Durante la planeación de exhibiciones en el Harry Ransom Center, los curadores seleccionan los materiales que consideran más relevantes en las colecciones y que, a su vez, mejor se relacionan con los temas de cada muestra. Posteriormente los restauradores evalúan la condición física de todos los objetos seleccionados, con el fin de entender su fragilidad material, evaluar los posibles riesgos y/o requerimientos específicos para exhibirlos de forma segura, tales como la necesidad de construir soportes exactos y a la medida para libros, o establecer niveles de iluminación para fotografías. En el caso de Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World, se determinó cuáles fotografías podrían beneficiarse de algunos tratamientos de conservación. [Read more…] about Elliott Erwitt: Home Around the World / Un hogar en todo el laboratorio
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Elliott Erwitt: Home around the lab
During exhibition planning at the Harry Ransom Center, conservators assess all objects the curators have chosen for display. Conservators evaluate the condition of [Read more…] about Elliott Erwitt: Home around the lab
"Write for readers like yourself": James Salter’s Novels
Note: This post originally appeared on April 18, 2013.
James Salter’s All That Is (Knopf), his first new novel since 1979, is a reflective work, a reconsideration of many of the themes he has explored in his earlier fiction. Looking back at Salter’s prior novels through his archive at the Harry Ransom Center, one can see the artist at work and better understand the sentiments that guide his craft. [Read more…] about "Write for readers like yourself": James Salter’s Novels
Stella Adler scholar explores acting master's interpretation of great American playwrights
“Mommy, is that God?” a little girl once whispered to her mother as Stella Adler swept into a party in New York City. The girl’s mistake was understandable: Adler was known as a presence of divine proportions, a tall, glamorous woman whose grand gestures and dramatic one-liners captivated audiences both large and small. Adler began acting at age four in the “Independent Yiddish Art Company,” run by her parents, and continued her acting career until 1961. In 1931, Adler joined the Group Theatre, where she worked closely with Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg.
In 1934, she went with Clurman to Paris to study with Constantin Stanislavski, an acting great famous for developing the Stanislavski System, a set of acting techniques that was tweaked by Strasberg and is known today as Method acting. Adler believed strongly that actors should use their imagination to synthesize characters, whereas Strasberg relied on emotional memory exercises, and the two eventually split over their differences. Adler left the Group Theatre and later opened her own acting school, The Stella Adler Studio of Acting, in 1949 in New York City, where she taught famous actors such as Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro. She opened another school, The Stella Adler Academy of Acting, in Los Angeles in 1985 with her friend and protégé Joanne Linville, who continues to run the school today.
The Ransom Center hold Adler’s papers, which were used extensively by Barry Paris in his book Stella Adler on America’s Master Playwrights (Knopf). The volume peeks into Adler’s classroom and explores the acting master’s take on American playwrights such as Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Edward Albee, Clifford Odets, and others.
The book was put together using transcripts from Adler’s script analysis classes, where lively discussions of American culture, socioeconomics, and history fleshed out the context of the plays—a practice on which Adler placed the utmost importance. Adler once said of the great artists featured in the book: “these playwrights all saw what was wrong.” She believed it was imperative for the actor not only to bring personal experience to the role, but to truly understand the beliefs, prejudices, and lives of the playwrights who crafted the plays she taught. Peter Bogdanovich, one of Adler’s former students, praised the book for “bring[ing] back the sound of Stella’s unique voice and thought processes, as well as her own particular vision.”
Paris, the book’s editor, did extensive research in the Ransom Center’s holdings on Stella Adler and Harold Clurman.
Phil Patton offers reading recommendations relating to “Visions of the Future”
In conjunction with the exhibition I Have Seen the Future: Norman Bel Geddes Designs America, the Harry Ransom Center hosts “Visions of the Future,” the tenth biennial Flair Symposium. The Flair Symposium honors the ideals set forth by Fleur Cowles and her landmark Flair magazine.
