Week 42: What have you been doing all semester?
a whole lotta something
In between four classes and running a club and writing this little shindig every so often, I also work two jobs at the Lilly Library as a desk attendant and as an exhibitions assistant. I had never worked in exhibitions before this semester, so it’s been fun to learn the work of a material-based but public-facing position.
To give you the lay of the land: the Lilly Library underwent a two-year renovation that concluded right before I arrived (ace timing, I know) and included revamping the public exhibition spaces. When you walk into the building, you’re met by our galleries, which includes twelve standing cases, four wall cases, and two standalone cases, one housing a volume of Audubon’s Birds of America (currently open to The Raven) and the other housing a copy of Gutenberg’s New Testament. In a room to the left, we have six cases of a standing exhibition of our puzzles collection (puzzles of all kinds from all over the world) and our five New Acquisitions cases, where we display materials that have arrived in the last year.
That's quite a lot of glass to clean, so I begin each shift by spraying down the cases with alcohol and wiping away oily fingerprint and nose and forehead smudges. I like the forehead smudges best, especially on the standing cases, because those mean someone bent down to get really close to the materials. I’ve never seen this happen myself, but some of my friends who sit at the front desk tell me they’ve seen people lean into the wall cases, thinking there’s nothing there, and bop their heads on the glass. I suppose that’s what happens when the glass is too clean.
Much of my job is physical labor: I move boxes, I assemble flats cases, I organize our exhibitions and conservation materials into the flats cases, I label things, I organize plastic supports, I wipe down the frames of our portraits. There’s a smudge up high on the portrait of JK Lilly Jr, the founder and endower of the Lilly Library, right on top of his lips. Someone’s kissed him! I giggle about this often.
Most recently, I’ve been covering discarded planks of wood in canvas that matches the cloth in our cases so we can stage materials more dynamically. If you’re a painter, as I generously consider myself, this task resembles stretching canvas over wooden frames. I use a stapler gun. I find it exceedingly satisfying.
Occasionally, my supervisor also asks me to research strange things for her. In the first month of my job, we decided that I would research the artists and subjects of all of the portraits, artworks, and sculptures in the Lilly’s collection to understand who it is, exactly, that we hang on our walls. I’ll spare you the gory details, but among the colonizers and enslavers, we own a lot of paintings of and by men who were exceedingly bad husbands. Just comically awful people. We do, however, also own paintings of and by a few very cool women.
One such story that stuck with me is of Marie Rosenthal-Hatschek, a Jewish Austrian painter who worked in the 1920s and 1930s. She was sought after as a portraitist by the Austrian Royal family, as well as colleagues of her husband’s at Universitat Leipzig. In 1942, her estate was raided by Nazis and she fled, her whereabouts unknown, though it is assumed she was eventually herded to a concentration camp and murdered along with her five sisters. Her brother, Moses, a skilled pianist, survived in England, and her two daughters fled the Continent, one to England and the other to the United States, settling in (where else?) Bloomington, Indiana.
Usually when someone’s works have been looted, we have to be very wary about the provenance: I’ve written often enough about stolen materials in this newsletter for everyone to be on the same page that looted stuff is not good. At best, we want to return stolen things. Thankfully, we know the painting by Rosenthal-Hatschek was smuggled out of Austria by her daughter and later donated to/purchased by the Lilly Library, clearing the provenance. It’s one of a handful of Rosenthal-Hatschek’s surviving works, and perhaps one of just two or three that have a clean acquisitions history.
This seems like an ideal painting to put up on our walls: it’s a rare survival of a prolific and talented woman painter from the interwar period whose life was cut short by genocide. It’s a powerful story.
The wrench in the story lies in the actual subject of the painting: Ernst Heinrich Haeckel, a colleague of Rosenthal-Hatschek’s husband. Haeckel was a biologist and zoologist and an avowed eugenicist, though, somewhat ironically, his books were banned by Nazis because he recognized Jews’ contributions to German culture (what a guy). What a wry twist of horror that one of the few surviving examples of Rosenthal-Hatschek’s work depicts a man whose ideology contributed to her own murder.
