THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD ART LIBRARY-A PERSONAL VIEW Rodney Palmer, March 2006 Initial idea and

early development: The idea of the World Art Library was conceived in the period immediately after 1992 when the School of World Art Studies was founded. It was soon apparent that the School, for all the ambition of its name, knew little about how art was presented in museums, written about in books or taught in institutions in the many other countries of the world. In order to remedy this defect John Onians applied for and was awarded a grant of 90,000 from the Getty Grant Program which allowed him to set up the World Art Research Programme. One element of the funding was designed to support a Fellow charged with creating a collection of publications documenting as far as possible the variety of interest in and knowledge of art around the globe. Originally called the Representative Library of World Art, it later became the World Art Library. The first Fellow/Librarian was Dominic Marner, appointed for two years. Dominic at first tried to persuade organizations worldwide to contribute to the fledgling library by writing to them, but when this yielded little result he bought a round-the-world air ticket with a view to collecting materials in person. This he did very effectively, bringing materials back from many places, including North America, Australasia, the United Arab Emirates and South Africa. This collection was then enriched by participants in another project organised by John Onians and funded by a new grant from the Getty Grant Program. This was the Summer Insititute in World Art Studies, held in the School in 2000 and ably administered by Lauren Golden. Coming from twenty different countries, the participants were invited to bring with them to Norwich materials evidencing the resources, activities and priorities of their home institutions. The invitation was responded to with alacrity by colleagues from Eastern Europe (eg by Levon Chookaszian from Armenia, Elisavetta Moussakova from Bulgaria, Reet Verblane from Estonia, Ruta Kaminska from Latvia, Pawe Leswkovicz from Poland, Mattei Craciun and Florin Draovean from Romania, and by Anna Mainicheva from Russia) and from other geographical areas (for instance by Laura Malosetti Costa from Argentina). The materials they generously brought with them are now in the Library. It was, however, to be under the auspices of another activity supported by the original Getty grant, the sponsorship of three-month World Art Fellowships for scholars and artists working on the art of more than one continent, that I came to Norwich at this time, joining other World Art Fellows, such as Raminder Kaur, an expert in the politics of Hindu performance arts, who was working on the Indian diaspora in Britain. This coincidence had significant consequences both for me and the Library. At the end of the summer, John was able to calculate that sufficient funds remained from the original grant to finance a further fellowship in the first seven months of 2001, to develop the World Art Library by means of correspondence and a round-the-world journey. Round-the-world mission, 2001: In January 2001, John and I drafted the brochure that remains the only published prospectus for the World Art Library. A thousand of these were printed together with several hundred visiting cards, the latter suggested by Dominic Marner. Financial

considerations favoured a relatively short this is equatorial and northern hemisphere rather than antipodean circuit of the globe, visiting countries in the Americas, Asia and Europe. The Star Alliance ticket allowed for internal flights within Brazil; and then onto: Bogot; Mexico City; Los Angeles; Osaka; Manila; Bangkok; New Delhi; Copenhagen. Of the destinations I was to visit only Japan and the Philippines were to be absolutely new to me. I chose my itinerary as World Art Librarian partly so that it would take me back to places I had already been: I hoped relative familiarity with the mores of most of the places I visited would maximise my efficiency. The itinerary fixed, contact was made with people in London and abroad who might be able to help prepare the way for a fruitful visit: for instance Alma Luca of the Colombian Embassy at Hans Crescent in London who herself gave the library a colourful guide to Colombia. Brazil In Brazil, there was no need to visit Sao Paolo since John Onians had already done so and the catalogues of the National Museums were already in the World Art Library. I arrived at Rio de Janeiro and had only 24 hours there, from Saturday until Sunday lunchtime. That sunny Saturday afternoon in Rio, a quick visit to the Museu de Arte Moderna and Museu Historico Nacional were rewarded with publications relating to exhibitions on subjects ranging from the encounters made along the trade routes to the Indies, to the work of Ana Maria Pacheco; the Museu de Folclore later sent on a series of their catalogues on visual, musical