Our Library
August 20th, 2007The organization of a library can be highly revealing. Donald Judd, for instance, is said to have arranged his personal collection of art books according to artists’ birth dates so that he could easily see what precedents artists in every moment had to confront. It was a history of dealing with history, for his own use. The organization of the Pulitzer library may be just as telling about the institution’s aims. The two main sections are artists and architects, both arranged first by last name, then by date of publication. Among other things, this arrangement tends to stress how individual artists remain relevant to the present: one can easily see that there are books from 2007 on both Monet and Matthew Barney. Beyond the artist and architect sections there are sections on artistic movements (expressionism, fauvism), the art world (biographies of curators, collectors), and institutions (you can see almost all the publications from certain museums side by side). It’s a history of histories and then some.
