Public lecture Dec. 2nd at RBSC by Craig Stephenson

This coming Tuesday, December 2nd, Dr. Craig Stephenson will give a free public lecture on his book Anteros: A Forgotten Myth.

Anteros

“Anteros: A Forgotten Myth explores how the myth of Anteros disappears and reappears throughout the centuries, from classical Athens to the present day, and looks at how the myth challenges the work of Freud, Lacan, and Jung, among others. It examines the successive cultural experiences that formed and inform the myth and also how the myth sheds light on individual human experience and the psychoanalytic process.”

from the publisher (Routledge) 

About the speaker: Craig E. Stephenson, Ph.D., is a graduate of the C.G. Jung Institute Zürich, the Institute for Psychodrama (Zumikon, Switzerland), and the Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies, University of Essex. He is the author of Possession: Jung’s Comparative Anatomy of the Psyche (Routledge, 2009), editor of a collection of essays titled Jung and Moreno: Essays on the Theatre of Human Nature (Routledge, 2013), and the translator of Luigi Aurigemma’s book of essays, Jungian Perspectives (University of Scranton Press, 2007). He has lectured at the Bodmer Foundation, Geneva, for the Philemon Foundation and at the Warburg Institute, University of London.

The talk will take place in Rare Books and Special Collections, 4th fl. McLennan Library, 3459 rue McTavish, Montreal. All are welcome. Please RSVP to jillian.tomm@mcgill.ca.

Exhibition: Arthur Lismer’s McGill Sketchbook

Arthur Lismer (1885-1969) Learned societies at McGill Ink on paper

Arthur Lismer (1885-1969) Learned societies at McGill. Ink on paper

Arthur Lismer artist, educator (b Sheffield 27 June 1885; d Montreal 23 Mar 1969)
Arthur Lismer lived and worked in Montreal from the 1940s until his death in 1969. A founding member of the Group of Seven (with Franklin Carmichael, Lawren Harris, A.Y. Jackson, Franz Johnston, J.E.H. Macdonald and F.H. Varley), Lismer dedicated his life to art education. Still relatively unknown and with little teaching experience, Lismer began his career as Head of the Victoria School of Art (today NSCAD University) 1916-1919. From Halifax, he spent the next 20 years in Toronto, first as Vice-Principal, Ontario College of Art (OCA) and later as supervisor of art education, Art Gallery of Toronto (today Art Gallery of Ontario). He moved to Montreal in 1940 to join the Art Association of Montreal (today the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts), where he established the MMFA School of Art and Design as one of the premier Canadian art training centres.

Lismer joined the McGill School of Architecture as a sessional lecturer in 1943 at the invitation of John Bland, the School’s director, and was appointed assistant professor in 1945. There he taught: the History of Art and Theory of Design; Freehand Drawing; and led the Sketching School with Gordon Webber. Lismer retired from McGill in 1955 at the age of seventy.

The exhibition
Rare Books and Special Collections, McGill University holds some 30 sketches by Arthur Lismer, executed between 1940-1969, during his McGill tenure and into his retirement. Lismer sketched throughout his life, filling dozens of sketchbooks, but also captured the world and the people around him on scraps of paper, in the margins of flyers and programs, and on paper napkins.

Arthur Lismer (1885-1969) Seated figures; Professor F. Howes and Professor Hebb, 1953 Pencil on paper, McGill University Faculty Club stationary On verso: Portrait of Dr. Robert George

Arthur Lismer (1885-1969) Seated figures; Professor F. Howes and Professor Hebb, 1953. Pencil on paper, McGill University Faculty Club stationary On verso: Portrait of Dr. Robert George

The McGill sketches originated primarily in the Faculty Club, where Lismer stopped most days en route between the campus and his office at the museum. Many drawings are annotated by Richard Pennington, University Librarian, with whom Lismer dined regularly.

Arthur Lismer (1885-1969) Forecast of the new library terrace [1952] Pencil on paper, McGill University Faculty Club stationary

Arthur Lismer (1885-1969) Forecast of the new library terrace [1952]. Pencil on paper, McGill University Faculty Club stationary

Additional McGill sketches, of and by Lismer, hang in the Faculty Club. These are part of the McGill Visual Arts Collection, which also holds several Lismer paintings. Caricatures drawn on the plaster walls of the Arts Building East Wing, before renovations, are also documented in the McGill Archives.

Exhibition prepared by Jennifer Garland, Assistant Librarian, November 2014

Further reading: McGill News

On view in the Rare Books and Special Collections Reading Room. Extended to 1 March, 2015.

Lest we forget

smaller_poster-300x207Exhibition opening today, November 11, 2014: The Patriotism of Death: Propaganda posters from WWI at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Graphic Arts Centre, Jean-Noël Desmarais Pavilion.

Read more about our collaboration with the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and about McGill Library & Archives events commemorating the centenary of the First World War here.

 

A rare edition of Voltaire

Recently, while cataloguing some volumes from the J. Patrick Lee Voltaire Collection acquired by McGill in 2013, our colleague Marc Richard discovered a very intriguing book:

“This particular edition of L’évangile de la raison was published in Year 10 of the French revolutionary calendar, a date which corresponds to either 1801 or 1802. It’s a compilation of previously published works, assembled and edited by Voltaire, and includes many works written by him. Several editions of this compilation exist; indeed, the J. Patrick Lee Collection also holds a 1765 edition of the same title.

 

The 1801 edition, however, is extremely rare. In fact, Georges Bengesco, who compiled the standard bibliography of Voltaire’s works, Voltaire: bibliographie de ses oeuvres, had not been able to locate it at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. The only mention of this edition in Bengesco’s authoritative listing is a reference to Antoine-Alexandre Barbier’s Dictionnaire des ouvrages anonymes, which provides a brief entry for it saying: ‘Réimprimé sous le titre de “L’évangile de la raison. Ouvrage posthume de M… D… V… et D… F…” Se trouve chez tous les imprimeurs et libraires, an X, in-8, XVI-224 pp.’

 

The Voltaire volumes of the Bibliothèque nationale’s Catalogue général des livres imprimés, published in 1978, do not include this edition at all, and prior to our cataloguing of this edition there was apparently no record for it in the OCLC WorldCat online database, which covers the major research libraries in North America and much of Western Europe.”

McGill’s volume confirms that this edition survives. The book is available for consultation here at RBSC, and more detailed information about it can be found in the catalogue record which Marc has prepared for it. Marc’s description makes it possible for researchers around the world to discover this copy of the volume, and our digitization team has created a full high-quality digital reproduction. The record for the physical copy can be viewed here; the full digital copy can be linked to from the e-copy record here