At Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx, from the mid-19th century through much
of the 20th, death inspired a creative outpouring of remarkable artistry,
variety and even surprise: for example, an urn by the sculptor Alexander
Archipenko and a landscaped monument by Sir Edwin Landseer Lutyens, the
planner of New Delhi.
The record of this work ? blueprints, booklets, drawings, ledgers,
letters, maps, photographs, plans, receipts, sketches and trade catalogs ?
is so illuminating and important that Woodlawn?s trustees formally donated
the cemetery archives last month to the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts
Library at Columbia University.
The archives amount to the largest single accession Avery has made in its
116 years, said Gerald Beasley, the library?s director. In all, they run
to 800 linear feet, longer even than College Walk, which bisects the
Morningside Heights campus.
?There is so much to be found in the files,? said Susan Olsen, the
executive director of Friends of the Woodlawn Cemetery. ?For the
biographies of all the people who are buried at Woodlawn, all the last
chapters will have to be rewritten now.?
....
Perhaps the most astonishing item to jump from the files so far is the
drawing, signed by Archipenko in 1946, for a memorial for the art
collector Alfred Romney. The centerpiece is a four-legged bronze urn, not
quite three feet tall, that could be construed as an hourglass. Or as a
precursor to the spacecraft in ?The Day the Earth Stood Still.?
Ms. Olsen cheerfully acknowledged her surprise when she discovered the
memorial?s distinguished artistic provenance.
?I?ve walked by this a million times,? she said. ?We called it the
?Mongolian beef pot? until we opened the file and found out it was by
Archipenko.?
cont'd....
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/16/arts/design/16dunl.html?_r=1&oref=slogin