and ethnographic cultures. I then crammed onto the ferry full of Brasilieros over the water to the futuristic Museu de Arte Contemporaneo (MAC) on Niteroi peninsula. With John Onians encouragement, Brazil also provided an opportunity to do some research towards an essay, published in the interim on the worldwide reception of Andrea Pozzos Perspective for Painters and Architects (Rome 1693-1700), including in Rio, where on the Sunday morning I visited the church of So Francisco da Penitncia. A stay in Salvador provided the opportunity to admire Jos Joaquim da Rochas Pozzo-inspired ceiling painting at the Conceio da Praia. This subplot, the World Art Librarians selfeducation in his area of historical specialization, but on a geographic canvass of a breadth that would have been inconceivable without John Onians imaginative dispensation of Getty funds was to develop a week later in the famously beautiful colonial mining city Ouro Preto (black gold), and a bus journey on from Ouro Preto in the arguably even prettier Mariana, where Luis Armando, Professor of Art History was full of insights about the Brazilian baroque. In Baha, I stayed on the island of Itapatica, the island in front of Salvador itself, with Stefano Passoni and Roberta Argento, who ran a hostel for deprived Bahian children, funded by my friend from Rome and south west London in the 1990s, Alessia Bulgari. Partly due to the fact that the lanchas over to town took nearly an hour, and partly due to my limited Portuguese, in Bahia I spent quite a lot of time and energy collecting a relatively small amount of materials, bar a generous selection of catalogues and periodicals from the Museu Carlos Costa Pinto, enabled by the Director, Mercedes Rosa. The relative paucity of donations acquired elsewhere in Salvador would prove to be the exception rather than the rule. A massive boost to the momentum of the mission to collect Brazilian materials

occurred in Brasilia. Here things were greatly helped by the kindness and hospitality of Sarah Gillett, then Number Two at the British Embassy. Sarah met me at the airport with an unprecedented and as yet unrepeated typed itinerary for the visit of the World Art Librarian, resembling those for visiting dignitaries that I had glimpsed as a diplomatic child. Thanks to Sarah, the visit was empowered by the support of Brazilian luminaries including the Secretary for Patrimony, Museums and Plastic Arts, Octvio Elisio Alves de Brito, and the Director for the Promotion of Brazils Institute of Historic and Artistic Patrimony (IPHAN), Srgio Pereira de Souza Lima, thanks to whom the Library is very strong in IPHAN books and has a long run of its journal, the Revista do Patrimnio Historico e Artstico Nacional. Sarah and I were also allowed unusual and privileged access to the Banco do Brasils collection of modern art, the guide to which is in the World Art Library. Sarah has continued to be unstinting in her support of the World Art Library, to which, in her role as Consul General in Montreal, she donated Canadian materials. Sarah herself writes of the Library: The World Art Library is an inspiring 21st century project. In our globalised world appreciating the art of different cultures will become increasingly important. The World Art Library is such a good idea that I am amazed it wasn't launched during the Renaissance. It gave me great pleasure to be associated with it in a very small way through helping with a Brazilian dimension. Boa sorte. To return to the journey of early 2001, the next stop after Brasilia was to be Belo Horizonte, capital of the Minas Gerais region. The plane was to stop at smaller provincial centre Goinia. On the basis that wherever a plane touched down, I would alight if possible, between Brasilia and Belo Horizonte I spent twenty-four hours in Goinia. Goinia exemplifies Onians view, which I came to share, that wherever one finds oneself feels like the centre of the world: because everywhere is to some extent a centre of cultural gravity. Certainly, low expectations of Goinia were much exceeded by the vibrant provincial city, which due to its central location had aspirations to be the capital in the nineteenth century, as is demonstrated by the atmospheric Museo Ludovico. Gionia is also distinguished by its galleria abierta (open gallery) of murals on many of its taller buildings. These and some of the other undocumented artworks seen on the round-the-world trip can here be found in the photographic gallery. In Belo Horizonte, at the Universidad Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), set in Pampulha, the idealistic lake and park of which was modelled in the 1950s, I was welcomed very graciously by Maria Aida Arancibia, coordinator of international programs, and colleagues including Fabricio Jos Fernandinho organiser of the the UFMGs Festival de Inverno (winter festival), and especially well looked after by the charming maverick Paolo Valladares, then on secondment to UFMG from So Paolos Sun TV.

