News & Events

Away from Home

The Art Library is closed for renovation until the end of August 2009. The Art Library book collection will be returned to Van Ingen Hall beginning June 1. During the first two weeks of June art books will only be available on a call basis through the Main Library circulation desk.

Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

Catching Light: European and American Watercolors from the Permanent Collection

May - July 2009

Back to the Future: The New Vassar College Art Library

The Art Library is currently under renovation and will reopen for the beginning of classes for the Autumn '09 Term.

The Vassar College Art Library is a rare example of a complete early modernist interior from the pre-World War II period in the United States. Built in 1937, the interior was designed by John McAndrew, an architect as well as educator, who taught architectural history and drafting in the Vassar College Department of Art from 1931 to 1937.

The clarity, openness, and textured warmth of the space is in keeping with the American or what McAndrew termed a "naturalized" version of the machine style, which he would go on to promote in his role as Curator of the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art beginning in the Fall of 1937. The design also has elements in common with the streamline style of Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes. McAndrew's Art Department colleagues referred to this dynamic and forward-looking space as the expression of a new functionalism in architecture.

As a learning environment it was exactly that, an elegantly-crafted machine in which every surface, volume, and element was shaped and illuminated for the efficient appropriation of a knowledge of the history of art through group and individual study. McAndrew's space is now being carefully renovated to recover its original function through the introduction of new visualization technologies as well as through a restoration of the original interior on designs by another architect/educator, the late Paul Spencer Byard, and his partner Charles A. Platt, of the New York-based firm of Platt, Byard, Dovell & White. To view a slideshow of the original space, follow this link.

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