissle, and Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor.
Centenary of Witold Gombrowicz
October 22, 2004 - January 15, 2005
Beinecke Library celebrates the centenary of the Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz
(1904-1969) with an exhibition drawn from his papers and library, acquired by Yale in 1998.
Gombrowicz, playwright, diarist, and author of several novels, including Ferdydurke
which Susan Sontag has called "one of the most important overlooked books of the 20th Century,"
was born in Poland on August 4, 1904. During his 24 years of exile in Argentina, he explored
themes of identity and alienation in such works as the novel Trans-Atlantyk and the
plays "Slub" [Marriage] and "Operetka" [Operetta]. After leaving Argentina in 1963, Gombrowicz
settled in the south of France, where he continued his writing, winning the International Prize
for Literature in 1967 for his novel Cosmos as well as a nomination for the Nobel Prize.
Gombrowicz, who died in July 1969, remains a powerful voice in modern European literature,
though he is little known in America. The Yale University Press issued a new translation of his
novel, Ferdydurke in 2000. On display are original manuscripts by Gombrowicz, rare editions
of his publications, pages of his diaries, and photographs showing the writer throughout his
life.
John Locke
Through December 22, 2004
This exhibition addresses the history and the posthumous legacy of each of
Locke's major works, in Europe, the Americas, and around the world over
the past 300 years. The exhibition also traces Locke's career, his
intellectual circle, and literary legacy in dozens of printed and
annotated books, manuscripts, and historical artifacts.
To these Shores
June 21-September, 2004
A survey of the Yale Collection of German Literature, focusing on how it was
formed and grew over the last century. Collectors, booksellers, scholars, and
librarians interacting with historical forces, such as immigration, exile, and the
effects of both World Wars, resulted in a unique collection of literary books and
manuscripts in German. In conjunction with the 45th annual Preconference of the Rare
Book & Manuscript Section of the Association of College & Research Libraries,
June 21-24 in New Haven, which takes as its theme the acquisition of foreign
collections. [About 120 items]
Ruckus! American Entertainments at the Turn of the Twentieth
Century
May 28-August 1, 2004
Ruckus! American Entertainments at the Turn of the Twentieth Century recalls popular
amusements at the turn of the century in all their variety and vivacity and celebrates the
performers, both the famous and the forgotten, who were at the heart of the period's most
lively divertissements. The exhibition includes materials related to vaudeville, minstrel
shows, popular plays, early burlesque, and Wild West shows. The “ruckus” of the title refers
to the finale of many minstrel shows, when the entire company--which might include comics,
dancers, acrobats, animal acts, female impersonators, among others--joined on stage for a
final song and dance number. [About 60 items]
The Art of Medicine
April 16-May 15, 2004
Medieval manuscripts from the collections at Beinecke and treasures from the Cushing/Whitney Medical
Library show the importance of the visual in early medicine. Alchemy, astrology, hawking, and horse
care jostle with anatomy, forecasting of the outcome of illness, and the business of healing. The way
medical books were designed and decorated to meet the needs of contemporary owners and users enhanced
their meaning for readers at the time and makes a striking visual impact today. [About 60 items]
Western Photographs: Selected Acquisitions, 2003.
Through March 2004
A selection of contemporary and 19th-century photographs of people and places from the
American West, all acquired since January 1, 2003. Contemporary works by David Plowden,
Miguel Gandert, Owen Luck, and David Grant Nobles. Nineteenth-century albums and vintage
prints by William Prettyman, Louis McClure, Frederic Maude, and George Wharton James.
The exhibition also includes selections from Peter Palmquist's collection of 19th-century
western photography. [About 100 items]
"No Man Can Hinder Me": Black Troops in the Federal Army
During the Civil War
2 December 2003 - February 2004
This memorial tribute to African American soldiers who served in the United States Army, 1862-1865,
will feature autograph letters--including one by Frederick Douglass on his youngest son "Charley's"
enlistment--autograph documents relating to the recruitment and organization of the "colored troops," regimental histories, and individual and group portraits of the men who served.
St. Petersburg: A Portrait of a Great City
Through January 17, 2004
Books, manuscripts, prints, and photographs document the role of St. Petersburg as a cultural, artistic, and literary center from its founding through the Second World War. The exhibition looks at St. Petersburg through the eyes of non-Russian travelers, while including such Russian artifacts as the library's renowned Romanov albums and the recently acquired manuscript of Anna Akhmatova's Poema bez geroia (Poem without a hero).
Gloriana: Monuments and Memorials of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth I
October - November, 2003
An exhibition of manuscripts, contemporary printed books, portraits, commemorative medals, and other documents of the major events and personalities of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, drawn from the collections of the Elizabethan Club of Yale University in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the Queen's death in 1603.
Renaissance Pop-Ups: Interactive Books at the Beinecke Library: 1474-1677
November 2003
From the earliest days of movable type, parallel innovations in the mechanics of book-making were explored. Examples of curious devices, such as volvelles, wheels and pointers, and flip-up tabs used to illustrate, inform, and prognosticate will be on display.