Colombia In Bogot, the Pinto family were exemplary hosts. Yolanda Pinto de Medina is mainly to thank for the Librarys collection, probably unrivalled outside Colombia, of Colombian art publications dating from around 2000. Colombia is one of the most culturally sophisticated nations in South America; the lively youthful atmosphere of the Luis Arang library in Bogot evidence of how passionately literate much of the Colombian population is. Highlights of the Librarys spectacular collection of holdings from Bogot include donations authorised by Mara Liliana Casasbuenas Gonzlez of the amazing Museo de Oro (Museum of Precolombian Gold), the Museo de Arte Colonial, Museo de Arte Religioso, Museo de Arquitectura Leopoldo Rother, Museo de Artes y Tradiciones Populares, Museo de Arte Moderno, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, and, thanks to Mara Claudia Romero Isaza, Director of the Instituto de Investigaciones Estticas at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, many syllabi and prospectuses, both loose and compressed onto a zip disk. Colombians were enthused by the possibility to reveal the visual aspect of their cultural richness to the outside world, so much so that thanks to the network of communication established by Alma Lucia, Yolanda Pinto and Jorge Orlando Melo, other cities and regions of Colombia are well represented without actually having been visited. These include Armero, Barranquilla, Cal, Norte del Santander and San Juan de Pasto. Above all without going to Medelln contact was made with the University of Antioquia in that great if troubled city, and Medelln is generously represented in the Library. On the subject of generosity, it would be hard to match that of Fernando Botero, who has donated his private collection of European and Latin American modernist masterpieces, and many of his own finest paintings to museums both in his native Medellin and in Bogot. On a weekend trip to the idyllic provincial town of Villa de Leyva, materials were collected from the Centro de Estudios Histricos and the Luis Alberto Acua Museum. Mexico: In Mexico City, Clara Bargellini at the Instituto de Investigaciones Estticas was welcoming; Karen Cordero Reiman, who was and remains energetically involved in the radical CURARE initiative of radical curating and criticism, engaged enthusiastically with the project of the World Art Library, in which a range of publications, including the journal CURARE itself, are generously represented. Karen also introduced me to Claudia Barron Aparicio, researcher at the Museo Nacional de Arte on Tacuba at the heart of Mexico City; across Tacuba (famously immortalised by Diego Rivera), the Museo Franz Mayer, which in a variety of ways shows sixteenth-century material culture to have been a worldwide affair, the head librarian Beatriz Macgregor Garca Moreno was most helpful. Since it is only a couple of hours bus journey away from Mexico City, it was feasible also to spend a couple of days in the colonial city of Puebla de los Angeles. Karen Corderos old friend Gonzalo Yanes, native of El Salvador, was a charismatic intermediary in Puebla, not only directing but personally accompanying me to most of the citys museums, other artistic institutions, and to the Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, where we were cheerfully helped by the young Englishman Mark McGrath.

Puebla is thus represented in the Library by numerous museum and university publications as well as by Gonzalos own accomplished local histories. Gonzalo drove us to the Universidad de las Amricas, Puebla, out of town in Cholula, where the decano Luisa Vila Pay enabled us to gather some syllabi. A particularly memorable response in Puebla was that of the Bolivian-born Mara Rene Baudoin Dvalos, who was friendly and generous in her role as subdirector of the Museo Poblano de Arte Virreinal (Pueblan Museum of Viceroyal Art), and moreover met me after work to give several copies of the colourful supplement on art and culture which she edits for the newspaper Sntesis. Reflecting in early 2006 on the marked enthusiasm of Colombians, and of Salvadorian and Bolivian migrs to Mexico I realise more than ever that further stages of the development of the Library might very profitably seek to reveal the artistic richness of smaller central and south American nations. Los Angeles I stopped over for two nights and a day in Los Angeles, which was under a torrential downpour for the duration of my stay. Here I stayed with David Kunzle, historian of twentieth century Latin American art and his charming wife, Marjorie, a yoga teacher. Marjorie extremely kindly drove me around sodden LA in her VW Golf. Joan Weinstein, whom I had met when she had visited UEA to see how the World Art project as a whole was unfolding, arranged for the Librarys still current free subscription to the important journal Conservation. Japan From Los Angeles, I took off in the morning on the long daylight flight to Osaka. Sitting next to a window on the right hand sight of the craft it was a memorable experience to watch the seemingly endless snowbound coastlines of Alaska and then Kamchatka go on and on and on. From arrival in Osaka airport, three days of hilarious novelty ensued in my stay in Kyoto. It was snowing in Kyoto, whereas almost everywhere else I had visited was somewhere between warm and hot, so I piled on every available layer of summer clothing. I must therefore have looked a sight as I walked, entranced but shivering under the Kyoto snow around Kyotos wonderful Buddhist temple complexes and museums, from which I gathered some quite entertaining pedagogical materials featuring the then ubiquitous Kitty. In the main, I gathered the ever surprising ephemera, and simply bought things for the Library, because of the language barrier in describing the World Art Librarys mission to Japanese colleagues. One notable exception was Motoichi Nakase, Administrator of the World Craft Council which then had its headquarters in Kyoto. John Onians and I are glad to have been able to showcase this underrated worldwide organisation in the culminating spread of his Atlas of World Art. The level of success of my stay in Kyoto was thoroughly and utterly transformed by being fortunate enough to meet the American expert in Japanese early modern art Melissa M. Rinne: in her capacity as curatorial assistant and website director in the Department of Information and Archives in the Kyoto National Museum, Melissa arranged for the World Art Library to receive all of the wonderful publications not only of the Kyoto National Museum, but also that of Nara, with which she was also affiliated. We are also very grateful to Asao Sarukawa for acknowledging the safe arrival of these publications, and thus maintaining the relationship with Kyoto and Nara.

