fall/winter 2017
TRANSCRIPT
The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens
FALL/WINTER 2017
FLORIFORM
WELCOME TO THE RANCH
IN THE WOODS WITH A CANOE
SENIOR STAFF OF THE HUNTINGTON
STEVE HINDLE Interim President and
W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research
LARRY J. BURIK Vice President of Facilities
JAMES P. FOLSOM Marge and Sherm Telleen/Marion and Earle Jorgensen
Director of the Botanical Gardens
CATHERINE HESS Interim Director of the Art Collections and
Chief Curator of European Art
MITCHELL MORRIS Chief Information Officer
COREEN A. RODGERS Anne and Jim Rothenberg Vice President for Financial Affairs
RANDY SHULMAN Vice President for Advancement
SUSAN TURNER-LOWE Vice President for Communications and Marketing
DAVID S. ZEIDBERG Avery Director of the Library
MAGAZINE STAFF
EDITOR Kevin Durkin
DESIGNER Lori Ann Achzet
Huntington Frontiers is published semiannually by the Office of Communications and Marketing. It strives to connect
readers with the rich intellectual life of The Huntington, capturing in news and features the work of researchers,
educators, curators, and others across a range of disciplines.
INQUIRIES AND COMMENTS:Kevin Durkin, Editor, Huntington Frontiers1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108
For advertising inquiries, please call Maggie Malone, 312-593-3355
Unless otherwise acknowledged, photography is provided by The Huntington’s Department of Imaging Services.
© 2017 The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. All rights reserved. Reproduction or use of the contents, in whole or in part, without permission of the
publisher, is prohibited.
1151 Oxford Road | San Marino, California 91108 | huntington.org
FROM THE EDITORSOUL SEARCHING, HUNTINGTON STYLE
There’s a spiritual quality to The Huntington that we hear about regularly, and from people from all walks of life: this is a place where they come to renew and replenish; a restorative place for quiet reflection and contemplation. And while we don’t typically
seek out stories for the magazine to fit a theme, I was struck by the degree to which this issue seems to speak in particular to the intersection of the mind and the spirit—through art, nature, and intellectual pursuit. Take, for example, our cover story, in which James Glisson, the Bradford and Christine Mishler Associate Curator of American Art, imaginatively engages with the work of three modern artists—Henrietta Shore (1880–1963), Agnes Pelton (1881–1961), and Helen Lundeberg (1908–1999)—who conjured up a multiplicity of meanings in their luminous depictions of flowers (see pg. 16). The minds and spirits of these three artists live on in the floral forms their art embodies. Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Usha Lee McFarling leads us deep into the earthly paradise of the Ranch, The Huntington’s experimental demonstration garden. Part classroom and part research lab, the Ranch draws inspiration from The Huntington’s—and the region’s—agricultural heritage, while making connections with gardeners, native plant enthusiasts, landscape professionals, students, educators, and researchers throughout Southern California (see pg. 10). Racha Kirakosian, assistant professor of German and the Study of Religion at Harvard University, and a short-term fellow at The Huntington in 2017, explores the materiality of a devotional work as she contemplates a recess carved into the wooden cover of a 15th-century Dutch manuscript and posits a surprising purpose it may once have served (see pg. 8). In his book Heading Out: A History of American Camping, Terence Young—professor emeritus of geography at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona—takes readers on a pilgrimage into nature to explore the history of camping in the United States. In an excerpt from the book, he scrutinizes U.S. historian Frederick Jackson Turner, best known for his “Frontier Thesis,” as he encountered the wilderness with family and friends on a 1908 canoe-camping trip (see pg. 22). Take a whirl though our Social Scene (see pg. 6), a roundup of images and news items from The Huntington’s social media, and then slice up and weave together our Back Page, which features The Blue Boy in a format you’ve never seen before (see pg. 27). At The Huntington, we are devoted to the notion that our humanity is best expressed through a balance of the things of this world and the promptings of the soul. In the pages ahead, may you catch a glimpse of enlightenment.
Kevin Durkin is editor of Huntington Frontiers.
On the cover: Detail of Agnes Pelton’s Passion Flower, ca. 1945, oil on canvas. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation Acquisition Fund for American Art.
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Contents FALL/WINTER 2017
FEATURES
WELCOME TO THE RANCH 10 The Huntington’s experimental demonstration garden educates and enchants By Usha Lee McFarling
FLORIFORM 16 Don’t expect a garden variety flower from a modernist painter By James Glisson
DEPARTMENTS SOCIAL SCENE 6 SCHOLAR’S INSIGHT 8 A Riveting Hypothesis By Racha Kirakosian
LESSONS LEARNED 22 In the Woods with a CanoeBy Terence Young IN PRINT 26 Recommended Reading BACK PAGE 27 Now You See Him, Now You Don’tBy Kate Lain
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Top: Fruits and vegetables harvested from the Ranch, The Huntington’s experimental demonstration garden. Photograph by Kate Lain. Center: Detail of Henrietta Shore’s Clivia, ca. 1930, oil and pencil on canvas laid down on board. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation Acquisition Fund for American Art. © Estate of Henrietta Shore. Bottom: In 1908, historian Frederick Jackson Turner and his family joined the family of Charles Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin, on a canoe camping trip through southern Ontario Province in Canada. This detail is from a photograph taken on the Atikokan River. Unknown photographer. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
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SOCIAL SCENEA PEEK AT WHAT WE’RE UP TO ONLINE
Seven artists have spent the better part of the year immersing themselves in The Huntington’s library, art, and botanical collections as they create new artworks as part of /five, The Huntington’s five-year contemporary arts initiative centered on creative collaborations. The artists were selected by the Los Angeles–based Women’s Center for Creative Work (WCCW), The Huntington’s 2017 partner in the initiative. Over the course of the year, The Huntington has been following the artists’ progress and sharing updates with our digital audiences via the /five website at huntington.org/five.
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We’re also on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more! Links at huntington.org
SOCIAL SCENE As part of a YWCA Girls’ Empowerment Camp, nearly 100 middle schoolers recently went behind the scenes in the Library for an “up-close-and-personal” experience with curators, conservators, and materials from the collections.huntingtonblogs.org/2017/09/making-history-personal/
Art intern Julia Cury shares some of the hidden elements tucked inside a few pieces of furniture in the Virginia Steele Scott Galleries of American Art.http://huntingtonblogs.org/2017/10/inside-secrets/
“A fairy volume nestled in the palm of your hand”—a re-search fellow reflects on miniature books at The Huntington.huntingtonblogs.org/2017/08/enchanting-miniature-books/
The Lily Ponds are looking better than ever after undergoing a major cleaning.huntingtonblogs.org/2017/07/flourishing-lily-ponds/
ON SOUNDCLOUD AND ITUNES…These lectures are only a tiny fraction of The Huntington’s audio available for free on SoundCloud and iTunes.
