FALL/WINTER 2017

FLORIFORM WELCOME TO THE RANCH IN THE WOODS WITH A CANOE

The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens SENIOR STAFF OF THE HUNTINGTON STEVE HINDLE Interim President and FROM THE EDITOR W. M. Keck Foundation Director of Research LARRY J. BURIK SOUL SEARCHING, HUNTINGTON STYLE Vice President of Facilities JAMES P. FOLSOM Marge and Sherm Telleen/Marion and Earle Jorgensen Director of the Botanical Gardens here’s a spiritual quality to The Huntington that we hear about CATHERINE HESS Interim Director of the Art Collections and regularly, and from people from all walks of life: this is a place Chief Curator of European Art where they come to renew and replenish; a restorative place for MITCHELL MORRIS quiet reflection and contemplation. And while we don’t typically Chief Information Officer Tseek out stories for the magazine to fit a theme, I was struck by the degree COREEN A. RODGERS to which this issue seems to speak in particular to the intersection of the Anne and Jim Rothenberg Vice President for Financial Affairs mind and the spirit—through art, nature, and intellectual pursuit. RANDY SHULMAN Vice President for Advancement Take, for example, our cover story, in which James Glisson, the Bradford SUSAN TURNER-LOWE and Christine Mishler Associate Curator of American Art, imaginatively Vice President for Communications and Marketing engages with the work of three modern artists—Henrietta Shore (1880–1963), DAVID S. ZEIDBERG Agnes Pelton (1881–1961), and Helen Lundeberg (1908–1999)—who conjured Avery Director of the Library 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 MAGAZINE STAFF art embodies. EDITOR Pulitzer Prize–winning science journalist Usha Lee McFarling leads us Kevin Durkin deep into the earthly paradise of the Ranch, The Huntington’s experimental DESIGNER demonstration garden. Part classroom and part research lab, the Ranch draws Lori Ann Achzet inspiration from The Huntington’s—and the region’s—agricultural heritage, while making connections with gardeners, native plant enthusiasts, landscape Huntington Frontiers is published semiannually by the professionals, students, educators, and researchers throughout Southern Office of Communications and Marketing. It strives to connect readers with the rich intellectual life of The Huntington, California (see pg. 10). capturing in news and features the work of researchers, Racha Kirakosian, assistant professor of German and the Study of Religion educators, curators, and others across a range of disciplines. 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 INQUIRIES AND COMMENTS: carved into the wooden cover of a 15th-century Dutch manuscript and posits Kevin Durkin, Editor, Huntington Frontiers 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108 a surprising purpose it may once have served (see pg. 8). [email protected] In his book Heading Out: A History of American Camping, Terence Young—professor emeritus of geography at California State Polytechnic For advertising inquiries, please call University, Pomona—takes readers on a pilgrimage into nature to explore Maggie Malone, 312-593-3355 the history of camping in the United States. In an excerpt from the book, he Unless otherwise acknowledged, photography is provided by scrutinizes U.S. historian Frederick Jackson Turner, best known for his The Huntington’s Department of Imaging Services. “Frontier Thesis,” as he encountered the wilderness with family and friends on a 1908 canoe-camping trip (see pg. 22). © 2017 The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Take a whirl though our Social Scene (see pg. 6), a roundup of images and Gardens. All rights reserved. Reproduction or use of the news items from The Huntington’s social media, and then slice up and weave contents, in whole or in part, without permission of the publisher, is prohibited. 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.

1151 Oxford Road | San Marino, California 91108 | huntington.org volume 13, issue 1

Contents FALL/WINTER 2017

10

FEATURES

16 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 Canoe By Terence Young

IN PRINT 26 Recommended Reading

BACK PAGE 27 Now You See Him, Now You Don’t By Kate Lain

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 22 in Canada. This detail is from a photograph taken on the Atikokan River. Unknown photographer. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. 4 huntington.org SOCIALA PEEK AT WHAT WE’RE UP TO ONLINE SCENE

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.