Intimate Circles: American Women in the Arts
July 28-October 18, 2003
This exhibition focuses on several loosely defined groups of women, including communities in the American southwest (including Georgia O'Keeffe and Mable Dodge), Harlem and "outposts" of the Harlem Renaissance such as Chicago and Washington D.C. (including Zora Neale Hurston, A'Lelia Walker, and Georgia Douglas Johnson), and expatriate communities abroad (highlighting Stein and Toklas, Romaine Brooks, H.D., Josephine Baker).
Extravagant Crowd: Carl Van Vechten's Portraits of Women
July 28-October 18, 2003
About 50 women of achievement, photographed by Van Vechten between 1932-1964. The exhibition catalog will increase this number to about 85. The women include some of the best known of Van Vechten's subjects (Gertrude Stein, Billie Holiday, Zora Neale Hurston, Marianne Moore) and some now-forgotten women who made significant contributions to Broadway theater, the Harlem Renaissance, the early Hollywood film industry, and the 1920s and '30s expatriate communities in Paris and London.
James Swan, Châ-tic of the Northwest Coast: Paintings and drawings from the Franz & Kathryn Stenzel Collection
April 25-July 19
In January 1850, James Gilchrist Swan, a thirty-one-year-old ship chandler and admiralty lawyer, sailed from Boston for the West. Over the next fifty years he came to be recognized as one of the country's foremost experts on the history and culture of Northwest Coast Indian communities. The Beinecke's exhibit represents the first comprehensive exhibition of more than 100 pictures drawn by or collected by Swan. The exhibition will include 11 drawings by nineteenth-century Haida artist Johnny Kit Elswa.
Hector Berlioz (1803-69)
March-May
This bicentenary tribute to the French composer will feature autograph scores--notably that the King Lear overture, the only major Berlioz manuscript in the United States--, autograph letters by Berlioz or addressed to him, and first or early editions of his works.
James Lord
April 18-May
An exhibition celebrating the life and writings of memoirist and Giacometti biographer James Lord, in conjunction with the publication of his latest book, Plausible Portraits
Juvenile Jurisprudence: Law in Children's Literature
January 30 through April 18, 2003
William Walton, Composer: A Centenary Exhibition
October 18, 2002, - January 27, 2003
The Buxheim Library:Books from the Carthusian Charterhouse of Buxheim (southwest Germany) celebrating the 600th anniversary of its founding in 1402
November through December, 2003
Gleaming Gold, Shining Silver: 19th-century Book Covers from the Collection of Leonard and Lisa Baskin
July 26 through October 12, 2002
Lighter than Air :Selections from the John Winston Graham Aeronautical Collection
August 8 through September 27, 2002
America Pictured to the Life: Illustrated Works from the Paul Mellon Bequest
May 3-July 17, 2002
My Soul Has Grown Deep like the Rivers: Langston Hughes at 100
February 1-20 April 2002
A Library for Its Time, Collections Then & Now: A tercentenial celebration of Yale Library collections in 1701 and 2001
October 6, 2001 through January 19, 2002
Commonplace Books: Manuscripts and Printed Books from Antiquity to the Twentieth Century
July 26 through September 29, 2001
From Heinrich Schütz to Henry Miller: Selections from the Frederick R. Koch Collection at the Beinecke Library
20 April - 14 July 2001
Theater and Anti-Theater in the 18th Century
15 January - 14 April 2001
Kurt Weill: A Centennial Celebration
October - December, 2000
Ascendancy: Irish Religion & Politics 1500-1800
July - October, 2000
Banks' Florilegium
July - October, 2000
Pushkin to Nabokov: Russian Literature at Yale
April 26 through July 15, 2000
No Place on Earth
January 28 through March 2000
Goethe the Scientist
Through 22 December 1999
Rush! Beinecke celebrates gold
Through 2 October 1999
Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Digital Age: An exhibition at theBeinecke Library
Through 15 September 1999
Fritz Eichenberg Exhibit at Yale
Through 16 April 1999
From Bojangles to Broadway
Through 26 March 1999
Contested Terrain: Beinecke exhibit marks the sesquicentennial of the Mexican War
Through December 23, 1998
Along His Way: James Weldon Johnson
Through June, 1998
The Italian Grand Tour in letters, journals, books, and prints
Through March, 1998
Thornton Wilder: A Centenary Exhibition
Through September 19, 1997
American Indian Writing and Art at the Beinecke Library
Through June 28, 1997
Renaissance Readers
Through March 28, 1997
Spenseriana: From Illustrated to Spurious Spenser
Through October 15, 1996
Some Australian Flowers: Plates from Banks' Florilegium
Through October 15, 1996
Baseball Books for Children From the Betsy Beinecke Shirley Collection
Through August 30, 1996
Woman to Woman: An Exhibition of Letters at the Beinecke
April-June, 1996 |