Philippines From Kyoto, Thai airways flew over the idyllic looking southern archipelago of Japan down to Manila. Manila was one of the key destinations in the itinerary, and I was very lucky to stay with my genial cousin Adrian Harley, who represented Cathay Pacific there, and his funny wife Olivia. Almost inevitably the sharp drop in temperature felt in Kyoto led to a heavy cold that was exacerbated by the variations between tropical heat and air conditioning in Manila itself. Any resulting lugubriousness was more than compensated for by the marvellous networking opportunities opened up by Adrian, Olivia and their connections. Adrian and Olivias friend, Doris Magsaysay-ho, whom I visited together with Victoria Bautista in her familys Magsaysay shipping lines office, introduced me to Jaime C. Laya, chairman of more than one company in Manilas Makati business district and also of the Philippine National Commission for Culture and the Arts based at Luna Street in Manilas very small but equally atmospheric Intramuros (Within-the-walls) historical centre. Laya and his colleague Virgilio S. Almario were very generous in their own right and pointed me in the direction of their colleague on the National Commission, Gabriel S. Casal, also Director of Manilas National Museum and moreover on the governing board of SPAFA (South East Asian Project for Archaeology and Fine Arts), thus the latters representation both in the World Art Library and in the Atlas of World Art. Another key player in Manila was Florina H Capistrano-Baker, the thoroughly well-organised and charming Director of the Ayala Museum in Makati, who is very ably assisted there by Aileen T. Matic; Florina and Aileens colleague Maritoni Campa Ortigas of the Filipinas Heritage Library, housed at the Ayala Foundations, was no less generous. The journey out on the most heavily polluted urban highway I have ever witnessed, to the Pasig City outskirt, home to the Eugenio Lopoez memorial museum was richly rewarded by the assiduously kind and attentive welcome that Serafin D. Quiason gave on arrival there. Another very generous contact was Alice M. Esteves, in charge of the library at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in Pasay City, founded by Imelda Marcos due to which the World Art Library has historically fascinating publications celebrating Marcos patronage. A separate long road trip out, this time to Manilas greener satellite Quezon City, took me to Manila University: and the Manila University publications in the Library are largely thanks to Maricor E. Baytion, assistant director of the Ateneo de Manila University Press. As well as these institutional high flyers, the businessman and private publisher Randall M. Young invited me to take tea at his marble palace and donated copies of a couple of his most luxurious volumes to the Library. Thailand A shortish flight took me next to Bangkok, my three days in which began with a visit to British Council, where I was greeted by the irrepressibly giggly Mallila IamlaOr. Having assured me that she could not help, Mallila then opened a tall cupboard out of the top of which tumbled the pile of copies of Art in Thailand and Art4D journals now carefully preserved in the World Art Library. What is aught but as tis valued? In the main the value of our collection lies not in our particular will, but in the willingness of others to give to it. In Bangkok, my visit to the gilded pavilions and serene lawns of the National Museum was especially fortunate because smiled upon by

the Director, Somchai Na Nakhonphanom, thanks to whose largesse the Library holds three of the museums precious presentation volumes. Sod Daeng-id of the Office of Archaeology and National Museum was equally helpful. Elsewhere in Bangkok, at Silpakorn University I was greatly helped by Prof. Preecha Thaothong, Dean of the Faculty of Sculpture and Graphic Arts, Dr Narin Ruttanachan, head of the Art Theory Department in that Faculty, and by Ms Saismorn Surasang, Silpakorn Universitys Chief of Information and Public Affairs. At the nearby Sipla Bhirsri Memorial Museum, Chuleerat Somabutr generously donated catalogues of exhibitions at that museum. India: India for the second time felt oddly cosy (especially compared to the hilarious chaos of my first visit to see a marvellously bonkers hippy friend of Chilean extraction, Sitaram now living between Santiago and West London and still infamous after all these years in a Hindu ashram at Omkareshwar in 1999). People were surrounding the TV in the foyer of my cheap hotel in New Delhi to watch the final day of a test series between India and Australia, the last day of the Calcutta test in which thanks to the rising stars of VVS Laxman and Harbajan Singh, India were fighting back to save a draw after following on from a seemingly impossible position. That afternoon I was to meet Kulwant Rai