Francis Morrone September–November 2024
Here is my fall update.
For Scarsdale Adult School, I will be doing a series of six lectures by Zoom, France in America, on the French influence on American culture. Many of you have heard me go on (and on) about the American architects who attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and the influence of that school on the architecture of American cities (not least New York) in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Such New York architects as Charles Follen McKim, Richard Morris Hunt, John Merven Carrère, Thomas Hastings, Ernest Flagg, Whitney Warren, and John Russell Pope all had Beaux-Arts pedigrees, and even architects, such as Stanford White, Cass Gilbert, and Arnold W. Brunner, who did not attend the École were strongly influenced by its approach. Architects elsewhere in America, such as San Francisco’s Arthur Brown Jr. and Julia Morgan (the first woman, of any nationality, to receive a diploma from the École), Boston’s Henry Hobson Richardson, and Chicago’s Louis Sullivan also attended the École. Even New York’s great Art Deco architects of the 1920s and 1930s, including William Van Alen (Chrysler Building), Raymond Hood (Rockefeller Center), and William Lamb (Empire State Building), attended the École. A few French-born Beaux-Arts architects, such as Paul Philippe Cret of Philadelphia and Emmanuel Louis Masqueray, who started out in New York but is more closely associated with Minneapolis and St. Paul, made their careers in America. And many American artists, such as the sculptors Augustus Saint-Gaudens and Frederick MacMonnies and the painters George de Forest Brush and Thomas Eakins were trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. In this series we will look at all of these figures. But we will range much further. New York’s artistic jack-of-all-trades in the colonial and Early Republican eras, Pierre L’Enfant, who had arrived in America with Lafayette’s army and who went on to plan the new capital city of Washington, D.C.; Thomas Jefferson, whose ideas about architecture crystallized in his years spent living in Paris, and who borrowed the influential French architect Charles-Louis Clérisseau to help him design the state capitol in Richmond, Virginia; and the Frenchman Joseph-François Mangin (born in the Vosges in 1758), who designed New York’s City Hall, all demonstrate the profound French influence on American architecture and urbanism at the turn not of the 20th but of the 19th century. The first important American painter to study in Paris, John Vanderlyn, also dates from this period. (You all know his remarkable panoramic painting of the palace and gardens of Versailles that has a room all its own in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) In recent years, as more and more architects from abroad have had the opportunity to work in New York, such Frenchmen as Jean Nouvel and Christian de Portzamparc have left their mark on the city.
But the influence of France on American culture is not to be found only in art and architecture, but in food (from Delmonico’s to Julia Child and beyond) and fashion (from the Worth gowns that rustled through Gilded Age ballrooms to the Givenchy suit Jacqueline Kennedy wore to her husband’s funeral) as well. These will be covered in the series.
Though this is conceived as a series, Scarsdale Adult School likes to let people register by the session, rather than for the series as a whole. Here are the links:
The French Influence on American Art
Wednesday, September 11, 1:00–2:00
$30
The Influence of France on American Architecture Part 1: From Colonial Times to the Late 19th Century
Wednesday, September 18, 1:00–2:00
$30
The Influence of France on American Architecture Part 2: From the Turn of the 20th Century to Today
Wednesday, September 25, 1:00–2:00
$30
Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture
Wednesday, October 9, 1:00–2:00
$30
The French Influence on American Food
Wednesday, October 16, 1:00–2:00
$30
The French Influence on American Fashion
Wednesday, October 23, 1:00–2:00
$30
Recordings will be available for those of you who cannot make it on Wednesdays at 1:00.
For the 92nd Street Y it’s different: You have to sign up for the whole series. This fall I am offering From Arts & Crafts to the Aesthetic Movement: Art and Imagination in the Late 19th Century. In five lectures I will be covering a wide range of artists, architects, and decorators associated with the surprisingly and sometimes strangely overlapping movements known as Arts and Crafts and Aestheticism (as well as, in France, Decadence and Symbolism). In Lecture 1, we will look at the influence of John Ruskin (1819–1900) as well as at the artists known as the Pre-Raphaelites, particularly Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82), who provides something of a through line in the series. From there we move on to the Arts and Crafts movement and the towering figure of William Morris (1834–96), the multifaceted genius whose designs for textiles, wallpaper, books, and stained glass continue to hold us in thrall, as well as the Scottish architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife, the artist and designer Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh. From there we will try to see how the Aesthetic Movement—”art for art’s sake”—emerged from this, with an explanation of the influence of the writers Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde, and a look at such artists and designers as James McNeill Whistler, Frederic Leighton, and Aubrey Beardsley. We then cross the Channel to France for a look at the parallel movements, beginning with the literary influences of Charles Baudelaire, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Stéphane Mallarmé and moving on to such visual artists as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, and others—with a visit to Gustav Klimt in Vienna. Finally, in the fifth lecture, we come to America and what I am calling the “Arcadian Revival,” a way of looking at American art and architecture in which we stress the commonalities and not the differences among such figures as Stanford White, Louis Sullivan, and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue. Here we will also look at the role of Boston as a seedbed of some of the most compelling artistic ideas of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This series will cover a great deal of the art and design about which I am personally most enthusiastic.
