I’m looking forward to turning all systems off today and starting the holiday break. No classes, no research, no writing, no brand-new Daily Hellers (I’ll be publishing “Best ofs” until Jan. 2). But before I leave for two weeks of ice fishing, I must recommend two unmissable exhibitions for those visiting New York for the holidays, and youse who live here, too …
Mexican Prints at the Vanguard
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, through Jan. 5
Among the most acerbic protest and satiric art of the late 19th and early 20th centuries originated during and after Mexico’s populist revolution. I’ve collected many artifacts of this time. But had I not been gifted a copy of the MET Bulletin, I would have missed this trove of printed publications, Calavareras (broadsheets) and pamphlets.
As the Bulletin explains: “The rich tradition of printmaking in Mexico—from the 18th century to the mid-20th century—is explored in this exhibition of works drawn mainly from The Met collection. Among the early works presented are [pages] by Mexico’s best-known printmaker, José Guadalupe Posada, whose depictions of skeletons engaged in human activities helped establish a global identity for Mexican [comic and satiric] art. Following the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), printmaking proved to be the ideal medium for artists wanting to address social and political concerns and voice resistance to the rise of fascism around the world. Artists also turned to printmaking to reproduce Mexican murals from the 1920s and to create exhibition posters, prints for the popular press, and portfolios celebrating Mexican dress and customs.”
In addition to Posada, whose work is chronicled in dozens of books and catalogs, are the great Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and Leopoldo Méndez. They exemplify how prints defined and critiqued social and political issues, a role of graphic arts that continues in Mexico today. French artist Jean Charlot donated a plethora of his own prints and many by other artists in the mid-1940s when he represented the Metropolitan Museum in Mexico. The collection is stunning … and, for me, a wonderful holiday surprise (along with the MET’s other offerings).
(Images taken from the MET Bulletin.)
Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books
The Grolier Club, through Feb. 15
The Grolier Club is a deep source of bibliophilic scholarship and obsession. Its exhibits are replete with invaluable knowledge and various rarities. One of the club’s more curious exhibitions presently on view this holiday season is at once a conceptual art installation and hilarious entertainment, featuring a collection of books that do not really exist. Imaginary Books: Lost, Unfinished and Fictive Works Found Only in Other Books is part literary phenomenon, part satire. It is “an alternative library” that imagines the look and feel of some of the major “what ifs” of bibliographic history.
Curated by collector and club member Reid Byers, the exhibition includes more than 100 imaginary books: “lost texts that have no surviving example, unfinished books, and fictive works that exist only in story. In this post-structuralist art project, presented with a dry wit,” all of these props are “meticulously created by Byers with a team of printers, bookbinders, artists and calligraphers.”
The gallery setting is a collector’s ersatz library featuring such impossibilities as William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Won, the simulated lost sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost, of which no known copies survive; Ernest Hemingway’s first novel, which vanished when his wife’s luggage was stolen from a train at the Gare de Lyon, Paris, in 1922; and the Necronomicon, a magical volume that had been sealed in a Wells Fargo strongbox. An accompanying book/catalog with serious parody citations is published by Oak Knoll (U.S.) and Club Fortsas (France). It is more than a hoot, it is high- low-techery in an age of digital AI fakes and simulacra.
If you cannot see the exhibit, get the real printed book. Or do both. After all, it is the holiday for giving and getting.
“An encounter with an imaginary book brings us forcibly to a liminal moment, confronted with an object that we know does not exist, but then it leaves us suspended in this strange space, for being magical. … It appears before us only to amuse, to prompt a gasp, a knowing chuckle, or the briefest thought of ‘O, how I wish!’” says Byers, adding, “Every book in the world was an imaginary book when it was first begun to be written.”
(Book covers taken from the catalog, and the collection of Reid Byers.)
The post The Daily Heller: Two Must-See Exhibits in NYC This Holiday Season appeared first on PRINT Magazine.