“I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There”Hilary Mantel
Kate Sessions:A Legacy of Botanical BountyNancy Carol Carter
Potosí, Silver, and the Coming of the Modern WorldJohn Demos
Conference: Octavia E. Butler Studies: Convergence of an Expanding Field
The Art of Farming: How a Farmer Sees the Future
David Mas Masumoto and Marcy Masumoto
Kindred: A Graphic Novel AdaptationDamian Duffy and John Jennings
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Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star: Now I See You as You AreJennifer van Saders
3Finger smudges, worn pages, notes written in the margins: the signs of use in a medieval manuscript are a thing of special beauty to a scholar.http://huntingtonblogs.org/2017/10/a-using-book/ 5
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One of the most pleasurable experiences one can have as a medievalist is coming across an artifact that triggers a chain of discoveries and unexpected connec-
tions. That happened to me when I was researching a codex from The Huntington’s collections, a 15th-century Dutch manuscript of devotional texts known as Huntington Manuscript 1048, or simply HM 1048. Produced in the northeastern part of the Netherlands around 1439, it contains meditations, sermons, and prayers from several authors. In my work on medieval mysticism and materi-ality, I study manuscripts and the texts they contain in order to connect two things in seeming opposition: devotional culture dealing with transcendence and the physical nature of book production.
I’m used to poring over book bindings, illumi-nations and miniatures, and “bookish” things. But HM 1048 stood out with a particular feature: a pear-shaped recess on the inside of the front wooden cover. This posed a conundrum. What was its use? Why was it there? Did it hold a devotional object, which would have been in keeping with the book’s religious and mystical contents? This would be palpable evidence for the link between devotion and corporeality, between mysticism and materiality. The catalog entry suggested that an ampule of holy water could have been kept in the front cover’s recess, elevating the status of the book to that of a reliquary. Yet, the recess’s dimensions—approxi-mately 2.6 inches long, nearly 1.4 inches at its widest, and 0.2 to slightly over 0.3 inches deep—would have hardly accommodated a glass con-tainer. Besides, such a precious book would not be the ideal place to keep liquids. Upon further deliberation and consultation with colleagues, an intriguing hypothesis took shape: what if the reader of the Dutch manuscript needed eyeglasses that she kept in the book itself? Indeed, one particular type of medieval spectacles had a central hinge to sit on the nose, so-called rivet spectacles. Their lenses would be relatively thin (0.08–0.12 inches!), and if folded in a case, it would be pear shaped. A small pair of rivet spectacles would fit perfectly into the recess in HM 1048’s front cover.
A Riveting HypothesisTHE RECESS IN A BOOK’S COVER MAY HAVE CONTAINED MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE
By Racha Kirakosian
scholar’s insight
Above: Senior book conservator Andrea Knowlton (left) and Racha Kirakosian, assistant professor of German and the Study of Religion at Harvard University, look at a pear-shaped recess inside the front cover of a 15th-century Dutch codex known as Huntington Manuscript 1048. Photograph by Kate Lain. Below: Colored drawing of a virgin with a unicorn in her lap; on the facing page, the beginning of a sermon and, at the bottom of the page, a dragon and unicorn fighting. HM 1048, back/front of leaf 21 and 22. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
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There exists at least one other manuscript of the time with a front book cover carved out to contain spectacles (the manuscript with the shelf-mark “Ms. L. 64,” located in the Bibliothèque Cantonale et Universitaire in Fribourg, Switzer-land). The Huntington’s copy, however, seems unique. In contrast to the Fribourg book, in which the spectacles were kept with their lenses spread apart, HM 1048 would have accommodated a folded pair of rivet spectacles. One can easily imagine that glasses were need-ed to read the pocket-size book, considering that the sometimes small handwriting was so difficult to decipher, especially in half-light. But who then owned the book and the suspected glasses? An ex libris note on the book’s last page, dating from the time when most of the texts in the manu-script were copied, specifies in Dutch: dijt boek hort tuu inden meygaerd ende voert dije gemeijn susteren (“this book belongs to the May Orchard and was given to all sisters”). This indication of ownership is signed by Mechtel Pijls. A woman named Mechtelt Pijls is mentioned in the Utrecht archives in 1470, but we see no signs of a community named Meygaerd. Still, this would be a common nomenclature for a beguinage—a quasi-monastic but lay community of pious people. Other details affiliate HM 1048 with a female monastic context, such as the depiction of a woman
with a unicorn. According to medieval tradition, only a female virgin was able to catch the fantastic beast. The portrayal of the unicorn in the virgin’s lap preceding a sermon on the mystical bride speaks for a nunnery or some sort of female community as the place where the volume was produced and used. The fact that only brothers are addressed in the sermon is not a mistake on the scribe’s part, as the sermon harks back to textual and even oral traditions; it might originally have addressed a male community before it was circulated and copied. Although we cannot be absolutely certain about when and where the codex was bound, the back flyleaf, attached to the back cover, is made from parchment recycled from a Latin breviary (book containing liturgical text) for nuns. Returning to the point of departure: does the mundane use of the book’s cover as a container for spectacles diminish its links between devotional and material culture? My short answer is, no, it does not. This codex is a wonderful example of a book put to personal and practical use while also serving as a medium of devotion within a community.
Racha Kirakosian is assistant professor of German and the Study of Religion at Harvard University, and was a short-term fellow at The Huntington in 2017.
Left: The rivet spectacles in this image would fold into a pear shape. Detail of The Presentation in the Temple by Friedrich Herlin (1425/30–1500), left inner panel of the high altar of the St. Georg church in Nördlingen, Germany, currently housed at the Stadtmuseum Nördlingen. Photograph: Institute for Material Culture–University of Salzburg. Right: Close-up of the pear-shaped recess inside the front cover of HM 1048. Photograph by Kate Lain.