From November 1-3, the Ransom Center will bring together historians, architects, industrial designers, and visionaries in the fields of science fiction, film, theater, and future studies to explore the ways the future has been imagined over time.
Author and curator Phil Patton will moderate one of the symposium panels, “Motorways in the Twentieth Century and Today.”
Patton is the author of Open Road: A Celebration of the American Highway, Autodesign International, and Made in USA: The Secret Histories of the Things that Made America. He has worked on several exhibitions, serving as Curatorial Consultant for Different Roads: Automobiles for the Next Century (The Museum of Modern Art, 1999) and Co-Curator for Cars, Culture, and the City (Museum of the City of New York, 2010). He writes for The New York Times and teaches at the Design Criticism program at the School of Visual Arts.
Below are some of Patton’s reading recommendations relating to the symposium theme. Mentioned authors Paul Daniel Marriott and Tom Vanderbilt are also panel participants for “Motorways in the Twentieth Century and Today.”
Letters in Knopf archive show challenges Ray Bradbury faced early in his career
Legendary science fiction writer Ray Bradbury, author of the classics Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, died last Wednesday at the age of 91. In his long writing career, Bradbury published hundreds of novels and short stories, becoming an icon in the world of literature that describes aliens, space ships, faraway planets—and the future of books.
Like the 13-year-old characters in his Something Wicked This Way Comes, Bradbury spent much of his boyhood visiting the public libraries of his Midwest hometown, where he was inspired by the works of such writes as Aldous Huxley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells. Throughout his life he was an enormous supporter of libraries, advocating them as some of the most important institutions in American life and culture. The son of an electrician father and a Swedish immigrant mother, Bradbury lacked the means for a formal college education and prided himself on being largely self-taught. In 1971, in aid of a fundraising effort for public libraries in southern California, he published the essay “How Instead of Being Educated in College, I Was Graduated From Libraries.” Like the characters in his most famous novel, Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury feared a future wherein books would become obsolete.
Bradbury faced an arduous challenge in making his own futuristic novels part of the libraries he so dearly loved. Early in his career, he had difficulty garnering interest for his science fiction stories from mainstream publishing houses. He was famously “discovered” by a young Truman Capote, then a staff member at Mademoiselle, who picked Bradbury’s 1947 short story “Homecoming” out of the slush pile of submissions to the magazine and encouraged its publication. The Alfred A. Knopf archive at the Harry Ransom Center, however, reveals that despite Capote’s early advocacy, Bradbury continued to meet with difficulties when seeking a home for his work. In a rejection letter from 1948, a reader at the publishing house professes hesitation toward Bradbury’s first novel, Dark Carnival. The evaluator states that though there is “much talk about town” of Bradbury’s “weird, unusual, and tricky” stories, “the style, while adequate, lacks distinction.”
Three decades later Bradbury, by then a seasoned author with dozens of publications to his credit, became a highly valued writer at the Knopf firm. During the 1970s he worked closely with editors Robert Gottlieb and Nancy Nicholas, who published his Where Robot Mice and Robot Men Run Round in Robot Towns, Dandelion Wine, and When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed, among others. In a letter to Nicholas (shown in the slideshow above), Bradbury, who often wrote nostalgically of childhood, included a picture of himself at the age of three. He jocularly describes the photograph as “beautifully serious, as if the young writer had just been disturbed in the midst of some creative activity.”
The Ransom Center also houses manuscripts and letters related to Ray Bradbury in its Lloyd W. Currey, Sanora Babb, Eliot Elisofon, Lillian Hellman, B. J. Simmons, and Tim O’Brien archives. Additionally, the Ransom Center’s Lewis Allen collection contains screenplay drafts, correspondence, casting notes, call sheets, and promotional materials for François Truffaut’s 1966 film adaptation of Fahrenheit 451.
Please click on the thumbnails below to view full-size images.
