Open to the public Wednesday 1-4 and by appointment.
Click here to access the Library's online catalog.
Located on the first floor of the Museum, the Hanson Library is one of the most comprehensive art research libraries in the southeastern United States. Library holdings include over 35,000 items focusing on objects and styles in the Museum's permanent collection and traveling exhibitions. The Library holds a broad range of research materials including general art reference works, auction catalogues, artist files, periodicals, indexes, exhibition catalogs, and databases. The Chellis Wedgwood Collection, housed in the Lucille Stewart Beeson Rare Book Room, is the largest and most comprehensive special collection in the world related to Josiah Wedgwood and his manufactures, and makes the Library the U.S. center for the study of Wedgwood. Among these holdings are letters from John Flaxman and Benjamin West, and Sir William Hamilton's Collection of Engravings from Antique Vases, known as the Hamilton Folios, the first color plate books in the history of art.
Clarence Bloodworth Hanson, Jr. (1908-1983) was publisher of The Birmingham News and a Birmingham Museum of Art Board member for twenty-four years. An avid bibliophile and collector of rare books, including a fine private press library, Mr. Hanson brought a keen love of history and art to his duties at the Museum. In his memory, Mr. Hanson’s wife Elizabeth Fletcher Hanson (1910-2001) endowed the Clarence B. Hanson, Jr. Library for the benefit of the Birmingham Museum of Art and its visitors.
Due to the unique nature of many items in the collection, patrons may only use Library materials on the premises. A photocopier is available.
Please call 205.254.2565 x3944 or email This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to make an appointment.
Christopher A. Robinson, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Alabama-Birmingham and Museum Librarian Tatum Preston discuss Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum.
PLEASE CLICK HERE TO VIEW THE VIDEO INTERVIEW.
From Publisher's Weekly:
In an authoritative account, two reporters who led a Los Angeles Times investigation, reveal the details of the Getty Museum's illicit purchases, from smugglers and fences, of looted Greek and Roman antiquities. In 2005, the Italians indicted former Getty curator Marion True for trafficking in looted antiquities, and by 2007, after protracted negotiations, the Getty agreed to return 40 of 46 artifacts demanded by the Italian government; Italy in turn agreed to loan the Getty comparable objects. One of the major pieces lost by the Getty was an Aphrodite statue purchased by True to put the Getty on the map. But still eluding the Italians is the Getty Bronze, a statue of an athlete hauled out of international waters in 1964 by Italian fishermen; it was the prized acquisition of the Getty's first antiquities curator, Jiri Frel, who brought thousands more looted antiquities into the museum through a tax-fraud scheme. The authors offer an excellent recap of the museum's misdeeds, brimming with tasty details of the scandal that motivated several of America's leading art museums to voluntarily return to Italy and Greece some 100 classical antiquities worth more than half a billion dollars. 8 pages of b&w photos.
Click on the article title or book image to see the short video! Or click here to watch it on youtube.
Join Librarian Tatum Preston and her friend Victoria Ebrahimi, a 2nd year student at Cumberland School of Law, as they discuss Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut.
Rabo Karabekian, an aging war veteran, failed artist, and collector of abstract art, looks back on his life at the urging of a mysterious visitor-turned-house guest, Circe Berman. As he puts his story on paper, he reminisces on many interesting and funny characters and explores the themes of aging, mistakes and redemption, and how we are remembered.
Vonnegut fans and art lovers alike will enjoy this novel. Available for purchase in the Museum Store.
From Library Journal:
Vonnegut rounds up several familiar themes and character types for his 13th novel: genocide, the surreality of the modern world, fluid interplay of the past and present, and the less-than-heroic figure taking center stage to tell his story. Here he elevates to narrator a minor character from Breakfast of Champions, wounded World War II veteran and abstract painter Rabo Karabekian. At the urging of enchantress-as-bully Circe Berman, Karabekian writes his "hoax autobiography." Vonnegut uses the tale to satirize art movements and the art-as-investment mind-set and to explore the shifting shape of reality. Recommended. A.J. Wright, Univ. of Alabama at Birmingham. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.