This series will be by Zoom, and recordings will be available.
From Arts & Crafts to the Aesthetic Movement: Art and Imagination in the Late 19th Century
Five Wednesdays, September 18–October 23 (does not meet on October 2), 3:00–4:00
$200 for the series, $180 for Roundtable members
At New York University’s School of Professional Studies (which used to be called the School of Continuing Education) I am teaching a course that I am very excited about. Some of you know of my enthusiasm for the field of book history. This enthusiasm grows from many sources, beginning with my own long involvement with the world of books. I’ve worked in book publishing, I’ve been a bookseller, I have written numerous books, I am a book reviewer, I am a book collector—but above all I just love books. From my professional interest in architecture and design comes my love of book design and typography. Indeed, architects and designers such as William Morris and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (see above) were also involved in book design. In this NYU course I will be adding the dimension of urban history, as we explore the book worlds of four great cities that have been central to the history of the book over the last 600 years. In 15th-century Florence we will look at the world of handmade manuscript books, at “book hunters” (the humanist scholars, such as Poggio Bracciolini, who traveled Europe in search of manuscripts of ancient texts), and at the collectors, makers, and sellers of illuminated manuscripts, such as Niccolò Niccoli, Vespasiano da Bisticci, Cosimo de’ Medici, and Pope Nicholas V. We’ll see how these figures were as central to the Florentine Renaissance as were such artists as Donatello and Brunelleschi. Above all we will look at the creation of the modern world’s first great libraries: that of San Marco, in Florence, and those nearby in Cesena and Fiesole, and at the Florentine role in the creation of the greatest Renaissance libraries, that of the Duke or Urbino and the Vatican Library in Rome. We then move to Venice where the story is no longer about manuscript books but printed books. Gutenberg may have invented (c. 1440) his printing press in Mainz, but Venice became the most important center of book publishing in the early modern period. Our hero is Aldus Manutius, and among his accomplishments we will consider the extraordinary and strange Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, which may make you think of the Italian Renaissance in a whole new way. We then move to London, where we will look at the early book trade but spend most of our time on the 18th and 19th centuries, the rise of industrial book production, the development of modern book publishing, and at such triumphs of the making of books as Rudolph Ackermann’s Microcosm of London (1808–10), the Oxford English Dictionary, and the rise of the travel guidebook as mass tourism came into being. William Morris will also get his due. Finally, we move to New York, where we will discuss much, including the typographers Frederic Goudy, W.A. Dwiggins, Bruce Rogers, and Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue (here he is again), and linger over two of my all-time favorites, the Century Dictionary and Isaac Newton Phelps Stokes’s Iconography of Manhattan Island. The lectures will, of course, be copiously illustrated, and I will try to focus on books that have been digitized so that you can peruse them on the internet.
This course will be held in person, not on Zoom! (I know that Zoom is enormously convenient, is great for anyone with mobility issues, and allows for recordings, but for me, personally, I am infinitely more comfortable when I can stand and move around when I lecture, and when I can seen who’s asleep, neither of which I’ve ever been able to figure out how to do on Zoom.)
The City and the Book: Florence, Venice, London, New York
8 Mondays, September 30–November 18, 1:00–2:40
$699
Class will be held at NYU’s Midtown Center, 20 West 43rd St.
A thing or two may pop up (a walking tour, perhaps?) that hasn’t been firmed up in time for this newsletter. I will send a brief notice if and when that happens.
I really hope I see you, either in person or on Zoom, this fall.
Recommendations:
Here are some exhibits in New York that I think are worth seeing:
Crafting the Ballets Russes: The Robert Owen Lehman Collection
Morgan Library & Museum
through September 22
The influence of Serge Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on the arts of the 20th century cannot be overestimated. This exhibit at the Morgan contains many fascinating things covering the dance, music, scenic design, and costume design of the great company and its luminaries including Vaslav Nijinsky and his sister Bronislava Nijinsky, Michel Fokine, Ida Rubinstein, Léon Bakst, Pablo Picasso, Natalia Goncharova, Igor Stravinsky, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, and others. Remember, it was from the Ballets Russes that Lincoln Kirstein plucked George Balanchine. This also strongly relates to my series for the 92nd Street Y.
Belle da Costa Greene: A Librarian’s Legacy
Morgan Library & Museum
October 25, 2024–May 4, 2025
This of course has not opened yet but it is a long-anticipated exhibit focusing on Belle da Costa Greene, the brilliant and beautiful African-American woman who served as J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian and as the first and longtime director of the institution that is now called the Morgan Library & Museum (and who was also the lover of Bernard Berenson). She will feature in my course (see above) The City and the Book.
Sublime Ideas: Drawings by Giovanni Battista Piranesi
Museum web sites are one of the best excuses for the internet, if you ask me. They just keep getting better and better. Here is an example. You may have missed the Morgan’s wonderful 2023 exhibit of Piranesi drawings. Or you may have seen it and wish to revisit it. Here it is online, in a very rich presentation packed with images and information.
Yes, I suppose I really like the Morgan Library. You may be interested in reading this article I wrote way back in 2010 for Humanities: The Magazine of the National Endowment for the Humanities, on the history of the Morgan Library: The Museum of Morgan.