Mittal, a contact made for me by Franois Quiviger of the Warburg Institute Library: Kulwant Rai, doyen of KK Agencies online store of Indian publications very kindly agreed to meet me. He turned up at exactly the appointed time, when with Harbajan at the crease India were only about 10 runs short of the incredible victory which I only gathered later that they attained. Kulwant took me through the relatively deserted streets of New Delhi (most of the populace was crammed around TVs and radios). If Kulwant Rai Mittal was in this respect in a minority, in another he was not unreasonably in a majority: unlike Latin American and East Asian colleagues he was reluctant to give anything for free. At his son Parmil Mittals academic bookshop in Old Delhi, where many treasured purchases such as D.P. Singhal, India and World Civilization were made, I learnt that the praxis of asking for donations would not wash in most places in India. Having made appointments for my return with Jyotindra Jain, then director of the Crafts Museum and Shobita Punja of From New Delhi (both addresses given to me by Mark Tully), I took the early morning train with a charming young Irishman named John Byrne to Jaipur and he accompanied me to the museum there, a dusty replica of the V&A in London. Energy the most exhausting aspect of the mission having been the carrying of huge piles of books and then packing, wrapping and sending large packages from post offices in Bogot, Mexico City, Manila and Bangkok - was by this point running short, so much so that to my abiding regret I had none left physically to get off the train as planned in Agra, and ended up directly in Varanasi. In Varanasi, I developed feverish symptoms and was bedbound much of the time, fortunately in the Hotel Ganjes View run by the very enlightened Shashanka Narain Singh, the programmes of whose Aspects of Benaras lecture series are in the Library. Thanks to Shashanka Narain, in the the Ganges view I was tended for my fever by an aryavedic doctor who taught me techniques of Hindi, specifically Shaivite meditation (I informed him that in Omkareshwar they had named me Shiva Das or slave of Shiva). It is agreeable and therapeutic to follow energy chakras up from the anus up the spine and to imagine oneself ejaculating from the crown of ones head. Thus cured, I made it in a bicycle rickshaw to Benares Hindu University where

some assembled faculty gave some of their prospecti, and the course book of the Universitys impressive MA course on Asian and western art, as well as publications on the Universitys excellent Bharat Kala Bharavan art museum. I was even able to walk down the banks of the Ganges to Jnana Pravh (River of Truth) cultural institute upstream of Benares itself, where the Director kindly gave me what was then the full series of its pure white bulletin from its inception in 2000. The truths that the Ganges knows are many and varied: of course I wanted invasively watched a Hindu cremation; when going native one evening and washing my undies on the ghats, I had my only frightening experience of the entire round-the-world trip, being chased by a knifewielding gang along the ghats. A short train journey took me to Allahabad, junction of the Ganges and Jamuna rivers and one of the sites of the quadriennial Kumbh Mela. I visited the best two museums in Allahabad: first the Nehru museum, a fine white town house set in a spacious garden and birthplace of Indias first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. The Allahabad museum, founded by Nehru in 1947, is now very dusty in the manner of so many subcontinental museums, but nonetheless boasts a fine collection of Hindu sculptures, the catalogues of which I keenly bought, a particularly fascinating and well-illustrated discussion of Indo Greek Sunga Art, published by the Allahabad Museum Society in 1991. The curatorial team of the Allahabad Museum also made available many copies of the Allahabad Museums Cti-Vtika journal of art, history, culture and literature. In Varanasi and Allahabad alike, I also acquired numerous oleographs of single Hindu deities, and scenes such as Saraswati the goddess of wisdom, music and the arts on a white lotus and playing a sitar, presiding over personifications of the rives Ganges (sitting on a crocodile) and Jamuna (sitting on a tortoise), and below them bathers at the holy junction of the rivers amid floating flowers and other offerings. I keenly bought these oleographs, in fact mainly printed in Mumbai (Bombay) and Calcutta, because they are the publications that for Hindus best document their visits to holy cities such as Varanasi and Allahabad. On return to New Delhi, Shobita Punja and and Rabindra Seth welcomed me with exemplary good manners at the impressive Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) in the leafy Lodhi Estate area of New Delhi. We are very grateful