In our last post, we gave one recollection of visiting the Exhibition Hall in the basement of the New Library (and for the entirety of the Exhibition Hall’s time here, it was the New, rather than the Berkeley, Library). Today, we feature some of the programmes that accompanied the displays – these are all catalogued, and available to order and consult via Stella Search. In our next post we’ll show you a sequence of photos of one exhibition in situ.
In order to give you a flavour of the pamphlets, let’s start with the one that led to Henry Moore’s “King and Queen” sculpture taking up residence outside the Library from 1967-9:
From inside that, here is an image of said sculpture:
The subjects really were diverse. Here we have an exhibition on 20th-century chair design:
The designer of the chairs on the cover is Bertoia, whose chairs were to be found in large numbers in the Library for the first 40 years of its existence. Here is the relevant part of the catalogue:
Completely different again, the cover of an exhibition of pop-art banners:
It really is quite odd to think that art by Picasso, Lichtenstein and Warhol, together with the works of many other artists in many different media, were all displayed in the Berkeley’s basement!