When I first heard about the blog, I was excited to have another avenue to connect our libraries with the public. I can’t remember how many times I’ve heard visitors say, “Wow, I have been to the museum so many times, but never knew there was a library downstairs. It’s amazing! Look at all these books!” when they visit the McCaw Foundation Library at the Seattle Asian Art Museum for the first time. The library has been here as long as they museum has – more than seventy-seven years. I am excited to have this opportunity to showcase some of the marvelous books we have in this library.

Complete Works of Bada Shanren
We recently celebrated the Lunar New Year, also known as the Spring Festival and the Chinese New Year. Choosing from our thousands of titles, I’d like to start my book-blogging off by introducing one our most recent acquisitions: Complete Works of Bada Shanren.

Complete Works of Bada Shanren (Ba da shan ren quan ji). Jiangxi: Jiangxi mei shu chu ban she, 2001. Photo by: Jie Pan.

Chinese painter and poet Zhu Da (1626-1705), better known as Bada Shanren, was the leading artist and the most well known of the Four Monks group of painters (Hong Ren, Kun Can and Shi Tao) in the early Qing Dynasty (1644-1911). As a descendant of the last Ming prince Zhu Quan, he was forced into religious life to escape persecution by the Qing who defeated the Ming in 1644. The cataclysmic fall of the Ming dynasty and the death and dispersal of so many of his family and friends arguably led to a mental breakdown. From then, he painted birds and flowers using highly dramatic calligraphic brushstrokes to express his inner loneliness and dissatisfaction.

In 1986, the Jiangxi Fine Arts Press began work on a book in conjunction with the Bada Shanren 360-year Birthday Celebration and International Symposium held in Nanchang, the hometown of Bada Shanren and the capitol of Jiangxi Province. Including the contributions of many noted art historians, it was published in 2000. This wonderful collection is a five-volume set encased in a beautiful fabric box on which a relief of golden cloud and floral pattern with the author’s own calligraphy has been applied. These five volumes demonstrate Bada Shanren’s paintings, calligraphy, seals, signatures, poems and letters. Scholarly papers on the artist are also collected in this set. It is the most comprehensive book to date studying Bada Shanren and his work.

The Decorative Arts and Painting Council (DAPC) generously donated this set to the McCaw Foundation Library in 2009 in honor of Director Emeritus, Mimi Gates, for her 15 years of service to the Seattle Art Museum.

Two paintings of Bada Shanren are featured in the current exhibition New Old and New New. See also this blog entry. If you’d like to read more on Bada Shanren and his work, please visit the McCaw Foundation Library at the Seattle Asian Art Museum. We are open to the public: Thursday 1-8pm, Friday and Saturday 1-5pm.

Jie Pan, Assistant Librarian, McCaw Foundation Library

Black History Month
This month’s Book(s) of the Month Club entry highlights some of the more recent library acquisitions related to African American art production and African Americans as the subject in art. February is Black History Month and I’m thrilled to have an opportunity to highlight some our great resources in these areas.

Image of the Black in Western Art Series
I recently discovered we owned part of this series when an acquisition request came in for a missing volume. (We have over 50,000 volumes in our library collections – I don’t know them all… yet!) These volumes are produced by Harvard University’s Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project and Photo Archive at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.

Spanning nearly 5,000 years and documenting virtually all forms of media, the Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project and Photo Archive is an unprecedented research project devoted to the systematic investigation of how people of African descent have been perceived and represented in art…[The archive was] started in 1960 by Jean and Dominique de Menil…For the first thirty years of the project’s existence, the project focused on the production of a prize-winning, four-volume series of generously illustrated books, The Image of the Black in Western Art. Since moving to Harvard in 1994, the project is focused on the production of the final volume of [the series.]”
- W.E.B Du Bois Institute

The Dorothy Stimson Bullitt Library has most, but not all of the series at present. We have:
v. 1. From the Pharaohs to the Fall of the Roman Empire
v. 2. From the Early Christian Era to the “Age of Discovery”: pt. 2. Africans in the Christian Ordinance of the World
v. 4. From the American Revolution to World War I:  pt. 1. Slaves and Liberators and pt. 2. Black Models and White Myths
We do not have volume 2, part 1 and volume 3 is forthcoming.

