A Death in the Family

My elation over hitting a rare trifecta in the Arts section of The Sunday New York Times, that is, actually reading all three of the lead articles -- Clint, I. M. and Kate/Leo -- was short lived. As happens with ever-increasing frequency, an Obituary squelched my elation, making my world a little bit smaller.

Mildred Constantine died at age 95. Times Go-To Guy Steven Heller provided the details:

"Ms. Constantine ... was associate curator and ultimately curatorial consultant in the Modern's architecture and design department from 1943 through 1970, many of those years under Philip Johnson, the department's founder. She was largely responsible for popularizing ignored or difficult-to-categorize collections, or what she called "fugitive material."

I have made a career of rounding up this "fugitive material," and although I never had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Constantine, I felt a kinship with her from her years of curating and chronicling the Modern Movement. Her 1968 catalog coauthored with Alan Fern, WORD AND IMAGE. POSTERS FROM THE COLLECTION OF THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART, as well as 1974s encore volume REVOLUTIONARY SOVIET FILM POSTERS are both books that have never strayed far from my reference shelf.



Heller again, quoted without comment:

"Ms. Constantine also developed what she called the Ephemera Collection, building upon the graphic materials -- from letterheads to business cards -- originally collected by the German typographer Jan Tschichold. Furthermore, she savored "wooing" objects away from their collectors."

Her collaborator Alan Fern, curator emeritus of the National Portrait Gallery, said "She was always on the prowl for untapped cultural artifacts, -- an advocate of modern anything on the cutting edge." Mr. Fern's sentiment reminds me of two of my favorite quotes from the Modern Canon: "Catalogues, posters, advedrtisements of all sorts ... believe me, they contain the poetry of our epoch." -- Guillaume Apolinaire, 1912 and "Modernism is not a style, it is an attitude." -- Marcel Breuer.



A quick review of my shelves found Ms. Constantine writing about Latin American Posters in a 1941 edition of A-D, profiling George Nelson and Associates for GRAPHIS in 1953, and providing the preface to Ladislav Sutnar's VISUAL DESIGN IN ACTION.

In VISUAL DESIGN IN ACTION, Mildred Constantine wrote:

"There is a force and meaningful consistency in Sutnar's entire body of work, which permits him to express himself with a rich diversity in exhibition design and the broad variations of graphic design. Sutnar has the assured stature of the integrated designer."

Substitute Curator for Designer in that last sentence and you have an excellent description of Ms. Constantine. Her advocacy of the Modern and her lifelong pursuit of the elusive fugitive material made her feel like family to me. She will be missed.