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Art Library

Welcome

About the Art Library

The Vassar College Art Library is a rare example of a complete 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 design in the Vassar College Department of Art from 1932 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 aesthetic, which he would go on to promote in his role as Curator of the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art between 1937 and 1941. The vivid colors of the library interior draw on Le Corbusier’s purist principles and their relationship between color and space. 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 design 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 has now been carefully renovated to recover its original function 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

For a beautifully illustrated historical account of the life and work of John McAndrew, his design of the Vassar College Art Library, and the contribution of McAndrew and Vassar to the development of modernist art and architecture in the United States, see the architectural historian Mardges Bacon's monograph, John McAndrew's Modernist Vision: From the Vassar College Art Library to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, published in 2018 by Princeton Architectural Press, and available through Amazon.  For the Library Cafe interview of Mardges Bacon by Art Librarian Thomas Hill about the book, click here. For contemporary images of the Art Library taken for Bacon's book by Andrew Tallon after the Platt Byard Dovell White renovation, click here.

 

FINDING AIDS

NEWS & EXHIBITS

The Belle Ribicoff lecture

by Sean Sawyer

Frederic Church's Olana: Art, Ecology, and the Native Forest

Monday, April 8th at 5:30 in Taylor 203

arcane botanicals poster

ARCANE BOTANICALS

Natural Imagery and Dioscorides'

Materia Medica

A Thesis Exhibition curated by Natalia Fay, '24

On view in the Art Library Reading Room

through April 19, 2024

 

 

Research Group on Manuscript Evidence 

2024 Spring Symposium at Vassar 

"Between Past and Future"

April 19 · 2pm - April 21 · 2pm

This Symposium celebrates the roles which Special Collections can fulfill as part of teaching in institutions dedicated to the Liberal Arts.

Part of the RGME Symposia collection.

Making a Life in Photography: Rolly McKenna

Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center 

&

The Frederick Thompson Memorial Library

February 3 - June 16

This exhibition is the first survey of the prolific career of American photographer Rosalie (Rollie) Thorne McKenna (1918–2003). After graduating from Vassar College in 1940, McKenna worked independently as a sought-after architectural and portrait photographer, making unique yet underrecognized contributions to American modernism and documentary photography. 

Women at Work: Photography and Labor

January 6–March 31, 2024

Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center

As both a profession and artistic pursuit, photography has historically been dominated by men. Yet despite many inequities, women have made significant contributions to photography as a creative profession. Drawn from the Loeb’s collection, this single-gallery exhibition explores the relationship between photography and labor, spanning the early 1900s to the present, featuring seven American women photographers: Jessie Tarbox Beals, Margaret Bourke-White, Mary Lloyd Estrin, Remy Holwick, Susan Meiselas, Carrie Mae Weems, and Janet Yoshii-Buenger. While some have made their living through fashion photography, photojournalism, editorial and documentary photography, others are artists whose photographs examine unpaid domestic labor.