to them, and to the Director General of INTACH, O.P. Agrawal, for the many INTACH publications, including several of Agrawals own on the conservation of paintings on all sorts of surfaces, from walls to paper, which were mailed to the Library several months later. In the afternoon, as arranged in advance with Jyotindra Jain, I visited the Arts and Crafts Museum, and enjoyed spending time watching the painting, weaving and other activities going on there, I went to the opening of the Gold and the Clay exhibition, a collaboration between the Italian artist Nicola Strippoli Tarshito and Italian craftsmen and women. The most memorable phrase in Jyotindra Jains speech at the opening of this event described India and Italy as cultural superpowers. Undeniably their cultural histories qualify each country for such status: the more that each nation can achieve with such kudos in the direction of world harmony, peace and environmental responsibility, the better. The next day I went back to visit Jyotindra again: he gave me numerous publications relating to the Crafts Museum, of which the one about which he was most modest, his Other Masters. Five Contemporary Folk and Tribal Artists of India (1998) is the most fascinating.

Denmark The final stop on the round-the-world mission was Copenhagen; here my delightful Danish friend Leo Catana, met at the late Michael Evans Latin lessons at the Warburg, lent me his flat. Copenhagen was still pretty chilly in early April, so once more I layered up light clothing before stepping out to visit some of Denmarks museums. Danes are as liberal about dress as they are about everything else. In the splendid Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek Museum of antique and neoclassical sculpture, despite the fact that I felt and looked as though I was at the end of an intense round-theworld mission and had no appointment, the Head Curator of ancient sculpture agreed spontaneously to meet me. It transpired that Mette Moltesen knew and liked John Onians from having met him at a conference on classical art. A lighthearted chat, and generous offering of Glytothek publications put a spring in my step through Copenhagens glistening pavements to the Nationalmuseet where the press officer Lisbeth Armand was no less charming. On return to England, packages posted on the course of the round-the-world trip continued to flood in and I set about arranging them on shelves in the current arrangement. The Library opened for the inspection of UEA colleagues on 31 July, 2001. The World Art Library was immediately recognised by Amanda Geitner as being cute; and by the hard-to-please Cesare Poppi on seeing a whole set of publications from the Istituto italiano per gli studi filosofici, Naples, as a real intellectual resource. Also that summer I was given a one-year teaching position at Leicester. In addition to the contracted courses on the Italian Renaissance, I launched the very popular World Art Studies, which benefitted from Library materials: SIWAS reading materials, the Gettys Conservation (which the Library still gratefully receives, like so many other institutions gratis) and so on. In the summer of 2002, Onians was able to reckon that just under 2,000, equivalent to $3,000, of Getty monies remained, on condition that they were spent before the end of this calendar year, so I arranged an East African itinerary that would take me to an area then under-represented in the Library: East Africa. This was entirely new ground. The itinerary was to take me to Ethiopia and Tanzania, with brief stopovers in between in Uganda and Kenya. Having finished teaching three courses for the first time, but with no further paid employment in prospect, I left for East Africa exhausted. Ethiopia Having arrived in a state of exhaustion, and slept the morning in the welcoming Wutma hotel, any personal travails were immediately set in perspective, by the joy and elegance as well as the suffering, on the streets of Addis. In the afternoon I visited the National Museum, among the many treasures of which the defining one is the movingly tiny skeleton of Lucy, the earliest known hominid, whose white bones are laid out on a black surface under glass. The postcard is in the Library. I was very privileged to be able, through an introduction effected by my sister Juliets friend Alice Martin, sometimes BBC Africa correspondent, to go out to take tea and Christmas cake with Richard Pankhurst, grandson of the great suffragette Emmeline, in the gazebo of the garden of his suburban, mongrel-patrolled garden. In 1963, Pankhurst founded the very important Institute of Ethiopian Studies (IES), a singular library and rich museum housed in Haile

