Duncan Phillips’s Conversations on the Page

This month’s members’ magazine includes a new feature called “From the Archives” and our first selection focuses on Duncan Phillips’s love of Giorgione and his related exchanges with scholar Bernard Berenson on issues of attribution.

Heavily annotated plates in a 1907 printing of H.F. Cook's Giorgione, from the library of Duncan Phillips.

Heavily annotated plates in a 1907 printing of H.F. Cook’s Giorgione, from the library of Duncan Phillips.

I have written before about Phillips’s prolific marginalia. I do not write in my books, but having come across, and even relied upon, so many of Phillips’s notes, I wonder if I shouldn’t start having these conversations with text. A couple of years ago, Sam Anderson wrote a wonderful essay in The New York Times Magazine about how he came to be a devoted writer of marginalia:

Today I rarely read anything—book, magazine, newspaper—without a writing instrument in hand. Books have become my journals, my critical notebooks, my creative outlets. Writing in them is the closest I come to regular meditation; marginalia is—no exaggeration—possibly the most pleasurable thing I do on a daily basis.

Anderson goes on to lament the shift to e-readers, clinical devices without the same sense of ownership. Do they mean the end of a reader’s ability to energize their experience of text by recording their responses, creating a dialog? In the end, Anderson comes around, re-envisioning marginalia as, in fact, a very current way to communicate. What else is Twitter but a giant collection of in-the-moment responses, musings jotted in the margins of real life? (And in a bit of a meta twist, Anderson sometimes tweets images of his marginalia!)

Phillips enjoyed intellectual engagement—with others, with himself, with text. His marginalia can be some of the most revealing resources available on this private man. If he were alive today, would he take to Twitter, sharing his arguments and considerations in 140 characters, as opposed to hiding all of those ideas in the pages of books and the backs of brochures? If he thought he could find a worthy audience, I think he might.

On Coburn’s Birthday, the Treat is Ours

Head Librarian Karen Schneider with Raymond Machesney, displaying a photogravure plate by Alvin Langdon Coburn.

Head Librarian Karen Schneider with Raymond Machesney, displaying a photogravure plate by Alvin Langdon Coburn called Portrait of Miss R- . Photos: Sarah Osborne Bender

On the 131st anniversary of the birth of photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn, we in the library had the pleasure of a visit from collector and donor Raymond Machesney, who also might be Coburn’s biggest fan. (Take a look at the abundant gifts he has given to the Phillips, nearly all somehow related to Coburn.) As always, Raymond brought his infectious enthusiasm for this influential and sensitive photographer and guided us, along with curators Elsa Smithgall and Eliza Rathbone, on a journey through his latest gift: a first edition of The Artistic Side of Photography in theory and practice, from 1910, by A.J. Anderson. Coburn assisted Anderson in the selection of images for the book and this edition includes beautiful tipped-in photogravures by Coburn, Alfred Stieglitz, and Holland Day, among others.

(left to right) Elsa Smithgall, Eliza Rathbone, Karen Schneider, and Raymond Machesney in the library.

(left to right) Elsa Smithgall, Eliza Rathbone, Karen Schneider, and Raymond Machesney in the library.

Raymond shows his inscribed copy of The Family of Man, purchased in D.C. in 1958.

Raymond shows his inscribed copy of The Family of Man, purchased in D.C. in 1958.

And, though not a gift, just as delightful was seeing a small volume Raymond brought with him, a pocket-sized edition of the catalogue for The Family of Man. Raymond bought the book in 1958 on a summer study trip to Washington, D.C., while on break from his full time studies in Ohio at the College of Wooster. A political science major at the time, he found the book appealed to his social interests rather than any artistic sensibility. What else happened on that trip to Washington? Raymond paid his first visit to the Phillips. We are glad he did.

Kandinsky’s World of Influence

(Left) Tomoko and Elizabeth catalog the book. (Center) A full-color plate. (Right) The book binding and slipcase.

Volunteer Tomoko Kanekiyo assists library intern Elizabeth Cawrse-Matthews in cataloguing a rare copy of Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, translated and published in Japanese in 1924. The powerful treatise on abstraction was first published in 1911. Soon translated and sold around the world, Kandinsky’s thoughts on color and form were vastly influential. The Phillips library also recently acquired an edition in Spanish, published in Argentina in 1956. Both editions will be on display as part of Kandinsky and the Harmony of Silence: Painting with White Border, June 11–September 4, 2011.