Pin given out at General Motors Futurama Exhibit, 1940.
I Have Seen the Future:
Norman Bel Geddes Designs America September 11, 2012 – January 6, 2013
Norman Bel Geddes (1893-1958) was an innovative stage and industrial designer, futurist, and urban planner who, more than any designer of his era, created and promoted a dynamic vision of the future—streamlined, technocratic, and optimistic. Geddes popularized this vision through drawings, models, and photographs of spectacular vehicles, buildings, and products featured in his books Horizons and Magic Motorways. His most notable effort was his Futurama display for the General Motors "Highways and Horizons" exhibit at the 1939-40 New York World's Fair, which adopted the motto "I Have Seen the Future." Futurama's giant model of a 1960 future American city gave Depression-era Americans genuine hope for a better future within their lifetimes.
The exhibition will explore the career of this complex and influential man through approximately fifty projects from the Ransom Center's Bel Geddes collection. The exhibition will bring together never-before-exhibited drawings, models, photographs, and films.
The exhibition is being organized by Donald Albrecht, the Museum of the City of New York's Curator of Architecture and Design and an independent curator, with planning support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund, the Marlene Nathan Myerson Family Foundation, Janet and Jack Roberts, and an FAIC/Tru Vue Optium® Conservation Grant.
Arnold Newman
Pablo Picasso contact sheet, 1954
Arnold Newman/Getty Images
Arnold Newman: Masterclass February 12, 2013 - May 12, 2013
Organized by the Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography (FEP) in collaboration with the Ransom Center, the exhibition explores the career of Arnold Newman, unquestionably one of the finest portrait photographers of the twentieth century. Many of his studies of European and American luminaries in the arts, sciences, politics, and business have rightly been described as iconic. Marlene Dietrich, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Arthur Miller, and Pablo Picasso are only a few of his celebrated sitters.
A bold modernist with a superb sense of compositional geometry, Newman is known for a crisp, spare style which cleverly situates his subjects in context. Artists delighted in sitting for Newman, knowing that he would find a way to convey their sensibility in dramatic, but always appropriate, fashion. Though Newman is celebrated today for his great portraiture, his still lifes, architectural studies and his earliest portraits, often of anonymous people in the street, are far less known, though they can well compare with the best in these genres.
The exhibition will take stock of the entire range of Newman's photographic art, showing many fine prints for the first time. This rich and varied exhibition will surprise and delight even those who think they already have a comprehensive sense of this master photographer's work.
Cornell Capa/Magnum Photos
Magnum Photos September 10, 2013 - January 5, 2014
Drawn from the massive Magnum Photos Collection housed at the Harry Ransom Center, this exhibition will include over 200 photographs spanning the range of subjects and styles that have made Magnum the preeminent photographic agency in the world.
Magnum, the venerable agency founded, owned, and managed cooperatively by its member photographers, has been a standard of photographic excellence and innovation for more than 60 years. The vintage prints in the collection have been amassed since the 1930s and include images of major world events, celebrities, family life, religion, and social affairs by its member photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Elliott Erwitt, Leonard Freed, Bruce Davidson, Rene Burri, Eve Arnold, Dennis Stock and more than 80 others.
The exhibition will highlight the vital function of these prints in the world of journalism before digital media. Cumulatively, they reveal a fascinating picture of the world of print journalism from the 1930s to the late twentieth century.
The Magnum Photos Collection resides at the Harry Ransom Center courtesy of MSD Capital, Michael and Susan Dell, Glenn and Amanda Fuhrman and John and Amy Phelan.
Vivien Leigh in "Tear Stains" make-up still, ca. 1938
David O. Selznick Collection
Gone With The Wind; a 75th anniversary exhibition September 9, 2014 - January 4, 2015
Gone With The Wind, the 1939 film based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Margaret Mitchell, was embroiled in controversy for its depiction of race and violence in the Civil War-era Old South before a single frame of film was shot. Yet the film continues to captivate audiences around the world 75 years after it was made. The exhibition will take visitors behind the camera to tell, from multiple perspectives, the story of the making of this quintessential film from Hollywood's Golden Age and illustrate why it remains influential and compelling.
Drawn from the producer David O. Selznick's archive, housed at the Ransom Center, the exhibition will include over 300 original items including behind-the-scenes photographs, storyboards, correspondence, production records, audition footage, and Selznick's own notoriously mogul-like memos. The exhibition will also feature five original gowns worn by Vivien Leigh as the beautiful and ambitious main character, Scarlett O'Hara. The newly restored costumes will be displayed together for the first time in more than 25 years.
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