6 huntington.org 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. SOCIAL SCENE 1huntingtonblogs.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/ 3 ON VERSO, THE BLOG… THE ON VERSO, Read about these stories and more at huntingtonblogs.org at more stories and these about Read 2 The Lily Ponds are looking better than ever after undergoing a major cleaning. “A fairy volume nestled in the palm of your hand”—a re- huntingtonblogs.org/2017/07/ search fellow reflects on miniature books at The Huntington. flourishing-lily-ponds/ huntingtonblogs.org/2017/08/enchanting-miniature-books/

4 Finger 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

ON SOUNDCLOUD AND ITUNES… Conference: Octavia E. Butler Studies: “I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There” Convergence of an Expanding Field These lectures are only a tiny Hilary Mantel fraction of The Huntington’s audio available for free on The Art of Farming: SoundCloud and iTunes. Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation How a Farmer Sees the Future Damian Duffy and John Jennings David Mas Masumoto and Marcy Masumoto

Potosí, Silver, and the Coming Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star: Kate Sessions: of the Modern World Now I See You as You Are A Legacy of Botanical Bounty John Demos Jennifer van Saders Nancy Carol Carter

We’re also on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more! Links at huntington.org

huntington.org 7 scholar’s insight

A Riveting Hypothesis

THE RECESS IN A BOOK’S COVER MAY HAVE CONTAINED MORE THAN MEETS THE EYE

By Racha Kirakosian

ne of the most pleasurable experiences I’m used to poring over book bindings, illumi- one can have as a medievalist is coming nations and miniatures, and “bookish” things. But across an artifact that triggers a chain HM 1048 stood out with a particular feature: a Above: Senior book conservator of discoveries and unexpected connec- pear-shaped recess on the inside of the front wooden Andrea Knowlton (left) and Racha Otions. That happened to me when I was researching cover. This posed a conundrum. What was its use? Kirakosian, assistant professor of German and the Study of a codex from The Huntington’s collections, a 15th- Why was it there? Did it hold a devotional object, Religion at Harvard University, look at a pear-shaped recess century Dutch manuscript of devotional texts which would have been in keeping with the book’s inside the front cover of a 15th- known as Huntington Manuscript 1048, or simply religious and mystical contents? This would be century Dutch codex known as Huntington Manuscript 1048. HM 1048. Produced in the northeastern part of the palpable evidence for the link between devotion and Photograph by Kate Lain. Below: Netherlands around 1439, it contains meditations, corporeality, between mysticism and materiality. Colored drawing of a virgin with a unicorn in her lap; on the sermons, and prayers from several authors. The catalog entry suggested that an ampule of facing page, the beginning of a In my work on medieval mysticism and materi- holy water could have been kept in the front cover’s sermon and, at the bottom of the page, a dragon and unicorn ality, I study manuscripts and the texts they contain recess, elevating the status of the book to that of a fighting. HM 1048, back/front of in order to connect two things in seeming opposition: reliquary. Yet, the recess’s dimensions—approxi- leaf 21 and 22. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and devotional culture dealing with transcendence and mately 2.6 inches long, nearly 1.4 inches at its Botanical Gardens. the physical nature of book production. 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.

8 huntington.org There exists at least one other manuscript of with a unicorn. According to medieval tradition, Left: The rivet spectacles in this the time with a front book cover carved out to only a female virgin was able to catch the fantastic image would fold into a pear shape. Detail of The Presentation contain spectacles (the manuscript with the shelf- beast. The portrayal of the unicorn in the virgin’s in the Temple by Friedrich Herlin mark “Ms. L. 64,” located in the Bibliothèque lap preceding a sermon on the mystical bride speaks (1425/30–1500), left inner panel of the high altar of the St. Georg Cantonale et Universitaire in Fribourg, Switzer- for a nunnery or some sort of female community church in Nördlingen, Germany, land). The Huntington’s copy, however, seems as the place where the volume was produced and currently housed at the Stadtmuseum Nördlingen. unique. In contrast to the Fribourg book, in which used. The fact that only brothers are addressed in Photograph: Institute for the spectacles were kept with their lenses spread the sermon is not a mistake on the scribe’s part, as Material Culture–University of Salzburg. Right: Close-up of the apart, HM 1048 would have accommodated a the sermon harks back to textual and even oral pear-shaped recess inside the folded pair of rivet spectacles. traditions; it might originally have addressed a male front cover of HM 1048. Photograph by Kate Lain. One can easily imagine that glasses were need- community before it was circulated and copied. ed to read the pocket-size book, considering that Although we cannot be absolutely certain about the sometimes small handwriting was so difficult when and where the codex was bound, the back to decipher, especially in half-light. But who then flyleaf, attached to the back cover, is made from owned the book and the suspected glasses? parchment recycled from a Latin breviary (book An ex libris note on the book’s last page, dating containing liturgical text) for nuns. from the time when most of the texts in the manu- Returning to the point of departure: does the script were copied, specifies in Dutch: dijt boek mundane use of the book’s cover as a container for hort tuu inden meygaerd ende voert dije gemeijn spectacles diminish its links between devotional susteren (“this book belongs to the May Orchard and material culture? and was given to all sisters”). This indication of My short answer is, no, it does not. This codex ownership is signed by Mechtel Pijls. A woman is a wonderful example of a book put to personal named Mechtelt Pijls is mentioned in the Utrecht and practical use while also serving as a medium archives in 1470, but we see no signs of a community of devotion within a community. named Meygaerd. Still, this would be a common nomenclature for a beguinage—a quasi-monastic Racha Kirakosian is assistant professor of German but lay community of pious people. and the Study of Religion at Harvard University, Other details affiliate HM 1048 with a female and was a short-term fellow at The Huntington monastic context, such as the depiction of a woman in 2017.

