Reading List: Staff Picks by Emily Stein

Hey there! I'm Emily, a Photoarchivist at the Frick Art Research Library. I work with the library’s collection of photographic reproductions of works of art from all over the world—over 1.5 million strong and growing. My favorite part of the role is looking at different artworks every day and researching their histories.

My goal is to make our analog and digital resources (check out our digitized materials in the Frick Digital Collections) more relevant and accessible, such as by composing blogs and #PhotoarchiveFind posts on The Frick Collection’s social media channels. Outside of work, I like taking walks in nature and enthusiastically watching Jeopardy! if I make it home in time.

In exploring the library’s vast collections, these are some titles that struck a chord with me. You can check them out when the reading room at our historic East 71st Street home reopens in April 2025!

1. Bernini

   Edited by Andrea Bacchi and Anna Coliva (2017)

   I visited the Galleria Borghese in Rome many years ago, before I was an art historian and before I knew what a photo archive even was. I’ll never forget how the tour guide said to approach Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne from the back, so we could see the story unfold as we walked around the sculpture. It made such an impression that my parents purchased a miniature replica for their home. How he sculpted such movement of flesh from a block of marble is out of this world. The artist’s son, also his father’s biographer, described him as a “monster of genius.”

   

2. Wayne Thiebaud

   By John Wilmerding, with contributions by Pepe Karmel (2012)

   What makes Thiebaud’s style exceptional, to my eye, is the combination of an attention-grabbing, mood-boosting palette with rich, thick, carefully chosen lines. Throughout the painter’s long career (he lived to age 101), he walked the line between Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art, and a unique je ne sais quoi. The poet Wallace Stevens called him “the emperor of ice cream.” His representations of confections are a welcome reminder to treat yourself to the finer things in life...like cake.

   

3. Violence & Virtue: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes

   By Eve Straussman-Pflanzer (2013)

   I go back and forth in my mind between Artemisia Gentileschi and Caravaggio as my favorite Baroque painter. Today is an Artemisia day. Her Judith Slaying Holofernes at the Uffizi is a timeless masterpiece that projects female empowerment. It is especially satisfying when one considers it in the context of the artist’s life: At age seventeen, Artemisia was raped by a teacher and collaborator of her father, resulting in a torturous months-long trial whose sentence was never carried out. As vividly expressed in the painting this book explores, she was a force to be reckoned with and has become both an artistic and feminist icon.

   

4. Renoir and Friends: Luncheon of the Boating Party

   By Eliza E. Rathbone (2017)

   How often have you wanted to enter a painting and interact with the figures? This book attempts to do just that. It delves into the lives of French Impressionist Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s contemporaries—friends, actors, models, lovers, patrons, and fellow artists—who appeared in his Luncheon of the Boating Party and discusses how they crossed paths and influenced one another in the bustling milieu of Paris and its suburbs. I found the chapter centering on critic and collector Charles Ephrussi especially interesting, given my curiosity about the history of collecting. I am partial to Renoir, his subjects, and his dreamy, feathery brushstrokes; his La Promenade may be my favorite work in The Frick Collection.

   

5. Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol

   By Stephen E. Ostrow (1969)

   “Like a bewitched castle in the fairytales of old, the world of art lies asleep.” So begins the foreword to this ingenious catalogue documenting Andy Warhol’s exhibition of objects selected from the storage vaults of the Rhode Island School of Design’s Museum of Art. A smaller encyclopedic museum, RISD was the perfect place for this forward-thinking project. (I highly recommend a visit next time you’re in Providence.) What a dream it would be to go treasure hunting in a museum’s vaults and curate a show according to one’s values, tastes, and whims!

6. Some Aesthetic Decisions: A Centennial Celebration of Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain”

   By Bonnie Clearwater (2017)

   People tend to have strong opinions about Marcel Duchamp. I certainly do, and I think that’s what he wanted. But one cannot deny that he played a huge role in shaping modern art, arguably for the better. In submitting a porcelain urinal to the 1917 Society of Independent Artists exhibition jury—straight from the factory line, except marked with the mysterious pseudonym “R. Mutt”—Duchamp challenged the values placed on art. Owing to copies and a famous photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, Fountain (even the title makes me both laugh and cringe) lives on, inspiring artists and thinkers more than one hundred years after its creation.

   

7. The Amazing Shoemaker: Fairy Tales and Legends about Shoes and Shoemakers

   Edited by Stefania Ricci (2013)

   What do Cinderella, Salvatore Ferragamo, the god Hermes, and Michael Jordan all have in common? Shoes! And they are all in this book. This volume aims to answer the questions: What is it about shoes that has so captivated artists over millennia, and how do they send messages and tell stories? The book traces the history of this accessory from ancient times to the present and offers new, gloriously illustrated takes on fairy tales and poetry featuring different elements in the life cycle of shoes. It all makes for an enlightening, entertaining volume that accompanied a 2013–14 exhibition at the Museo Salvatore Ferragamo.

   

8. Kehinde Wiley: A Portrait of a Young Gentleman

   Edited by Melinda McCurdy (2022)

   One of my goals is to make art history relevant, and maybe even cool, to a broad audience. Kehinde Wiley is an inspiration and an incredibly talented artist. He paints Black models in the style of eighteenth-century European “Grand Manner” portraits, inserting them into a complicated tradition and merging (or clashing) past and present. This catalogue was published in conjunction with an exhibition at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens, which brought together its famous Blue Boy by Thomas Gainsborough with Wiley’s A Portrait of a Young Gentleman. The figures’ poses almost exactly echo each other, but their regalia and backdrops couldn’t be more different. Not to mention the comparable frames. It’s genius.

   

Rapid-Fire Q&A with Emily

Fiction or nonfiction?

Historical fiction, so a mix of both!

Print or e-books?

Print, unless it’s a really large volume

Reading or audiobooks?

Audiobooks, so I can multitask

Iced or hot drinks?

Warm!

Favorite season?

Fall

Favorite library (besides the Frick)?

Does Hogwarts count?

Most interesting question you’ve received in your job?

I was presenting a selection of Photoarchive materials and someone asked, “Are these for sale?” Answer: No, we are a research collection, but I’ll take that as a compliment!

Advice for hopeful future Photoarchivists?

Your path may be circuitous, but you will end up in the right place at the right time. Keep going to museums and galleries and never stop learning!

All photos by Joseph Coscia Jr., The Frick Collection