Art Libraries

Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago.

College Librarian in China Admits He Replaced Art With Fakes from ABC News.

A former chief librarian at a Chinese university admitted in court Tuesday to stealing more than 140 paintings by grandmasters in a gallery under his watch and replacing them with fakes he painted himself.

For two years up until 2006, Xiao Yuan substituted famous works including landscapes and calligraphies in a gallery within the library of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.

...right in the library. Misfiled.

The items were found during an eight-week search of the stacks. Fourteen library workers searched through 180,000 of the print stacks’ 320,000 items — about 60 percent of the inventory, the statement said.

Amy Ryan is still resigning as President of the Library.

Art Project masterpieces from Google Cultural Institute in your browser tabs
Breathe a little culture into your day! Discover a beautiful artwork from the Google Art Project each time you open a new tab in Chrome.

With this extension, you’ll see masterpieces from Van Gogh, Degas, Monet and other iconic artists from museums around the world in every new Chrome tab. The artwork is refreshed every day, or change the settings to see a new image every time you open a new tab.

It all started with his work as a library volunteer. From The Sun Sentinel:

For Arthur Jaffe, books weren't just to be read. They were to be treasured as works of art. Jaffe, who donated a lot of money and his vast collection of hand-crafted books to Florida Atlantic University, died Sunday. He was 93.

From August through October of last year, 25-year-old artist and geographer Daniel Rotsztain boarded buses, trains, streetcars and his bike with an inky pen in hand and plenty of paper. His goal was to capture the city’s bastions of books by drawing each one of them in a “homey, but blue print style”— a feat he sometimes conquered amidst scorching heat and drizzling rain.

From our friends Libraries as Incubators via The Huffington Post:

#1: Libraries are quiet spaces--all the time, everywhere
#2: Book clubs are snooze-fests
#3: Library craft activities are old-fashioned, boring, or for kids only
#4: Libraries are about books--and that's it
#5 Libraries are boring
#6 Libraries are for nerds
#7 Libraries are for little kids

From The New York Times:

In a New York Times review by William Grimes, entitled "A History of Awesome in One Room", the JP Morgan Library's new exhibit from Oxford's Bodleian Library is described as featuring "some of the loftiest texts ever recorded"; the poetry of Sappho, the Magna Carta, the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays, Euclid’s Elements, Newton’s Principia Mathematica, Shelley's Frankenstein and an illustrated score by Felix Mendelssohn.

Here's an insiders glimpse inside this special music library.

There is always more going on at the Metropolitan Opera House than meets the eye: wig fittings, dance rehearsals, orchestral rehearsals. One particularly busy corner of the Met can be found by descending two stories below the stage level to the music library. Met 2nd violinist Sarah Vonsattel recently visited the library and spoke with Chief Librarian Robert Sutherland and Assistant Librarian Melissa Robason.