huntington.org 9 10 huntington.org 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.

huntington.org 11 “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 Top: High school students from one, visitors sample dark red mulberries and Australian finger limes—thin, dark the Torres Garden Club at East Los Angeles Renaissance citrus fruits that explode pleasantly on the tongue. “It’s like caviar!” one taster says. An 11-year-old visitor Academy visited the Ranch from Arizona, meanwhile, tears into a plate of fresh radishes. before planting vegetables on their school campus. Center: “Everyone likes to try the food,” says Chan Nguyen, a master gardener and Huntington volunteer Several of the Torres Garden from Eagle Rock who relishes her stints at the Ranch. “It’s very serene and magical,” she says. “It’s so Club’s raised vegetable beds basking in the sun. Bottom: The different from the rest of The Huntington. You almost feel like you’re breaking the rules.” Torres Garden Club students Visitors pepper master gardeners with questions. How hard is it to build raised beds? How high produced so many vegetables that they sold them at their high school should they be? Can I grow grapes on the side of my garage? Many seem impressed by how rich, ripe, to raise funds. Photographs by and lush everything is—and how different from stereotypical vegetable gardens with tidy rows. “I Natasha Burgos. would say people are surprised—and delighted,” says Joan Borgman, a volunteer and master gardener from North Hollywood.

12 huntington.org 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 The Ranch is also a lab and experiential learn- Above: Kelly Fernandez (left), freaking out about the berries,” says teacher Karina ing center for college students studying urban and gardener at The Huntington’s Evans. “They know zucchini, they know pumpkin, community agriculture, like Emma Ho’o, 26, a Herb Garden, builds a framework to support vegetables growing but not how they are grown.” plant science major from Cal Poly Pomona. in straw bales at the Ranch “They get excited about seeing where their food Ho’o is ambitious. She wants to run a kitchen Garden, while Emma Ho’o, a plant science major from Cal comes from,” agrees Deborah Hartnett, a master garden attached to a Michelin-starred restaurant Poly Pomona, spreads mulch gardener from Inglewood who leads school tours. like Copenhagen’s famed Noma and calls her between the rows. Photograph by Kate Lain. Hartnett says she’s seen children astonished when work helping with the Ranch vegetable patch given the chance to pull a carrot from the soil. “horticultural therapy.” “I’m hearing they eat more vegetables if they grow “It shows the ease and joy of growing your own them,” she says. food,” she says. “You can see how much—even in That’s true of Jesse Ramirez, 8, who helps her a small place—you can produce.” parents tend a small vegetable garden on the balcony Carolina Vaquerano, 26, is a Mt. San Antonio of their apartment. “We grow carrots, tomatoes, College student who hopes one day to open an cabbage, and cucumbers,” she says. “I make the urban farm using techniques she’s learning at the salad. I chop everything.” Ranch. On a recent Sunday, she’d driven more Older students benefit, too. High school stu- than an hour to tackle such unglamorous tasks as dents from the Torres Garden Club at East Los weeding and mulching. But she keeps returning, Angeles Renaissance Academy visited the Ranch she says, because “It’s a magical place.” “I can ex- before planting six raised beds on their campus. plore,” she adds. “I can hide in places and eat fruit. They planted Brussels sprouts, kale, and beets; When I’m here I feel like a little kid again.” built bamboo teepees to support snap peas; and grew strawberries, tomatoes, and artichokes. They ended up with so much produce that they made Kelly Fernandez’s main job is to care for The and sold lunches to teachers as a fund-raiser. Huntington’s Herb Garden, with its formal struc- The experience has been transformative for the ture, brick paths, and ordered plantings of helio- teenagers—some of whom are top students. Some trope and borage that recall European gardens of have learning disabilities, emotional problems, or past centuries. But Fernandez, an obsessive veg- have run into trouble with the law, says garden club etable gardener, has been known to sneak in the advisor and teacher Natasha Burgos. They’ve taken occasional kale, chard, or eggplant. “The docents to gardening with a vengeance—racing to the In- always ask me, why are there vegetables in here?” ternet to solve problems, like why artichokes aren’t Fernandez says. blooming or how to keep birds from eating straw- But in the annuals bed at the Ranch, Fernandez berries. “It helps them figure out things on their is able to grow vegetables, in all their mess and own,” Burgos says. “They see if they put in the time glory, to her heart’s content. She can create playful and the work, they get results.” plant tapestries, for example, combining tomatillos,

