Goddess, Heroine, Beast: Anna Hyatt Huntington's New York Sculpture, 1902-1936 Goddess, Heroine, Beast: Anna Hyatt Huntington's New York Sculpture, 1902-1936 Multiple Occupancy Common Love, Aesthetics of Becoming Social Forces Visualized: Photography and Scientific Charity, 1900-1920 Edward Koren: The Capricious Line Pictures for Books: Photographs by Thomas Roma Modernism and Iraq The New Acropolis Museum Treasures Rediscovered: Chinese Stone Sculpture from the Sackler Collections at Columbia University Revolutions: A Century of Makonde Masquerade in Mozambique Robert Moses and the Modern City: The Transformation of New York Architecture in Print: Design and Debate in the Soviet Union 1919–1935, Selections from the Collection of Stephen Garmey Guide to Phlamoudhi "Please, teach me..." Rainer Ganahl and the Politics of Learning Restoring Byzantium: The Kariye Camii in Istanbul & the Byzantine Institute Restoration The Troubled Search: The Work of Max Abramovitz Moscow: City, Spectacle, Capital of Photography Reflection: Seven Years in Print—The LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies Jean Fautrier, 1898–1964 Paris as Gameboard: Man Ray's Atgets Arte Povera: Selections from the Sonnabend Collection Architect of Dreams: The Theatrical Vision of Joseph Urban Percival Goodman: Architect, Planner, Teacher, Painter Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts—Events, Objects, Documents Brushed Voices: Calligraphy in Contemporary China Mastering McKim's Plan: Columbia's First Century on Morningside Heights Robert Motherwell on Paper Apostles in England: Sir James Thornhill and the Legacy of Raphael's Tapestry Cartoons The Old World Builds the New: The Guastavino Company and the Technology of the Catalan Vault, 1885–1962 The Post-Pre-Raphaelite Print: Etching, Illustration, Reproductive Engraving, & Photography in England in and around the 1860s Unfaded Pageant: Edwin Austin Abbey's Shakespearean Subjects Robert Smithson Unearthed: Drawings, Collages, Writings Victorian Pleasures: American Board and Table Games of the Nineteenth Century from the Liman Collection Impossible Picturesqueness Sexual Difference: Both Sides of the Camera
Victorian Pleasures: American Board and Table Games of the Nineteenth Century from the Liman Collection

Victorian Pleasures
American Board and Table Games of the Nineteenth Century from the Liman Collection

Marisa Kayyem and Paul Sternberger
Wallach Art Gallery, 1991
11 1/4 x 8 1/2", 80 pp., 15 b&w illus.
Paper
$20

The Liman Board Game Collection is about play. It is also about meaning. The games in this fascinating collection are doubly profound aesthetically. They are beautiful to look at and also involve the beauty of conceptual strategies. Often exquisitely lithographed, the nineteenth century boxed board game, when emancipated from the intense downward stare of the board-player and hung on the wall assumes a picture-like presence.

The games enter into every aspect of life, from coping to competing to transcending, offering an alternative existence in ways that are always entertaining and often didactically enlightening, not only for their original players, but for us, their cultural heirs.

The board games in this collection are implicated in contemporary attitudes to religion, morality, success, wealth, power, consumption of goods, travel, technology, history, geography, literature, science, education, sports, the spiritual and occult, and even matters of gender and race. The board games offer us at once our earlier social and cultural history, and an awareness of their continuing evolution in our own time.