Francis Morrone - September–October 2022
I hope you are well. This summer we’ve really seen things open up in New York. As I walk the streets of Manhattan, it feels, most of the time, that the city is “back to normal.” People who had been going into the office one day a week, then two days a week, are now going in three days a week. Tourism, amazingly, is approaching pre-pandemic levels. And so on. It’s not because COVID is over, but rather that many—most, it seems—people feel it’s manageable, or just that it’s time to get on with their lives. And, of course, by now so many people have contracted the virus, and everyone at least knows multiple people who have, that it feels somehow familiar, in a way it did not in 2020 or 2021. And that’s perfectly understandable. It’s also understandable that not everyone is in a position to let down his or her guard, and as we move into the fall and winter you’re going to see a mix of in-person and virtual programs. Everything I list below is virtual. I will sometime this fall give an in-person lecture (my first in-person public lecture in two and a half years), but the date’s not yet finalized. When it is, I will let you know.
For the 92nd Street Y I will be following up my series from May and June of this year on Paris: 500 Years of Art and Architecture with a series on London: 500 Years of Art and Architecture. Each of the five one-hour lectures will cover, roughly, one century, from the 16th to the 20th. As some of you know, London is my favorite city. I don’t think it’s the world’s most beautiful city, but I think it’s the greatest, and the most interesting—the most many-layered. It’s also the city that, after New York, I know the most about, and I’m very excited about doing this series. It will take place by Zoom on Wednesdays from 3:00 to 4:00, on September 21 and 28 and October 12, 19, and 26. (There will be no lecture on October 5.) The lectures will be recorded for those of you with schedule conflicts. The series costs $200. Here is the registration link:
London: 500 Years of Art and Architecture
For Scarsdale Adult School I will be doing seven Zoom lectures on The Great World’s Fairs. These will all be on Wednesdays from 1:00 to 2:00, and each one costs $25. Certain world’s fairs have always fascinated me, especially the ones in Paris. The whole point of world’s fairs has always been for cities to show off their proud accomplishments, and so are wonderful snapshots of cities at interesting moments in their development. In addition, the buildings and exhibits sponsored by different countries tell us what they most valued at given points in time. World’s fairs were a quintessentially 19th-century phenomenon, a product of that century of industrialization, urbanization, and globalization. They were an updating of the regional trade fairs dating to the Middle Ages. The first true world’s fair took place in London in 1851—the famous “Crystal Palace” exhibition in Hyde Park, the climax of the career of Prince Albert, as some of you will recall from the TV series Victoria. New York held its own Crystal Palace exhibition, on the site of Bryant Park, in 1853, and Paris followed suit two years later. From that point, Paris made world’s fairs—expositions universelles—their own thing, as they proudly showed off how they had made their city the most modern and the most dazzling in the world. Chicago produced America’s greatest world’s fair in 1893—the subject of Erik Larson’s bestselling book The Devil in the White City. These 19th-century fairs are ones I’ve studied and lectured on in the past. I’d previously known a lot less about the 20th-century fairs—even New York’s—and came up with the idea for this series in part to give myself the opportunity to learn more about them, as the focus of my own learning and writing and teaching shifts from the 19th century to the 20th century. You can pick and choose among the seven lectures, each of which you have to register for individually. But I naturally think it would be more interesting to do them all. They will be recorded, in case you have schedule conflicts. Also, while the first six of the seven are presented in chronological order, the seventh ended up out of order. I’m not sure how that happened, but it did, and can’t be changed at this point. The registration links are as follows:
September 21, London 1851, New York 1853, Paris 1855
September 28, Paris 1867 and 1878
October 12, Paris 1889 and 1900, Brussels 1897
October 19, Philadelphia 1876 and Chicago 1893
October 26, Paris 1925, Chicago 1933, New York 1939
November 2, New York 1964, Montreal 1967, Osaka 1970
November 9, St. Louis 1904 and San Francisco and San Diego 1915
And, yes, my Wednesdays will be busy.
As usual, I conclude this letter with some recommendations of things to see or read.
I haven’t seen it yet, but I very much look forward to the exhibit at the Grolier Club (47 East 60th Street) Aubrey Beardsley: 150 Years Young. I know Beardsley isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but in my opinion he was the greatest illustrator of the late 19th century—his sheer technical skill, even considered apart from his (sometimes scandalous) subject matter, can leave you slack-jawed. And he was a seminal figure in the development of Art Nouveau, which as some of you know has in recent years become a special subject of interest and study for me. In this exhibit you will be able to see not just Beardsley’s works on the printed page, but original drawings as well—a rare treat. He was shockingly just 25 years old when he died, from tuberculosis, in 1898. He’d recently converted to Catholicism, and had he lived it’s likely his work would have been quite different. But it’s hard to think that with such an abundance of talent and skill he wouldn’t have produced masterpieces. This exhibit opened on September 8 and runs through November 12.
I also strongly recommend the book Between Memory and Invention: My Journey in Architecture by Robert A.M. Stern with Leopoldo Villardi (The Monacelli Press, 2021, 520 pp.). Even if Stern’s architecture isn’t your thing, this book is a fantastic trip through American architectural culture from the 1960s to the present day. For those of us who came of architectural age amid the “style wars” of the 1970s and 1980s, this book is especially resonant. It’s also a beautifully produced book. (In my opinion, every book should, as this book does, place its “footnotes” in the margin, not at the bottom of the page, and certainly never at the end of the chapter or of the book.) This past June, I interviewed Stern on stage at the University Club in New York. (It was both Stern’s and my first appearance of this kind in nearly two and a half years!) Here is a video of the event..
Thanks, and I hope to see you soon.
Best, Francis Morrone