huntington.org 13 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

14 huntington.org 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 invasion of New Zealand spinach. An experimental Above: A pollinator attracted to Ranch—and elsewhere on the property, as more “food forest” in the rear of the Ranch—an attempt an artichoke flower in full bloom at the Ranch. Photograph by and more Huntington gardeners clamor for it. It’s to create a permanent ecosystem of fruit trees and Kate Lain. Opposite, top: Cara one example of how the stewardship and sustain- edible perennials with little maintenance—has Hanstein, the Ranch’s chief gardener, plucks a white ability efforts showcased at the Ranch, like heavy been more of a struggle because hardy weeds and mulberry from a tree at the mulching and the reduction of water use, are wind- grasses compete with the food plants. Ranch. Photograph by Kate Lain. Opposite, center: This massive, ing their way through The Huntington at large. But new ideas keep rolling in: Folsom is dream- diesel-fueled tub grinder While the Ranch features an edible landscape, ing up a hundred ways to use “square foot garden- converts tons of plant waste from across The Huntington’s the garden also stresses the importance of nurtur- ing” in raised beds for school curricula. He’s also campus into giant piles of ing habitats that support wildlife and pollinators. testing various ways schools might easily grow mulch. Photograph by Kate Lain. Opposite, bottom left: Alicia Key to this are the many California native plants— potatoes in containers large and small. “I think Baugh, head of The verbena, salvia, penstemon, and Matilija pop- of this as an idea space,” he says. Huntington’s plant sale nursery, stands between raised beds at pies—that look right at home amidst the vegeta- Alicia Baugh, head of The Huntington’s plant the Ranch where she tests soil bles. “It’s thinking about gardening in a whole new sale nursery, is using raised beds at the Ranch to amendment. Photograph by Kate Lain. Opposite, bottom way,” says Kitty Connolly, executive director of test which soil amendment—seaweed extract, bat right: Beneficial fungi spread the Theodore Payne Foundation for Wild Flowers guano, or organic, all-purpose fertilizer—works through mulch, slowly breaking it down. Photograph by Lisa and Native Plants and former botanical educator best to boost vegetable growth. Baugh, Fernandez, Blackburn. at The Huntington. The use of California natives Goyette, and other botanical staff who help at the throughout the Ranch, Connolly says, is “a seal of Ranch have full-time jobs at The Huntington unre- approval that natives have arrived and are an accept- lated to it, Folsom notes. But, like many volunteers, ed part of our aesthetic landscape.” 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, The Ranch is also the place where Huntington who encourages people to test an idea at the Ranch, gardeners can try new ideas with little fear of how use it as a classroom, or just visit it to enjoy the messy the results may look. “We are constantly scent of blooming sage, the crunch of soil under experimenting with things you hear in the field of their feet, and the vivid palette of colors that horticulture,” Hanstein says. “We are always observ- change through the seasons. “This wildness,” she ing, watching as the garden unfolds and responds.” says. “It’s something people crave—even if they There’s the “spontaneous garden” where a vol- don’t realize they crave it.” unteer once threw a handful of leftover seeds. It was recently brimming with drifts of chard and Usha Lee McFarling is a Pulitzer Prize–winning bachelor’s buttons that were battling off a small freelance writer based in South Pasadena, Calif.

