Words on Pictures

  42nd Street entrance to NYPL Central Bldg. where Central Circulation was located in the now named Celeste Bartos Forum. (top left)   Berenice Abbott's  Tempo of the City: II, Fifth Avenue at 42nd Street, Looking west from Seymour Building, 503 Fifth Avenue. 1937. Changing New York . NYPL Wallach Photography Collection.   Location, Location, Location: The NYPL Picture Collection as a Midtown Nexus The Picture Collection’s location at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue put it at the center of a mid‑20th‑century image machine. Within a short walk were nearly all the industries that produced, circulated, and monetized images: newspapers and magazines, publishers, fashion houses and garment manufacturers, film and theatre studios, radio and later television networks, advertising agencies, and department stores. That geography is not incidental. It explains why the Picture Collection became, in Romana Javitz’s phrase, a “giant encyclopedia where pictures are consulted i...

  I am honored to announce that the electronic edition of the Archives of American Art Journal’s Spring 2025 issue containing “Pictorially Yours”: The Correspondence of Joseph Cornell and Romana Javitz, is now at the University of Chicago Press. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/735900 Written by myself and Diana Kamin, the essay explores the influence of visionary librarian Romana Javitz on the work of artist Joseph Cornell. Javitz was superintendent of the New York Public Library’s Picture Collection, a comprehensive image repository used by working artists and designers, from 1928 to 1968. Cornell, who is most well-known for his surrealist box constructions and collages, was a long-time user of the Picture Collection and a close confidant and admirer of Javitz. The essay draws on correspondence from the Cornell papers at the Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Cornell Study Center, and the privately held Javitz estate, as ...