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Welcome to the Ranch THE HUNTINGTON’S EXPERIMENTAL DEMONSTRATION GARDEN EDUCATES AND ENCHANTS
By Usha Lee McFarling
If ever there were a secret garden, it’s the Ranch Garden at The Huntington. The place can be a bit hard to find. It’s tucked behind the Helen and Peter Bing Children’s Garden, past a string of working greenhouses, well off the beaten path. And it’s open to visitors only on Saturdays (10 a.m. to 1 p.m.). But you’ll know it when you find it. Walk under the shade of some stately oaks, through a humble gate, and you’ll see—depending on the season—fruit trees laden with plums and apricots, vines bursting with melons, and towering tomato plants. You may find a bower dripping with grapes, leafy artichokes as high as your waist, or tomatillos blooming amid a riot of sunflowers. You’ll hear bees buzzing and the songs of wrens and warblers. If you’re lucky, you’ll see monarch and swallowtail butterflies and maybe one of the lizards, or even bunnies, that call the Ranch their home. Part demonstration garden, part experimental space, and part pure magic, the Ranch is full of folksy touches like straw bales and a sign reading: “Trespassers will be composted.” With its abundance of edibles and a slightly unkempt, playful air, the Ranch is decidedly different from the more manicured, formal, ornamental gardens that grace the rest of The Huntington.
Opposite page: A chalkboard outside the “Tool Booth” welcomes visitors to the Ranch Garden. Photograph by Kate Lain. Left: Second graders from Washington Elementary in Pasadena, Calif., on a spring visit to the Ranch. Photograph by Kate Lain.
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“It’s a different kind of beauty,” says Jim Folsom, the Marge and Sherm Telleen/Marion and Earle Jorgensen Director of the Botanical Gardens. One of the primary goals of the Ranch, Folsom says, is not creating something that requires expensive landscape architecture or a large crew of caretakers. Instead, the Ranch showcases simple but effective ideas home gardeners might employ in their own yards. “The goal back here,” Folsom says, “is humility.” The Ranch Garden got its start with 80 homeless fruit trees that arrived when the nation’s largest urban farm, South Central Farm in Los Angeles, closed in 2006. The Huntington agreed to temporarily house the treasured trees in boxes, until a new farm site could be
found. When that fell through, the institution agreed to plant the trees as part of a demonstration space for urban gardening, funded with a grant from the Annenberg Foundation. The Otis Booth Foundation and Huntington Overseer Stephen E. Rogers have provided additional funds. The garden, says Folsom, is an opportunity for The Huntington to get back to the property’s agricultural roots—a legacy that was lost over the years as the focus shifted to ornamental and rare plants. “The Ranch” is what Henry E. Huntington originally called the working farmstead he bought in 1903. Huntington planted orange groves and was among the first in the state to farm avocados. He maintained a kitchen garden as well. Today, the 15-acre Ranch site includes some of Huntington’s original orange groves, a heritage avocado orchard, a “food forest,” and room for a
kitchen garden, or potager, about to get underway. At the heart of the Ranch is a half-acre demonstration site and working vegetable garden used to educate the public about sustainable urban gardening, a practice that’s become increasingly important in recent years. “People are interested in food and where it comes from,” says Aaron Fox, assistant professor of urban and community agriculture at California State Poly-technic University, Pomona. “But there are a lot of roadblocks. Having a demonstra-tion space like The Huntington’s Ranch may open a lot of doors and show people there are simple ways of integrating gardening into their own lives.” Each Saturday during open house, you’ll find volunteer master gardeners from throughout Los Angeles County showcasing the bounty of the Ranch. At a recent one, visitors sample dark red mulberries and Australian finger limes—thin, dark
citrus fruits that explode pleasantly on the tongue. “It’s like caviar!” one taster says. An 11-year-old visitor from Arizona, meanwhile, tears into a plate of fresh radishes. “Everyone likes to try the food,” says Chan Nguyen, a master gardener and Huntington volunteer from Eagle Rock who relishes her stints at the Ranch. “It’s very serene and magical,” she says. “It’s so different from the rest of The Huntington. You almost feel like you’re breaking the rules.” Visitors pepper master gardeners with questions. How hard is it to build raised beds? How high should they be? Can I grow grapes on the side of my garage? Many seem impressed by how rich, ripe, and lush everything is—and how different from stereotypical vegetable gardens with tidy rows. “I would say people are surprised—and delighted,” says Joan Borgman, a volunteer and master gardener from North Hollywood.
Top: High school students from the Torres Garden Club at East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy visited the Ranch before planting vegetables on their school campus. Center: Several of the Torres Garden Club’s raised vegetable beds basking in the sun. Bottom: The Torres Garden Club students produced so many vegetables that they sold them at their high school to raise funds. Photographs by Natasha Burgos.
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On many weekdays, the Ranch hosts some of its most enthusiastic visitors. Hundreds of second-graders from Pasadena Unified School District visit The Huntington through the school year as part of the district’s Farm to School program, which emphasizes growing and eating healthy produce. At the Ranch, they often can’t control their excitement. “Hey, I see hay!” shouts one student, cracking up his classmates. “Blueberries!” yells Victor Her-nandez, 7. “They look like they have juice inside!” The kids seem stunned to see a tiny watermelon forming on a vine. They thought pomegranate flowers would form cherries. It is clear many in the group don’t associate the foods they eat with the plants that grow them. “A lot of this is new to them, that’s why they’re freaking out about the berries,” says teacher Karina Evans. “They know zucchini, they know pumpkin, but not how they are grown.” “They get excited about seeing where their food comes from,” agrees Deborah Hartnett, a master gardener from Inglewood who leads school tours. Hartnett says she’s seen children astonished when given the chance to pull a carrot from the soil. “I’m hearing they eat more vegetables if they grow them,” she says. That’s true of Jesse Ramirez, 8, who helps her parents tend a small vegetable garden on the balcony of their apartment. “We grow carrots, tomatoes, cabbage, and cucumbers,” she says. “I make the salad. I chop everything.” Older students benefit, too. High school stu-dents from the Torres Garden Club at East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy visited the Ranch before planting six raised beds on their campus. They planted Brussels sprouts, kale, and beets; built bamboo teepees to support snap peas; and grew strawberries, tomatoes, and artichokes. They ended up with so much produce that they made and sold lunches to teachers as a fund-raiser. The experience has been transformative for the teenagers—some of whom are top students. Some have learning disabilities, emotional problems, or have run into trouble with the law, says garden club advisor and teacher Natasha Burgos. They’ve taken to gardening with a vengeance—racing to the In-ternet to solve problems, like why artichokes aren’t blooming or how to keep birds from eating straw-berries. “It helps them figure out things on their own,” Burgos says. “They see if they put in the time and the work, they get results.”
The Ranch is also a lab and experiential learn-ing center for college students studying urban and community agriculture, like Emma Ho’o, 26, a plant science major from Cal Poly Pomona. Ho’o is ambitious. She wants to run a kitchen garden attached to a Michelin-starred restaurant like Copenhagen’s famed Noma and calls her work helping with the Ranch vegetable patch “horticultural therapy.” “It shows the ease and joy of growing your own food,” she says. “You can see how much—even in a small place—you can produce.” Carolina Vaquerano, 26, is a Mt. San Antonio College student who hopes one day to open an urban farm using techniques she’s learning at the Ranch. On a recent Sunday, she’d driven more than an hour to tackle such unglamorous tasks as weeding and mulching. But she keeps returning, she says, because “It’s a magical place.” “I can ex-plore,” she adds. “I can hide in places and eat fruit. When I’m here I feel like a little kid again.”