huntington.org 15

Floriform

DON’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 Opposite page: Helen Lundeberg Feitelson, an abstract painter, Helen Lundeberg was (1908–1999), Irises (The Sentinels), 1936, oil on canvas, 30 x 25 in. a figure of note in the Los Angeles art scene from (76.2 x 63.5 cm). The Huntington the 1930s until her death in 1999. The Huntington’s Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with Irises (The Sentinels) dates from her breakout funds from the Art Collectors’ decade, the 1930s, when her artworks contained Council, the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation Acquisition Fund for an assortment of flagellum-propelled, cell-like American Art, the Connie Perkins bodies, carnivorous plants, distant galaxies, planets, Endowment, Eleanor and Max Baril, Nancy Berman and Alan optical instruments, and self-portraits. A drawing Bloch, Maribeth and Hal of hers at The Huntington shows her in profile on Borthwick, Caron and Steven Broidy, Jeri and Tom Mitchell, the right, as if she were dreaming up a mindscape Margaret Richards, Susan W. and of branches and flowers. Carl W. Robertson, Ann and Robert Ronus, Laura and R. Carlton At one level, Irises (The Sentinels) is an object Seaver, Amanda Shore, Tim and lesson in observation. Care has been taken to render Lisa Sloan, and Geneva and Charles Thornton. © The the vascular tissue of stems, the involutions of the Feitelson / Lundeberg Art petals, and their branching patterns of white and Foundation. Left: Helen Lundeberg (1908–1999), Three purple. At another level, the overall effect is disqui- Generations, 1937, color pencil eting—not what one expects of a floral illustration. on paper, 15 x 11 1/2 in. (38.1 x 29.2 cm). The Huntington Why? Irises often grow in semi-arid environments, Library, Art Collections, and but this imagined landscape resembles a hot desert Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from the Virginia climate, dry and devoid of plant life except for a Steele Scott Foundation greenish tint on the distant hills that might be Acquisition Fund for American Art. © The Feitelson / groundcover. Besides their improbable ability to Lundeberg Art Foundation. thrive, the irises appear to be eerily sentient.

huntington.org 17 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.”