What does it mean to put this painting on our walls? What would it mean to you?
turnover
As we prepare to turnover our reopening exhibition, which featured materials from some of the foundational collections at the Lilly (i.e. prominent collectors of travel literature, medieval manuscripts, miniature books, American history and literature, London low life, and Lincolnalia), my work has picked up in a different direction: accounting for all of the materials we are removing and all of the materials we are replacing in the cases. We’re changing out about ten cases, which is over half the gallery, many of which are curated by different people in the building. To prepare the new cases, my supervisor encourages the curators to pick too many things so we have lots of options. Once we have a sense of the story they’re trying to tell through their selected materials, we start building supports. I’ve cut many, many sheets of foam board (without any exacto-knife injuries!), rifled through the same bins of plastic supports that I organized, and strapped down a lot of endpapers.
Two weeks ago, I also did a deep dive into the donated collection of Dr. Richard Campbell, who collected books decorated with concealed foreedge paintings (paintings along the open edge of a book, revealed when you fan the text block).1 This involved more! Data! Cleaning! And then I spent an hour in the stacks actually examining the books and testing how stubborn their text blocks are. To display hidden foreedge paintings, we have to lock the text block into a bent shape with a little contraption, so we’re looking for books that have flexible blocks and won’t give us too much trouble (and won’t be irrevocably damaged by their three-month suspension).
You can see the clamp in this video from Martin Frost on fore-edge paintings (starting at 1:18):
Working in exhibitions has availed me of how much coordination you need to pull off an exhibition of any size: we’re working with six curators to select materials, compile item and case labels, and design layouts before we can even begin the physical work of building supports and eventually install everything, a days-long process that involves industrial suction cups to reopen the cases and a massive vaccum to clean them out.
I also love being in proximity to a conservation mindset: in addition to turning over whole cases, we are changing out materials that need to be removed from light exposure so they don’t fade dramatically. Understanding the different priorities of the library is very useful: on the one hand, we want people to be able to see and learn from materials, both on display and in the Reading Room. On the other hand, we want to ensure that the materials are useable and protected for years to come. These purposes of the library tug back and forth.
The other nine hours of the week, I work on this other side of material use as a front desk and Reading Room attendant. At the front desk, I offer information to visitors (some more interested than not) about the galleries, which is more fulfilling now that I know what the whole kit-and-caboodle entails. There is nothing more satisfying than hearing someone say, “This is so cool!”
I spend most of my time in the Reading Room observing patrons to ensure they are handling materials safely and answering questions where necessary. Sitting quietly for hours at a time without looking at my own work is less excruciating than you might think; letting my brain relax for a bit is often when I do my best brainstorming for these newsletters.
Housekeeping & birdseeking
house
What I’m currently reading: Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor.
A reminder to send me your questions via email or comments! About anything, though preferably somewhat related to the newsletter.
This is a good time to share Dispatch, as I’m not in the middle of a brutally complicated series.
bird
More later.
I also read through Campbell’s brief correspondence with the Lilly director/assistant director in the 1970s, hoping to find an explanation about his collection, but he didn’t give any reason as to why he had amassed this collection of 50 fore-edge paintings. Just that he wanted to donate the collection before year-end 1971. For tax reasons.
1) what constitutes a miniature book? 2) For the question of Rosenthal-Hatschek's work, I guess it matters more who is being celebrated in the painting? I'd argue if you name it, man in robe, people are going to pay a lot more attention to the artistry and the painter rather than the subject.
Hi Shira, I really enjoyed this article. I have a special interest in it in that I am Marie Rosenthal Hatschek's cousin (3× removed of course!). I'd love to communicate with you about her life and paintings. Please email me at nicoleballenger5@gmail.com.