Kelly Fernandez’s main job is to care for The Huntington’s Herb Garden, with its formal struc-ture, brick paths, and ordered plantings of helio-trope and borage that recall European gardens of past centuries. But Fernandez, an obsessive veg-etable gardener, has been known to sneak in the occasional kale, chard, or eggplant. “The docents always ask me, why are there vegetables in here?” Fernandez says. But in the annuals bed at the Ranch, Fernandez is able to grow vegetables, in all their mess and glory, to her heart’s content. She can create playful plant tapestries, for example, combining tomatillos,
Above: Kelly Fernandez (left), gardener at The Huntington’s Herb Garden, builds a framework to support vegetables growing in straw bales at the Ranch Garden, while Emma Ho’o, a plant science major from Cal Poly Pomona, spreads mulch between the rows. Photograph by Kate Lain.
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hot peppers, basil, and edible sunflowers into one gorgeous patch. She can let pole beans run up corn-stalks and flowers grow amidst rainbow chard. “The Ranch is more playful,” she says, deftly cutting a knee-high bunch of beet greens from amid a swirl of squash vines. “It’s a little looser.” One fan is David “Mas” Masumoto, the noted author and organic peach farmer, who visited the Ranch after lecturing at The Huntington last spring. “You look at that garden, there’s so much joy,” he says. “This is not industrialized, corporate farming. This is an oasis.” Indeed, the fanciful selection of fruit trees planted here seems an invitation to feast. There are coffee cake persimmons. Red strawberry guavas. Pink lemonade blueberries. Even bacon avocados. Folsom hopes such wondrous abundance en-courages homeowners to plant something of their own. “You need to drop your fears and just do it,” he says. “If you live here and have space but go to the store to buy rosemary and lemons, that’s just weird.” One Ranch project that home gardeners could easily try is planting vegetables in pockets of soil nestled inside straw bales. The bales break down into compost as the plants inside them grow. And with so much aeration, growing conditions can be excellent. “It’s all the rage right now, so I wanted to try it,” says Fernandez, who was eagerly anticipating cutting the strings holding the bales together at season’s end. “Inside is this luscious, wonderful new soil that’s been forming in there,” explains Ho’o, who had planted with bales the season before. “We’re all soil nerds,” Fernandez says. Which is good, because at the Ranch, says Folsom, “soil is queen.” It’s amended, aerated, and mulched as much as possible. Visitors are asked not to step on the soil in growing beds so as not to compact it. That soil is carefully tended by the Ranch’s chief gardener, Cara Hanstein, who is so good with plants, volunteers say she has “magic dust in her fingers.” But Barnard humbly attributes her success to the healthy soil and its many microbes. “Taking care of soil is definitely the future of gardening,” she says. “Which is a little bit silly because it’s also the past of gardening.” The Ranch’s original soil needed a lot of help. It was severely compacted by the many trucks that had parked on it during construction of the Chinese Garden and was riddled with gravel. Gardeners and interns—including Fernandez, who got her start at The Huntington by interning—spent
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months layering the ground with cardboard and mulch to rehabilitate the soil. Cardboard mulching has many merits: it kills weeds, draws beneficial fungus into the soil as it breaks down, and conserves water. If you look close-ly while at the Ranch, you might see some card-board peeking up from under wood chip mulch. “See how it really retains the moisture?” Barnard asks, lifting up the corner of a cardboard sheet for a visitor. “It’s been so hot. But not under here.” Hanstein needs an almost unimaginable amount of mulch to keep her soil in top shape. Luckily, Daniel Goyette can provide it. Goyette, The Hun-tington’s principal arborist, deals with the tons of plant waste that a 207-acre property generates. He grinds towering piles of material— thick oak trunks, palm fronds, lengthy bamboo stems—in a massive, diesel-powered tub grinder with a 75-foot-long conveyor belt—into giant piles of wood chip mulch. Truckloads of that mulch are then ferried to the Ranch—and elsewhere on the property, as more and more Huntington gardeners clamor for it. It’s one example of how the stewardship and sustain-ability efforts showcased at the Ranch, like heavy mulching and the reduction of water use, are wind-ing their way through The Huntington at large. While the Ranch features an edible landscape, the garden also stresses the importance of nurtur-ing habitats that support wildlife and pollinators. Key to this are the many California native plants—verbena, salvia, penstemon, and Matilija pop-pies—that look right at home amidst the vegeta-bles. “It’s thinking about gardening in a whole new way,” says Kitty Connolly, executive director of the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers and Native Plants and former botanical educator at The Huntington. The use of California natives throughout the Ranch, Connolly says, is “a seal of approval that natives have arrived and are an accept-ed part of our aesthetic landscape.”
The Ranch is also the place where Huntington gardeners can try new ideas with little fear of how messy the results may look. “We are constantly experimenting with things you hear in the field of horticulture,” Hanstein says. “We are always observ-ing, watching as the garden unfolds and responds.” There’s the “spontaneous garden” where a vol-unteer once threw a handful of leftover seeds. It was recently brimming with drifts of chard and bachelor’s buttons that were battling off a small
invasion of New Zealand spinach. An experimental “food forest” in the rear of the Ranch—an attempt to create a permanent ecosystem of fruit trees and edible perennials with little maintenance—has been more of a struggle because hardy weeds and grasses compete with the food plants. But new ideas keep rolling in: Folsom is dream-ing up a hundred ways to use “square foot garden-ing” in raised beds for school curricula. He’s also testing various ways schools might easily grow potatoes in containers large and small. “I think of this as an idea space,” he says. Alicia Baugh, head of The Huntington’s plant sale nursery, is using raised beds at the Ranch to test which soil amendment—seaweed extract, bat guano, or organic, all-purpose fertilizer—works best to boost vegetable growth. Baugh, Fernandez, Goyette, and other botanical staff who help at the Ranch have full-time jobs at The Huntington unre-lated to it, Folsom notes. But, like many volunteers, they can’t seem to keep away. “I love it,” Baugh says. “I love that it’s more like your own backyard.” “It feels like a community effort,” says Hanstein, who encourages people to test an idea at the Ranch, use it as a classroom, or just visit it to enjoy the scent of blooming sage, the crunch of soil under their feet, and the vivid palette of colors that change through the seasons. “This wildness,” she says. “It’s something people crave—even if they don’t realize they crave it.”