18 huntington.org Shore’s Clivia was likely painted in the late with rays formed by alternating green and pink Opposite page (top): Henrietta 1920s or 1930s, when she was most productive and petals. Light within the painting is peculiar and Shore (1880–1963), Clivia, ca. 1930, oil and pencil on canvas had befriended Weston. Clivia lacks the unsettling without a definite source; the red shadows on the laid down on board, 26 x 26 in. quality of Irises or the hallucinatory glow of Pelton’s green tendrils and the spectral highlights along (66 x 66 cm). The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Passion Flower, but it shares their placelessness. the leaves’ edges suggest multi-colored lights from Botanical Gardens. Purchased None of these paintings of flowers are located in multiple sources. (Or, perhaps, the plant is biolu- with funds from the Virginia Steele Scott Foundation the complicated ecosystems that sustain life. The minescent, glowing like a deep-sea creature?) In Acquisition Fund for American viewpoint of Clivia is tilted and skyward, which Pelton’s painting, the passion flower’s bloom is Art. © Estate of Henrietta Shore Opposite page (bottom): crops out any hint of soil or even the pot that it painted with a controlled impasto. This embossed Henrietta Shore (1880–1963), might be growing in. Centered on the canvas, the texture sits above the rest of painting’s surface and Women of Oaxaca, ca. 1929, lithograph, 14 x 18 1/2 in. (35.6 x clivia plant obediently splays its leaves and salmon makes it seem as though the flower is about to break 47 cm). The Huntington Library, flowers just up to the frame, too pleasing to be out of the fantastic space inside the painting into the Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. Gift of Hannah S. Kully. observed from life. The flowers have a cold beauty, real space of the spectator. While Passion Flower is © Estate of Henrietta Shore more like hammered sheets of metal than soft representational, Pelton listed it among her abstrac- petals. Shore drew a pattern of crisp outlines in tions, many of which were captioned with poems. pencil, then filled them in with precisely applied About The Huntington’s painting, she wrote: oil paint that resembles baked enamel. The dark “Blooming intensity, center of light.” substructure of lines comes through here and there The otherworldly quality of Passion Flower is as if the plant were assembled from die-cut parts— typical of Pelton’s abstractions, though many of making it look more like a brightly colored machine the others contain pulsations of light, cloud-like than a pliant, living thing. In Clivia, it is as if the forms, and energetic patterns. Her turn to abstrac- artist had distilled the floppy parts of actual, living tion came in 1925 and was based on her reading plants into hard, idealized forms, like mathematical of mystics and theosophists. Like many early 20th- diagrams that describe underlying structure. This century artists, including Vassily Kandinsky and is not the picture of a single plant, but the sum of Piet Mondrian, Pelton believed that visual art her observations of many. Her flowers are neither could reach into a spiritual realm and that visual artificial nor exactly possessing the quality of being forms were capable of speaking directly to a viewer, alive. One critic’s remark about Shore’s work could bypassing the limitations of everyday language to aptly be applied to the piece. Reginald Poland, the communicate a message about the oneness of the first director of what is now known as the San Diego universe. In 1929, she penned an artist’s statement Museum of Art, described her art as aimed “toward that leans on the flower as a metaphor for her aes- the greater goal of a vital, impelling creation that thetic goals: “As the fragrance of a flower fills is not merely life but more than that, an intensifi- consciousness with the essence of life without the cation of life.” necessity for seeing its material form, it seems that Without being a biologist or mathematician, color will someday speak directly to us…carrying Shore, through her art, nonetheless grasps at the a more direct impact on our newly developing structures, the sinusoidal curves, Fibonacci se- perceptions.” She wanted to make paintings with quences, and branching patterns that are the scaf- the sensory intensity and immediacy of smell to folding on which all lifeforms depend. Her sim- launch viewers onto a higher plane. Like many of plifications are an unveiling of the order inherent her contemporaries, her synesthetic conflation of to life-forms. smell and sight was stimulated by Kandinsky’s While Helen Lundeberg co-opted the iris for 1912 book Concerning the Spiritual in Art. She her Post Surrealist agenda and Henrietta Shore also compared color arrangements to musical pared down the clivia to an essential pattern, Agnes harmonies. In her sketchbooks, she placed color Pelton gives us a luminescent and hallucinatory symbols on musical staves, as if writing a song in passion flower vine. In Pelton’s hands, this vine is which each color formed a note. untethered from any support and emerges from a Pelton came from a musical family, so equating glowing violet background. Leaves, buds, tendrils, colors with music had a homegrown aspect. Born and an open flower do not connect to each other; in Germany, she moved to Brooklyn as a child instead, they appear to float in a liquid solution. with her mother, who for 30 years ran the Pelton The central flower expands, an aureole of light School of Music. She studied piano at home and

huntington.org 19 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.

20 huntington.org lessons learned In the Woods with a Canoe

A HISTORIAN OF CAMPING SCRUTINIZES FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER’S ENCOUNTER WITH WILDERNESS

By Terence Young

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 Below: The label for this image in from the stress of urban living to a form of recreation so popular that it spawned an entire industry. And one of the Turners’ photograph he points out the not-so-bright side of camping’s history, when segregated campgrounds at the national albums of their 1908 canoe trip reads: “Kahnipiminanikok / Dow parks underscored the nation’s fraught race relations. Young also focuses on key figures in its development, and the Turners en route.” showcasing a sampling of campers and their excursions. “Kahnipiminanikok” is the Ojibwe name of Kawnipi Lake in Ontario, Among those featured is Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), perhaps the most influential U.S. Canada. Seated in the bow seat historian of the first half of the 20th century. Best known for his “Frontier Thesis,” which he set forth in a is historian Frederick Jackson Turner (far right); behind him sits scholarly paper published in 1893, Turner attributed the development of a distinctly American character to his wife, Caroline Mae Turner the nation’s westward expansion. After a long and distinguished career as a history professor, Turner joined (second from right) and their daughter, Dorothy K. Turner The Huntington as a research associate in 1927. The Huntington acquired his papers after his death in 1932. (third from right). Jesse Dow (far Although many researchers have studied Turner’s archive for its scholarly content, Young is the first to left), one of the trip guides, sits in the stern seat, steering the study Turner’s musings on camping. The following is an excerpt from Young’s book that focuses on a month- canoe. Unidentified photographer. long canoe-camping trip that Turner, his family, and the family of the president of the University of Wisconsin The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. took together in the summer of 1908. Race would become a factor here, too.

