Archives of American Art Blog

Mustaches of Note - Elihu Vedder

Elihu Vedder, ca. 1910. Unidentified photographer. Elihu Vedder papers, 1804-1969. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Doesn’t he look ready to jump on his bicycle and join a modern day Tweed Ride?*

Elihu Vedder is best known for his illustrations of the 1884 edition of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. You can browse his digitized papers in our collections online. If you happen to be in Washington, DC you can visit some murals by Vedder in the Library of Congress, in the Thomas Jefferson building outside the Main Reading Room.

*More on the Tweed Ride in DC last fall from the Washington Post and DCist -- and there is a Seersucker Social on June 12!

Jennifer Snyder works with oral history interviews at the Archives American Art. When not sending interviews out for digitization, she is writing about extraordinary examples of facial hair for this blog.

The Beginnings of the Whitney Biennial

In the spring of 1933, Juliana Force, the first director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, began planning the museum’s first ever “Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors and Prints.” This followed one year after the “First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Paintings.” The two different biennials alternated annually before merging into what is now simply called the Whitney Biennial.

Juliana Force letter to Herman Trunk, May 17, 1933. Herman Trunk papers, circa 1926-1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

In this letter to modernist painter Herman Trunk, Force made clear the mission of the Biennial: “the entire Museum will be given over to this exhibition, which is designed to show, in its broadest aspect, the most recent accomplishment of living American artists...” For the past 80 years, curators of the Whitney Biennials have fulfilled this mission.

This letter also reveals that some things about the Biennial have radically changed. Force advised artists to “please bear in mind the intimate character of the Museum’s galleries which do not display to the best advantage unusually large works.” She set a size limit of 36 inches. I have yet to see the current Biennial, but I wonder if any of the artworks are actually smaller than 36 inches.

Exhibition catalog for the First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Sculpture, Watercolors, and Prints at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1933-34. Herman Trunk papers, circa 1926-1950. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

While reading this letter and paging through the first Biennial’s catalog of artists, I couldn't help but wonder how the past 80 years have contributed to the history of American art and what the next 80 years will bring.

Among the luminaries who showed at the 1933 Biennial were Milton Avery, Charles Burchfield, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, and the very founder of the museum, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Which artists in the 2010 Whitney Biennial will effectively become absorbed into the historical canon as future Biennials carry the torch of the contemporary?

Mary Savig is a curatorial assistant at the Archives of American Art.

Giuseppe Panza di Biumo

I just read Christopher Knight’s 78-page interview with Giuseppe Panza, who died April 24th, and it was well worth the trouble.  Knight, who did the interview for the Archives of American Art in 1985, got the collector to really talk about art and much else beside, though not about shopping or parties or gallery openings.  Most strikingly, Panza talked about why he collected, and he expressed himself with a modest seriousness that set off his ideas well.  These were comprehensive—emotional, aesthetic, philosophical, technical—and leave a strong, and sympathetic, impression of authenticity and ardor.

Knight wrote his own appreciation in the Los Angeles Times blog, and a transcript of the original interview is here: Oral history interview with Giuseppe Panza, 1985 Apr. 2-1985 Apr. 4

Darcy Tell is editor of the Archives of American Art Journal.