Usha Lee McFarling is a Pulitzer Prize–winning freelance writer based in South Pasadena, Calif.
Above: A pollinator attracted to an artichoke flower in full bloom at the Ranch. Photograph by Kate Lain. Opposite, top: Cara Hanstein, the Ranch’s chief gardener, plucks a white mulberry from a tree at the Ranch. Photograph by Kate Lain.Opposite, center: This massive, diesel-fueled tub grinder converts tons of plant waste from across The Huntington’s campus into giant piles of mulch. Photograph by Kate Lain. Opposite, bottom left: Alicia Baugh, head of The Huntington’s plant sale nursery, stands between raised beds at the Ranch where she tests soil amendment. Photograph by Kate Lain. Opposite, bottom right: Beneficial fungi spread through mulch, slowly breaking it down. Photograph by Lisa Blackburn.
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FloriformDON’T EXPECT A GARDEN VARIETY FLOWER FROM A MODERNIST PAINTER
By James Glisson
A rose is a rose is a rose, but what a rose can mean in different contexts is stag-geringly varied. Take the red rose. A token of romantic affection, it is also the flower of the City of Pasadena and its world-famous Rose Parade. The British Labour party has taken it up as a logo, as has the Socialist International. Farther afield, the flower was a part of official Soviet ceremonies, including the funeral of Joseph Stalin. Un-believably, the red rose connects Pasadena’s Colorado Boulevard and Moscow’s Red Square. It is probably not just the brilliant colors and concentric, interlocking forms of flowers that enticed such artists as Helen Lundeberg (1908–99), Henrietta Shore (1880–1963), and Agnes Pelton (1881–1961), whose paintings of irises, clivias, and passion flowers recently entered The Huntington’s collection. Just as flowers attract bees, they attract meanings. Humans cannot resist transforming them into symbols, and for Lundeberg, Shore, and Pelton, flowers are foils, ways to further their very different artistic agendas.
With longtime partner and later husband Lorser Feitelson, an abstract painter, Helen Lundeberg was a figure of note in the Los Angeles art scene from the 1930s until her death in 1999. The Huntington’s Irises (The Sentinels) dates from her breakout decade, the 1930s, when her artworks contained an assortment of flagellum-propelled, cell-like bodies, carnivorous plants, distant galaxies, planets, optical instruments, and self-portraits. A drawing of hers at The Huntington shows her in profile on the right, as if she were dreaming up a mindscape of branches and flowers. At one level, Irises (The Sentinels) is an object lesson in observation. Care has been taken to render the vascular tissue of stems, the involutions of the petals, and their branching patterns of white and purple. At another level, the overall effect is disqui-eting—not what one expects of a floral illustration. Why? Irises often grow in semi-arid environments, but this imagined landscape resembles a hot desert climate, dry and devoid of plant life except for a greenish tint on the distant hills that might be groundcover. Besides their improbable ability to thrive, the irises appear to be eerily sentient.
Opposite page: Helen Lundeberg (1908–1999), Irises (The Sentinels), 1936, oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in. (76.2 x 63.5 cm). The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from the Art Collectors’ Council, the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation Acquisition Fund for American Art, the Connie Perkins Endowment, Eleanor and Max Baril, Nancy Berman and Alan Bloch, Maribeth and Hal Borthwick, Caron and Steven Broidy, Jeri and Tom Mitchell, Margaret Richards, Susan W. and Carl W. Robertson, Ann and Robert Ronus, Laura and R. Carlton Seaver, Amanda Shore, Tim and Lisa Sloan, and Geneva and Charles Thornton. © The Feitelson / Lundeberg Art Foundation. Left: Helen Lundeberg (1908–1999), Three Generations, 1937, color pencil on paper, 15 x 11 1/2 in. (38.1 x 29.2 cm). The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation Acquisition Fund for American Art. © The Feitelson / Lundeberg Art Foundation.
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Their outstretched, tentacle-like leaves caress each other and brush against the ground. (Could they uproot themselves and sidle away, like an octopus escaping an aquarium?) They stand up-right, and their stems, like twisted necks, crane, as if to take in something in the distance. Alone in the desert, they are, indeed, sentinels keeping watch over a place where they do not belong. During the 1930s, Lundeberg’s career rode the wave of French Surrealism that had arrived recently in the United States. In 1936, she was included in the epochal Museum of Modern Art exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, organized by its famed director and indefatigable promoter of modernism, Alfred H. Barr Jr. Nonetheless, she had made an effort to establish distance from surrealism. In an October 1934 artist’s statement, she declared her work to be “New Classicism,” which she called a “Post Surrealist movement.” This was possibly the first avant-garde manifesto written in Southern California. She provides a clearer explanation of Post Surrealism in a state-ment in a 1942 Museum of Modern Art catalog: “The pictorial elements [subject matter] are delib-erately arranged to stimulate, in the mind of the spectator, an ordered, pleasurable, introspective activity.” Put another way, the various objects she includes are arrayed to provoke thought. For ex-ample, those healthy irises in the bone-dry desert do not make any sense, and their juxtaposition may trigger an internal self-critical awareness. While the Parisian Surrealists wanted to disorient, the Post Surrealist Lundeberg tugs and slightly confuses, like a pleasant dream with a nagging something-does-not-add-up feeling. Henrietta Shore hailed from Toronto, Canada, and later shuttled between New York City and Los Angeles before settling in Carmel, California. She was never very productive, and a relatively small body of work survives. Moreover, late in life, she was committed to an asylum in San Jose, where she died in 1963. She had no children, and there was no firm evidence of romantic attachments, though she and the photographer Edward Weston, who also lived in Carmel, had a close, if at times fractious, friendship. Yet for all the obscurity she fell into during the last decades of her life, she had once been lauded as a rising star. In 1927, a reviewer in the Christian Science Monitor said “she is unquestionably one of the most important living painters in the United States.”