22 huntington.org mong these [boat-camping] enthusiasts was no less a figure than Frederick Jackson Turner. Although the historian had expressed a concern for the “closing” ofA 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 them into rugged, pioneer-like fishing and camping. One biographer noted that individuals. “Erick the head guide Turner often began fall semester “trim and tanned” was a canny Swede who has lived because of these summer outdoor vacations. Many in the woods some thirty years of these vacations, such as the one he enjoyed during and can do anything.… Dow was summer 1908, relied on canoes. On Aug. 10 of a Canadian Scotch man—a true that year, Turner, his wife (Caroline) Mae, and their sport…. McCabe was a fine Irish daughter Dorothy departed on a canoe-camping man, strong as the propeller of an trip through southern Ontario Province with ocean liner at the stern paddle, and Charles Van Hise, a geologist and president of the then there was the cook [Fred University of Wisconsin, and his two daughters Landry], a French Canadian, with Mary Janet and Hilda. Paddling and portaging the gasconade of his people, but from Basswood Lake on the Minnesota-Ontario clever with the frying pan.” These border to Lake Nipigon north of Thunder Bay, four men supported the camping Above left: Portrait of Frederick they covered nearly four hundred miles. party for the entire time by being the principal Jackson Turner (1861–1932), ca. Both Turner and his wife left accounts of their paddlers in three of the four canoes, by portaging 1905. Unidentified photographer. The Huntington Library, Art vacation—a later letter by him to fellow historian most of the approximately one thousand pounds Collections, and Botanical and friend Max Farrand, [who became the first of supplies and gear, by almost daily erecting and Gardens. Above right: Frederick Jackson Turner “on the portage,” director of research at The Huntington in 1927], striking their encampments, and by preparing all according to the label for this and a personal journal by her—which occasionally meals. Although the campers were generally image in one of the Turners’ photograph albums of their reveal how their wilderness travels were a pilgrim- “roughing it,” they had time to relax and ate well. 1908 canoe trip. Unidentified age into sacred space. According to Turner, the One dinner, Mae Turner recounted, was an photographer. The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and campers “had a bully taste of the real wilderness” especially elaborate delight, since they had been Botanical Gardens. on this canoe-camping adventure. They slept in camping for more than three weeks at the time. beds only once, cut their own trails at times, saw Dinner, she noted in her journal for Sept. 2, was no one new for three weeks, encountered moose “pea soup—very good. Trout and bacon—sweet and bear, and caught and ate so many fish that “we potatoes…hot baking powder biscuit—blueberry filed the barbs off our hooks to keep from getting pie—blueberries—cheese—coffee.” This sumptu- too many to eat.” The six campers were assisted ous meal was followed the next morning by a by four men that Van Hise had “borrowed from similarly impressive repast: “blueberries, prunes, the force of the Oliver mining company which let Oatmeal, trout, bacon, toast & coffee—and some us pay them and use them in a dull season.” In left over blueberry pie.” However rough other ele- Turner’s view, these men were “real bullies of the ments may have been, the cook made their meals northern woods” whose experiences had made quite smooth.

huntington.org 23 As the 10 traveled their route, they sometimes area,” but she wished it was elsewhere. “Attractive” admired the landscape, just as other, romantically pine groves on other points caught her eye, but inclined campers had before them. A few days into more importantly, nearby their campsite sat “the their trip, for instance, Van Hise termed the scene frame of an Indian tepe.” Where the Dawson route at one lake a “Hogarthean line of beauty from had inspired Mae’s husband to recall frontier his- mountain to valley,” which prompted Turner to tory, the native structure gave her “the feeling that remark, “My I love these trees. Look at those leafy the place is unclean,” even though it had not been isles.” On another occasion, a landscape feature occupied for years. “Camping on virgin ground,” recalled the fading frontier for Turner. “We had a she concluded, “spoils one.” little taste of the old Dawson Route from Fort A few days later, as the campers prepared to William to the Rainy river,” he happily reported head their canoes up the Nipigon River, they faced to his historian friend Farrand. The Dawson route a dilemma that again involved First Peoples. The had been a wide trail that ran from Thunder Bay superintendent of the river and the local populace to the Red River district of southern Manitoba. “protested against our party going up with light Initially surveyed by S. J. Dawson in 1858 and canoes and no Indians,” recounted Turner. Van

