|
Indepth Arts News:
"Lost New York in Old Postcards"
2001-08-11 until 2001-11-25
Museum of the City of New York
New York, NY,
USA United States of America
Walk into most antique stores or flea mar-kets
and you are likely to find postcard
collectors sifting through boxes of cards
featuring famous and infamous images of
American life. Traditionally used as a
means of communication by visitors and
tourists, postcards have come to be valued
in their own right as objects of historical
significance and artistic merit. On August
11, 2001, the Museum of the City of New
York will present Lost New York in Old
Postcards, an exhibition of over 170 post-cards
documenting life in the City from the turn of the century to the mid-1950s, the
years in which hand-colored postcards were produced.
Today, as in previous times, postcards serve as a means of communication. For collectors,
historians, and artists, however, postcards take on a broader meaning and are often viewed
as a miniature art form. As an art form, the image on the front of the postcard rather
than the correspondence on the back is of primary interest. Renowned photographer
Walker Evans once said of postcards, “On their tinted surfaces are some of the truest visual
records ever made of any period.” This historical record of New York City’s past comes to
life in the colorful cards of Lost New York in Old Postcards.
Divided into eight cat-egories,
the postcards
on display in Lost New
York are from the col-lection
of Rod Kennedy, Jr., and the perma-nent
collection of the Museum of the City
of New York. Mr. Kennedy’s postcards will
be donated to the Museum, supplementing
its current holdings. The cards in Lost New
Yorkcapture images of buildings, parks,
hotels, subways, restaurants, nightclubs, the-aters,
and stores that no longer exist or have
been transformed by the constant change that defines New York City as a work in
progress. From the famed Copacabana nightclub to the Trylon and Perisphere of the 1939
World’s Fair, these postcards are both a record of life in the City in the past and an amus-ing
and often exaggerated depiction of New York City icons and attractions.
A fully illustrated book by the same title, Lost New York in Old Postcards, is to be published
by Gibbs Smith, Publisher, in August 2001 in conjunction with the exhibition. Created
by Rod Kennedy, Jr., with research and text by Elizabeth Ellis, this publication chronicles
Mr. Kennedy’s experiences as a postcard collector and features the cards on view in the
exhibition. The book will be available in the Museum Shop of the Museum of the City of
New York for $24.95.
As Mr. Kennedy notes in his book, postcards became popular after 1898, the year
Congress reduced the cost of mailing commercially printed cards from two cents to just a
penny. Following this price reduction, Americans bought over 770 million cards in 1906
and just under one billion in 1913. Today these images are valued not only as a snapshot
of one’s travels but as a testimony to the people, places, and things that have come to sym-bolize
New York City but often survive only as memories.
Related Links:
| | 
|