You may recognize the cover of volume 4, part 1. It is Portrait of Jean-Baptiste Belley (detail) by Anne-Louis Girodet, 1797. Titus Kaphar, the first recipient of the Gwendolyn Knight and Jacob Lawrence Fellowship, reproduced the painting in his work Conversation Between Paintings #3: Descent, 2007 for his exhibition at SAM in 2009: Titus Kaphar: History in the Making.

Other Notable Books on the Subject
In addition to this outstanding series, we also have these notable books, among many, many others:

	A Durable Memento: Portraits by Augustus Washington, African American Daguerreotypist. Washington, D.C.: National Portrait Gallery, 1999.
	A Force for Change: African American Art and the Julius Rosenwald Fund. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2009.
	Photographs from the Memphis World, 1949-1964. Memphis, TN: Jackson, MS: Memphis Brooks Museum of Art; University Press of Mississippi, 2008.
	Embracing the Muse: Africa and African American Art. New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2004.
	To Conserve a Legacy: American Art from Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Andover, MA: New York: Cambridge, MA: Addison Gallery of American Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem; Distributed by MIT Press, 1999.
	The Trenton Doyle Handbook: Volume 1. Brooklyn, NY: PictureBox Inc., 2007.

 I hope some of these spark your interest. They certainly have mine!

Traci Timmons, Librarian

When I was first asked to write something for this blog, I immediately thought about our incredible library collections and my desire to highlight at least some of the interesting resources we have.

The “book of the month” idea also came to mind. Dependent upon your age and where you grew up, you might have been a subscriber to the Book of the Month Club ©, a book-by-mail service begun in 1926. My mother, an elementary school teacher, signed me up for the Children’s Book of the Month Club ™ as soon as I could read. I’d like to take a page from the BOMC’s playbook and feature a book or books from our library collections each month on this blog. We don’t have mail-order services, but our libraries are all open to the public for reference use. Our hours and other information are available here.

Book Blitz Month
According to several “holiday observances” sites, January is, among other things, Book Blitz Month.* (Wow, how did I get so lucky?) Generally, this observance encourages us all to read voraciously throughout the month. That’s wonderful, but any of you who know art books know that they are anything but quick reads. We’ll be lucky if we get through one book this month!

Abrams’ How to Read… Series
Rather than focus on an esoteric product of a dissertation, I’d like to start this off by looking at a series of books that one could read in a short amount of time. Harry N. Abrams Inc., publisher extraordinaire of art and illustrated books, began the How to Read… series in 2004. In short, beautifully illustrated text entries, these works provide readers with clues to the “rich system of symbols, themes, and motifs that often eludes modern museum-goers.” Books in this series “not only help the viewer to understand the significant details of a picture but also explains the relationship with similar imagery in other works.”

Books in this series include: How to Read a Painting edited by Patrick De Rynck (2004), How to Read a Modern Painting by Jon Thompson (2006), How to Read a Photograph by Ian Jeffrey (2009), How to Read Bible Stories and Myths in Art also by Patrick De Rynck (2009), and the forthcoming How to Read Italian Renaissance Painting by Stefano Zuffi (2010). All of these, including the Zuffi book when it arrives, are available in the Dorothy Stimson Bullitt Library’s reference collection.

National Soup Month and Andy Warhol
January is also National Soup Month. We’re all really excited about the upcoming exhibition love fear pleasure lust pain glamour death — Andy Warhol Media Works in May 2010. Although we won’t see any of these in the exhibition, I always think of Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans when I conjure the image of soup in my head (bet you didn’t think I could tie art to soup, did you?) We have a number of great books and videos on Warhol in the library, including Andy Warhol: Campbell’s Soup Boxes (Paris: Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 2000).

I’d be especially interested to hear from those of you who’ve read/purused/used any of these books. I’d like to know how they might have augmented or enhanced an art-looking experience. If you’d like to see other items in our library collections, please visit our online library catalogue, which is also available by going to www.seattleartmuseum.org and choosing Museum Libraries under the Visit tab.

Traci Timmons, Librarian

*By the way, January is also: Bath Safety Month, International Creativity Month, National Be On-Purpose Month, National Clean Up Your Computer Month, National Hot Tea Month and Oatmeal Month, among many, many others.