Top left: The label for this image opened about 1870, it was slowly being reclaimed Hise and the hired men dismissed these protesta- in one of the Turners’ photograph by the forest and largely unused, except for local tions, telling Turner that they could do it on their albums of their 1908 canoe trip reads: “The Sleeping Beauty FJT.” traffic, when the Turners and Van Hises encoun- own. Turner, however, disagreed with the other men, Unidentified photographer. The tered it in 1908. “The old portages cut out for teams insisting that his family had to have a “Nipigon Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical and with corduroy road in places,” observed Turner, canoe” (a twenty-foot, dory-like boat) and an Indian Gardens. Top right: Caroline Mae “made a contrast with the Indian portages we had guide who knew the river and where to fish. Turner’s Turner found time to relax and read on her canoe-camping trip been following.” The former were more open and stance, he lamented, “greatly disgusted Van Hise on the Nipigon River in the easier to travel, but “not altogether to our taste.” who hates Indians,” but Turner held firm nonethe- summer of 1908. Here she sits in camp at Pine Portage. The Dawson route, it seemed to Turner, was out of less. Then, to his surprise, “Dow [the guide] kicked Unidentified photographer. The place and an invasion of sacred wilderness because and would not paddle [in the same canoe] with an Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical “it looked like civilization.” Indian.” Turner, finally revealing his own feelings, Gardens. Bottom: Heading Out: Ethnicity and race also challenged Turner, his admitted that he “sympathized with [Dow]. He was A History of American Camping by Terence Young, Cornell companions, and their guides as they canoed across a true sport; but I had made up my mind.” Subse- University Press, 2017. southern Ontario. Parts of this wilderness were quently, the party obtained its Nipigon canoe, and home to Canada’s First Peoples, but evidence of Dow, who had been at the stern of Frederick Turner’s their presence distressed Mae Turner. On one occa- canoe, exchanged with “amiable Mike” McCabe, sion, she recorded in her journal, the company who had been paddling in a canoe with the cook. established camp “on a point commanding all the The campers then departed upriver toward the next

24 huntington.org camp, where an outfitter had promised they would The fact that the Turner and Van Hise families’ meet their expert aboriginal guide. Ironically, when canoe-camping vacation had covered nearly four the new man appeared the next day, “he proved to hundred miles was noteworthy, but its duration— be a clever young bluffer, a white lad” with little one month—was unexceptional. Many, if not experience, it later turned out. Perhaps Van Hise’s most, camping trips taken during this era tended disgust, Dow’s “kicking,” and Turner’s sympathy to stretch to 30 or more days, making duration a had reached the ears of the locals, but for whatever factor that restricted camping’s appeal to a rela- reason, Turner admitted, “No Indian could be tively small group of adherents. Few Americans gotten to work with whites.” Consequently, the possessed sufficient leisure time to vacation in any campers missed some good fishing “by not having form. For most people, if they had the time to an expert Indian who could take us into one or two camp, it came as a result of the sort of ill health places where prior knowledge was requisite.” that would confine them to the house or because Nevertheless, after the canoe campers completed they were unemployed and without the money. their vacation on Sept. 10, Turner judged his travels Only as the 19th became the 20th century did a success because, like all true pilgrims, he had paid vacations begin to be won by working people. returned in a transformed state. “I am 20 pounds lighter & much more muscular,” he crowed. Only Terence Young is professor emeritus of geography at 46 at the time, Turner would continue to camp California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. and fish for many years to come.

huntington.org 25 In Print

A SAMPLING OF BOOKS BASED ON RESEARCH IN THE COLLECTIONS

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.

26 huntington.org back page Now You See Him, Now You Don’t

REACH FOR THE SCISSORS—IT’S TIME TO WEAVE A MASTERPIECE

By Kate Lain

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. N ow 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 Boy disappear 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.

huntington.org 27