Saillassies former palace, on the site of what is now Addis Abeba Universitys main campus. The World Art Library is rich in books, conference reports, the Journal of Ethiopian Studies, the IES Bulletin edited by Birhanu Teferra (who kindly gave me of his time for which many thanks) and other IES publications. While there, I also bought for the Library the Ethiopian edition of David Phillipsons The Monuments of Aksum (Addis Abeba UP, in collaboration with the British Institute in Eastern Africa, 1997). Due to Ethiopias heroically independent spirit publishing culture there has a materially poor, if spiritually noble quality. My excursion by aeroplane to Bahir Dar, the spa town on Lake Tana, the source of the Blue Nile, and thence by boat to the orthodox island monasteries on Tana itself and then by bus up to Gonder, resulted in few publications (in which context surprisingly hard-won leaflets in World Art Library the Bahir Dar Tourist information center and Lake Tana Navigation organisation, and the Kibran Gabriel monastery are of great value). The Library also has publications, mainly bought from the Ethiopian Tourist Board, on Lalibela, Harar, and broader ethnographic topics such as costume and housing. Gonderine architecture and garden design are dynamic. They lead one from arched vista to arched vista and can therefore only be experienced at first hand. Gonderine pooled gardens adapt medieval Persian garden designs, and the semi-circular outdoor theatres there draw on ancient Greek prototypes. Ethiopian liturgical culture presents a cross-cultural nexus of ideas and rituals, among which: African temple design, Judaic tabernacles (the Geez tabot is very comparable to the Hebrew teba), Islamic worship (removal of shoes, insistence on headwear, and placing of forearm on the floors), and Indic incense and face paint, especially the third eye. While here is a marked Portuguese influence on Gonderine architecture, the pictorial art there embraces Egyptian, Greek and Italian prototypes; the iconography is sourced from all of the above, plus esoteric local saints, among Mohammed plays syncretic role. Uganda On my way through Kampala, I visited the barkcloth Kasubi tombs of the nineteenthccentury dynasty of Buganda kings, the guidebook to which, sponsored by the Canadian High commission, and with intriguing information the making of bark-cloth, is in the Library. In the market at downtown Kampala, I came across the Nnyanzi art studio, and Nuwa Wamala-Nnyanzi himself, Master of Batiks, generously gave a dossier of exhibition catalogues and other documents on his art. In Uganda, I was also able to buy People and Cultures of Uganda (Fountain Publishers, Kampala 1997). Kenya A brief one-day stopover in Nairobi gave time to visit the National Museum, and to see the intriguing display there of the Asian African Heritage, documented in the Library. I also picked up materials on coastal Tanzania : including a guide to the early settlement Jumba La Mtwana, near Mombasa in southern Kenya. I also took a taxi out to the offices of the main Kenyan publishing house of illustrated books on natural and cultural subjects, Camerapix, whose colourful guide to Tanzania I acquired for the Library and with a view to using it in the interim.

Tanzania Having flown over the snow-bound cone of Kilimanjaro, the aeroplane looped out over the Indian ocean to land in Dar es Salaam. The weather in Dar es Salaam was fantastically hot, and a shower was needed every time you walked into or out of the Lutheran guest house. In the port of Dar es Salaam, dhows skirt playfully around the huge cargo ships and tankers, rust buckets on coastal runs, and catamarans and ferries carrying passengers over to Zanzibar, that enliven the natural harbour. The National Museum gave the impression of being in transition between purposeful leaderships, but it was possible to see the intriguing displays of visual cultures from that of Kilwa, a Persian/Swahili trading outpost on the southern coast, to artefacts made by the Nwamwezi, Kwere and other inland tribes of the north. These are well-presented in the publications of the 1990s, studies on rock art and demographics in the National Museums of Tanzania, Occasional Papers series, and Introducing Tanzania through the National Museum of 1990. Alarmingly the picture in this work of one the medieval coral stone tombs at Kunduchi (20 km north of Dar) encrusted with blue-and-white porcelain as a status symbol, was out of date. Most, in fact in my experience all of the porcelain, seems to have been removed in the interim, as I discovered when I went to Kunduchi with my minder Bosn, a charming unemployed merchant seaman who befriended me outside the Lutheran guest house. To return to the National Museum, in the bookshop there was plenty of evidence of the best kind of post-colonial collaboration, for instance Enrico Castellis Zamani: Building up the Visual Archives of Tanzania, and published by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs for the National Museum of Tanzania. The contemporary art