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Shore’s Clivia was likely painted in the late 1920s or 1930s, when she was most productive and had befriended Weston. Clivia lacks the unsettling quality of Irises or the hallucinatory glow of Pelton’s Passion Flower, but it shares their placelessness. None of these paintings of flowers are located in the complicated ecosystems that sustain life. The viewpoint of Clivia is tilted and skyward, which crops out any hint of soil or even the pot that it might be growing in. Centered on the canvas, the clivia plant obediently splays its leaves and salmon flowers just up to the frame, too pleasing to be observed from life. The flowers have a cold beauty, more like hammered sheets of metal than soft petals. Shore drew a pattern of crisp outlines in pencil, then filled them in with precisely applied oil paint that resembles baked enamel. The dark substructure of lines comes through here and there as if the plant were assembled from die-cut parts—making it look more like a brightly colored machine than a pliant, living thing. In Clivia, it is as if the artist had distilled the floppy parts of actual, living plants into hard, idealized forms, like mathematical diagrams that describe underlying structure. This is not the picture of a single plant, but the sum of her observations of many. Her flowers are neither artificial nor exactly possessing the quality of being alive. One critic’s remark about Shore’s work could aptly be applied to the piece. Reginald Poland, the first director of what is now known as the San Diego Museum of Art, described her art as aimed “toward the greater goal of a vital, impelling creation that is not merely life but more than that, an intensifi-cation of life.” Without being a biologist or mathematician, Shore, through her art, nonetheless grasps at the structures, the sinusoidal curves, Fibonacci se-quences, and branching patterns that are the scaf-folding on which all lifeforms depend. Her sim-plifications are an unveiling of the order inherent to life-forms. While Helen Lundeberg co-opted the iris for her Post Surrealist agenda and Henrietta Shore pared down the clivia to an essential pattern, Agnes Pelton gives us a luminescent and hallucinatory passion flower vine. In Pelton’s hands, this vine is untethered from any support and emerges from a glowing violet background. Leaves, buds, tendrils, and an open flower do not connect to each other; instead, they appear to float in a liquid solution. The central flower expands, an aureole of light
with rays formed by alternating green and pink petals. Light within the painting is peculiar and without a definite source; the red shadows on the green tendrils and the spectral highlights along the leaves’ edges suggest multi-colored lights from multiple sources. (Or, perhaps, the plant is biolu-minescent, glowing like a deep-sea creature?) In Pelton’s painting, the passion flower’s bloom is painted with a controlled impasto. This embossed texture sits above the rest of painting’s surface and makes it seem as though the flower is about to break out of the fantastic space inside the painting into the real space of the spectator. While Passion Flower is representational, Pelton listed it among her abstrac-tions, many of which were captioned with poems. About The Huntington’s painting, she wrote: “Blooming intensity, center of light.” The otherworldly quality of Passion Flower is typical of Pelton’s abstractions, though many of the others contain pulsations of light, cloud-like forms, and energetic patterns. Her turn to abstrac-tion came in 1925 and was based on her reading of mystics and theosophists. Like many early 20th-century artists, including Vassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, Pelton believed that visual art could reach into a spiritual realm and that visual forms were capable of speaking directly to a viewer, bypassing the limitations of everyday language to communicate a message about the oneness of the universe. In 1929, she penned an artist’s statement that leans on the flower as a metaphor for her aes-thetic goals: “As the fragrance of a flower fills consciousness with the essence of life without the necessity for seeing its material form, it seems that color will someday speak directly to us…carrying a more direct impact on our newly developing perceptions.” She wanted to make paintings with the sensory intensity and immediacy of smell to launch viewers onto a higher plane. Like many of her contemporaries, her synesthetic conflation of smell and sight was stimulated by Kandinsky’s 1912 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. She also compared color arrangements to musical harmonies. In her sketchbooks, she placed color symbols on musical staves, as if writing a song in which each color formed a note. Pelton came from a musical family, so equating colors with music had a homegrown aspect. Born in Germany, she moved to Brooklyn as a child with her mother, who for 30 years ran the Pelton School of Music. She studied piano at home and
Opposite page (top): Henrietta Shore (1880–1963), Clivia, ca. 1930, oil and pencil on canvas laid down on board, 26 x 26 in. (66 x 66 cm). The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation Acquisition Fund for American Art. © Estate of Henrietta Shore Opposite page (bottom): Henrietta Shore (1880–1963), Women of Oaxaca, ca. 1929, lithograph, 14 x 18 1/2 in. (35.6 x 47 cm). The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Gift of Hannah S. Kully. © Estate of Henrietta Shore
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art at Pratt Institute. Pelton later lived in bohemian Greenwich Village and exhibited at the Armory Show of 1913, which introduced a skeptical American public to modernist art. In the 1910s and 1920s, she visited Italy, Lebanon, Hawaii, New Mexico, and California. In 1932, she settled in Cathedral City, California, only a few miles from the resort area of Palm Springs, where she remained for the rest of her life and eked out a living by selling desert landscapes to tourists. She exhibited regularly through the 1940s and was the honorary president of the Transcendental Painting Group, which was founded in Taos, New Mexico, in 1938. The group’s members believed, as she did, that abstract art could trans-port people to hitherto unknown levels of reality. Today’s art world is more often associated with commerce and materiality—with a daily parade of headlines reporting record prices for works sold at auction—than with utopian consciousness raising or, as artists in Pelton’s day sometimes called it, a fourth dimension of reality beyond what we can see. With her spiritualist views and belief in abstrac-tion’s ability to capture them, Pelton turns a delicate passion flower into a logo for evangelical modern art. Lundeberg and Shore are less fervent, but they still take up flowers as vehicles for their artistic purposes. Lundeberg’s purple irises are gently un-settling Post Surrealist signs, and Shore articulates the architecture of the clivia’s stems, leaves, and flowers as if it could be broken into components and reassembled. Like the Soviets and the Pasadena Rose Parade organizers, who co-opt the red rose to vastly different ends, these artists use flowers as beautiful messengers to deliver their ideas.
James Glisson is the Bradford and Christine Mishler Associate Curator of American Art at The Huntington.
Agnes Pelton (1881–1961), Passion Flower, ca. 1945, oil on canvas, 24 x 16 in. (61 x 40.6 cm). The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation Acquisition Fund for American Art.
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In the Woods with a CanoeA HISTORIAN OF CAMPING SCRUTINIZES FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER’S ENCOUNTER WITH WILDERNESS
By Terence Young
lessons learned
Camping is one of the country’s most popular pastimes—tens of millions of Americans go camping every year. In Heading Out: A History of American Camping, Terence Young, professor emeritus of geography at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, takes readers into nature to explore with them the history of camping in the United States. Young shows how camping progressed from an impulse among city dwellers to seek temporary retreat from the stress of urban living to a form of recreation so popular that it spawned an entire industry. And he points out the not-so-bright side of camping’s history, when segregated campgrounds at the national parks underscored the nation’s fraught race relations. Young also focuses on key figures in its development, showcasing a sampling of campers and their excursions. Among those featured is Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), perhaps the most influential U.S. historian of the first half of the 20th century. Best known for his “Frontier Thesis,” which he set forth in a scholarly paper published in 1893, Turner attributed the development of a distinctly American character to the nation’s westward expansion. After a long and distinguished career as a history professor, Turner joined The Huntington as a research associate in 1927. The Huntington acquired his papers after his death in 1932. Although many researchers have studied Turner’s archive for its scholarly content, Young is the first to study Turner’s musings on camping. The following is an excerpt from Young’s book that focuses on a month-long canoe-camping trip that Turner, his family, and the family of the president of the University of Wisconsin took together in the summer of 1908. Race would become a factor here, too.
Below: The label for this image in one of the Turners’ photograph albums of their 1908 canoe trip reads: “Kahnipiminanikok / Dow and the Turners en route.” “Kahnipiminanikok” is the Ojibwe name of Kawnipi Lake in Ontario, Canada. Seated in the bow seat is historian Frederick Jackson Turner (far right); behind him sits his wife, Caroline Mae Turner (second from right) and their daughter, Dorothy K. Turner (third from right). Jesse Dow (far left), one of the trip guides, sits in the stern seat, steering the canoe. Unidentified photographer. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
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Among these [boat-camping] enthusiasts was no less a figure than Frederick Jackson Turner. Although the historian had expressed a concern for the “closing”
of the American frontier, pockets of wild nature nonetheless remained, and he frequently canoe camped through them as an escape from his every-day life. Turner’s taste for camping and fishing began during his youth in Portage, Wisconsin, a small town near the frontier when he was born in 1861. Turner’s father, Andrew Jackson Turner, loved the out-of-doors, especially fishing and hunting. The younger Turner, who considered himself and his father to be “comrades,” similarly embraced outdoor activities wholeheartedly, especially fishing. As he grew into a college student and then a professor (at the University of Wisconsin at Madison from 1890 to 1910 and at Harvard University from 1910 to 1922), Turner frequently spent his summers fishing and camping. One biographer noted that Turner often began fall semester “trim and tanned” because of these summer outdoor vacations. Many of these vacations, such as the one he enjoyed during summer 1908, relied on canoes. On Aug. 10 of that year, Turner, his wife (Caroline) Mae, and their daughter Dorothy departed on a canoe-camping trip through southern Ontario Province with Charles Van Hise, a geologist and president of the University of Wisconsin, and his two daughters Mary Janet and Hilda. Paddling and portaging from Basswood Lake on the Minnesota-Ontario border to Lake Nipigon north of Thunder Bay, they covered nearly four hundred miles. Both Turner and his wife left accounts of their vacation—a later letter by him to fellow historian and friend Max Farrand, [who became the first director of research at The Huntington in 1927], and a personal journal by her—which occasionally reveal how their wilderness travels were a pilgrim-age into sacred space. According to Turner, the campers “had a bully taste of the real wilderness” on this canoe-camping adventure. They slept in beds only once, cut their own trails at times, saw no one new for three weeks, encountered moose and bear, and caught and ate so many fish that “we filed the barbs off our hooks to keep from getting too many to eat.” The six campers were assisted by four men that Van Hise had “borrowed from the force of the Oliver mining company which let us pay them and use them in a dull season.” In Turner’s view, these men were “real bullies of the northern woods” whose experiences had made
them into rugged, pioneer-like individuals. “Erick the head guide was a canny Swede who has lived in the woods some thirty years and can do anything.… Dow was a Canadian Scotch man—a true sport…. McCabe was a fine Irish man, strong as the propeller of an ocean liner at the stern paddle, and then there was the cook [Fred Landry], a French Canadian, with the gasconade of his people, but clever with the frying pan.” These four men supported the camping party for the entire time by being the principal paddlers in three of the four canoes, by portaging most of the approximately one thousand pounds of supplies and gear, by almost daily erecting and striking their encampments, and by preparing all meals. Although the campers were generally “roughing it,” they had time to relax and ate well. One dinner, Mae Turner recounted, was an especially elaborate delight, since they had been camping for more than three weeks at the time. Dinner, she noted in her journal for Sept. 2, was “pea soup—very good. Trout and bacon—sweet potatoes…hot baking powder biscuit—blueberry pie—blueberries—cheese—coffee.” This sumptu-ous meal was followed the next morning by a similarly impressive repast: “blueberries, prunes, Oatmeal, trout, bacon, toast & coffee—and some left over blueberry pie.” However rough other ele-ments may have been, the cook made their meals quite smooth.
Above left: Portrait of Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), ca. 1905. Unidentified photographer. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Above right: Frederick Jackson Turner “on the portage,” according to the label for this image in one of the Turners’ photograph albums of their 1908 canoe trip. Unidentified photographer. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.
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As the 10 traveled their route, they sometimes admired the landscape, just as other, romantically inclined campers had before them. A few days into their trip, for instance, Van Hise termed the scene at one lake a “Hogarthean line of beauty from mountain to valley,” which prompted Turner to remark, “My I love these trees. Look at those leafy isles.” On another occasion, a landscape feature recalled the fading frontier for Turner. “We had a little taste of the old Dawson Route from Fort William to the Rainy river,” he happily reported to his historian friend Farrand. The Dawson route had been a wide trail that ran from Thunder Bay to the Red River district of southern Manitoba. Initially surveyed by S. J. Dawson in 1858 and opened about 1870, it was slowly being reclaimed by the forest and largely unused, except for local traffic, when the Turners and Van Hises encoun-tered it in 1908. “The old portages cut out for teams and with corduroy road in places,” observed Turner, “made a contrast with the Indian portages we had been following.” The former were more open and easier to travel, but “not altogether to our taste.” The Dawson route, it seemed to Turner, was out of place and an invasion of sacred wilderness because “it looked like civilization.” Ethnicity and race also challenged Turner, his companions, and their guides as they canoed across southern Ontario. Parts of this wilderness were home to Canada’s First Peoples, but evidence of their presence distressed Mae Turner. On one occa-sion, she recorded in her journal, the company established camp “on a point commanding all the
area,” but she wished it was elsewhere. “Attractive” pine groves on other points caught her eye, but more importantly, nearby their campsite sat “the frame of an Indian tepe.” Where the Dawson route had inspired Mae’s husband to recall frontier his-tory, the native structure gave her “the feeling that the place is unclean,” even though it had not been occupied for years. “Camping on virgin ground,” she concluded, “spoils one.” A few days later, as the campers prepared to head their canoes up the Nipigon River, they faced a dilemma that again involved First Peoples. The superintendent of the river and the local populace “protested against our party going up with light canoes and no Indians,” recounted Turner. Van Hise and the hired men dismissed these protesta-tions, telling Turner that they could do it on their own. Turner, however, disagreed with the other men, insisting that his family had to have a “Nipigon canoe” (a twenty-foot, dory-like boat) and an Indian guide who knew the river and where to fish. Turner’s stance, he lamented, “greatly disgusted Van Hise who hates Indians,” but Turner held firm nonethe-less. Then, to his surprise, “Dow [the guide] kicked and would not paddle [in the same canoe] with an Indian.” Turner, finally revealing his own feelings, admitted that he “sympathized with [Dow]. He was a true sport; but I had made up my mind.” Subse-quently, the party obtained its Nipigon canoe, and Dow, who had been at the stern of Frederick Turner’s canoe, exchanged with “amiable Mike” McCabe, who had been paddling in a canoe with the cook. The campers then departed upriver toward the next
Top left: The label for this image in one of the Turners’ photograph albums of their 1908 canoe trip reads: “The Sleeping Beauty FJT.” Unidentified photographer. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Top right: Caroline Mae Turner found time to relax and read on her canoe-camping trip on the Nipigon River in the summer of 1908. Here she sits in camp at Pine Portage. Unidentified photographer. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Bottom: Heading Out: A History of American Camping by Terence Young, Cornell University Press, 2017.
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camp, where an outfitter had promised they would meet their expert aboriginal guide. Ironically, when the new man appeared the next day, “he proved to be a clever young bluffer, a white lad” with little experience, it later turned out. Perhaps Van Hise’s disgust, Dow’s “kicking,” and Turner’s sympathy had reached the ears of the locals, but for whatever reason, Turner admitted, “No Indian could be gotten to work with whites.” Consequently, the campers missed some good fishing “by not having an expert Indian who could take us into one or two places where prior knowledge was requisite.” Nevertheless, after the canoe campers completed their vacation on Sept. 10, Turner judged his travels a success because, like all true pilgrims, he had returned in a transformed state. “I am 20 pounds lighter & much more muscular,” he crowed. Only 46 at the time, Turner would continue to camp and fish for many years to come.
The fact that the Turner and Van Hise families’ canoe-camping vacation had covered nearly four hundred miles was noteworthy, but its duration—one month—was unexceptional. Many, if not most, camping trips taken during this era tended to stretch to 30 or more days, making duration a factor that restricted camping’s appeal to a rela-tively small group of adherents. Few Americans possessed sufficient leisure time to vacation in any form. For most people, if they had the time to camp, it came as a result of the sort of ill health that would confine them to the house or because they were unemployed and without the money. Only as the 19th became the 20th century did paid vacations begin to be won by working people.
Terence Young is professor emeritus of geography at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
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In Civil Wars: A History in Ideas (Alfred A. Knopf, 2017), David Armitage, Lloyd C. Blankfein Professor of History at Harvard University and a 2006–7 Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at The Huntington, traces the least understood and most intractable form of organized human aggres-sions from ancient Rome through the centuries to the present day. By touching on certain signal instances in Western thought—the poetry of Lucan, the political theory of Thomas Hobbes, the so-called Lieber Code produced during the U.S. Civil War—Armitage provides perspective on the roots and dynamics of civil war and its shaping force in our conflict-ridden world.
Love’s Wounds: Violence and the Politics of Poetry in Early Modern Europe (Cornell University Press, 2017) takes an in-depth look at the widespread language of violence and abjection in early modern European love poetry. Cynthia Nazarian, assistant professor of French at Northwestern University and a 2012–13 Barbara Thom Postdoctoral Fellow at The Huntington, argues that poets exaggerated the posture of the downtrodden lover, adapting the rhetoric of powerless desire to forge a new “countersovereignty.” She tracks the development of the countersovereign voice from Francesco Petrarca to Maurice Scève, Joachim du Bellay, Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare.
From the mid-18th century, British collectors began to customize published books with prints and drawings in a process known as extra-illustration. In Facing the Text: Extra-Illustration, Print Culture, and Society in Britain 1769–1840 (Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, 2017), Lucy Peltz, senior curator of 18th-century portraits and head of collection displays at the National Portrait Gallery, London, provides the first concerted study of the subject. The volume features dozens of reproductions from The Huntington’s extensive collection of extra-illustrated books.
Edited by Jay Williams, former senior managing editor of Critical Inquiry, The Oxford Hand-book of Jack London (Oxford University Press, 2017) features essays in London studies by authors whose expertise in American literature has led them to consider London in a fresh way—not merely as a naturalist writer, but as a modernist writing in what he himself termed “The Machine Age.” The volume emphasizes the author’s biography, the publishing industry, and the cultural contexts of London’s politics.
Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966) is one of the 20th century’s great prose stylists and the author of a suite of devastating satires on modern English life. Evelyn Waugh’s Satire: Texts and Contexts
(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2016), by Naomi Milthorpe, lecturer in English at the University of Tasmania, renews scholarly debates central to Waugh’s work: the forms of his satire, his attitudes toward modernity and modernism, and his place in the literary culture of the interwar period.
In 2013, the Getty Foundation launched Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. As part of that project, William Deverell, professor of history at the University of Southern California, and Greg Hise, professor of history at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, worked with Huntington curators to put together Form and Landscape: Southern California Edison and the Los Angeles Basin, 1940–1990, an online
exhibition (available at pstp-edison.com), featuring hundreds of photographs of greater Los Angeles drawn from The Huntington’s Southern California Edison archive. The book of the same title, published by the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West in 2017, is the physical manifestation of the online exhibition.
A SAMPLING OF BOOKS BASED ON RESEARCH IN THE COLLECTIONS
In Print
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Now You See Him, Now You Don’tREACH FOR THE SCISSORS—IT’S TIME TO WEAVE A MASTERPIECE
By Kate Lain
back page
Thomas Gainsborough’s iconic painting The Blue Boy is undergoing its first major conservation effort, called “Project Blue Boy,” thanks to a grant from the Bank of America Art Conservation Project. The effort covers a two-year period during which the painting will be off view occasionally (for details, go to huntington.org/projectblueboy/). To mark this historic event, try your hand at a weaving project that makes the painting appear and disappear.
Instructions:1. Cut out the two rectangles below.2. Cut along the solid white lines of each grid, making sure that the strips stay attached along one side.3. Hold Grid A so you can read “Grid A” at the top left. Rotate Grid B clockwise 90 degrees so you can read
“Grid B” at the top right.4. Now you’re ready to weave the strips of Grid B into the strips of Grid A. To make Blue Boy appear, start
with B1 going under A1; continue with the other strips, alternating under with over. To make Blue Boydisappear into the green wall, start with B1 over A1; continue with other strips, alternating over with under.
5. Snap a photo of your finished masterpiece and share it with us on Instagram, Twitter, or Tumblr by tagging us!
Kate Lain is the new media developer at The Huntington.