scene in Tanzania is very vibrant, and shows remarkable continuity with traditional culture, the sculptural aspect of which is evidenced by the excellent volume From Ritual to Modern Art: Tradition and Modernity in Tanzanian Sculpture, published in Dar es Salaam in 2001 with financial assistance from the Dutch Prince Claus Fund and the Goethe Institut. The sense of acceleration in the Tanzanian art scene around 2000 is exemplified by the rapidly expanding Art in Tanzania project, and its accompanying catalogues, directed by Yves Goscinny and published in Dar with the support of the Eurafrican Bank. Elias Jengo is a key player in Art in Tanzania both as participating artist and as author of the essay on the Visual Arts in Tanzania in Art in Tanzania 2000. When going out of town to Dar es Salaam University I was very fortunate to meet the larger-than-life and most charming Jengo in the Arts Faculty, in his role as Associate Professor where he made time for me as well as for his enthused students. Jengo also passed on working plans for an East African Biennale, the idea of Goscinny and himself, planned for Dar es Salaam. The potential for regional collaborations in East Africa, and Dar es Salaams leading part in it, is exemplified the Art in Politics: The first East African competition on political caricatures and cartoons, the catalogue of which, published by Friedrich Ebert Stiftung foundation in Dar es Salaam, and which I bought at the National Museum in Dar, is in the Library. At the other end of the chronological spectrum, Dar is also the hub of the East Africa Rock Art Association of which the Library also has working documents. It seemed a very good idea take the bus out of sweltering Dar up the coast to the ex-slavetrading port, Bagamoyo, on the wondrously beautiful coast of that part of the Indian ocean. On my first evening in Bagamoyo the full moon rose big and salmon red up over

the horizon like the setting sun in reverse. The documentation of Bagamoyos cultural heritage is post-colonial in a cosmopolitan sort of way. The main source of printed information remains the Catholic Mission (to which I bicycled along a roads of sand under mango trees whose soft sweet fruit fell around me, and I gratefully and messily consumed), as is represented in the Library by occasional papers by Father John Henschel on Arabian and Indian tombs and doorways, on slavery, as well as by Fritz Versteijnen on the Catholic Mission itself (the latter printed by A.K. Zuber and COD Saarbrcken). At one of the hotels of Bagamoyo, it was possible to buy Anna Areskough and Helena Perssons sophisticated and heartfelt work, In the heart of Bagamoyo: The decoding of a coastal town in Tanzania, published by the Lund Institute of Technology in Sweden. Finally, I took the ferry to Zanzibar, where as one might expect there is a much greater range of conventional touristic and other such publications on that city and islands many attractions. The defining cultural enterprise of Zanzibar, of which the Library has been given a run of publications by Hassan A Mitawi, whom I met in the tourist office, is what started out as the Zanzibar International Film Festival (ZIFF), which has grown into the Festival of Dhow Countries (of Africa, the Gulf, Asia, and Indian Ocean Islands). 2003-06 The World Art Library has continued to benefit from donations directly from museums abroad, and also from generous British-based travelers who have given publications acquired on their trips to the Library. Isabelle Onians has been particularly generous with donations of publications from Pakistan, Uzbekistan and other central Asia countries, as well as from Egypt. Over recent years, contacts abroad have sent materials to the Library: for example Juliet Barclay who until recently worked in the office of the official Historiador of Havana, sent a very useful package of ephemera on that that great centre of historical and contemporary Hispanic American culture. The extent of the World Art Librarys usefulness as teaching resource was realised in the 2003-4 academic year, when John Onians used it for MA teaching at UEA. EEMLAC grant In the summer of 2005, Rodney Palmer made a successful application to the East of England Museums and Libraries Archive Council (EEMLAC) for funding to support voluntary development of the World Art Library between October 2005 and March 2006. Progress has been made on the principal intention of securing the collection by accessioning, stamping and plating it. Through the kind mediation of Anna Collum and Vanessa Lacey (Vanessa Palmer as was), Martin Chester realized the design of the World Art Library rubber stamp free of charge. The most ambitious aspect of this phase of development was that Polly Kwong, Rodney Palmer, Lucy Barnard, Hana Bristow, Keiko Kawakami, Alexander Meleshchenko and Asao Sarukawa started to database the Library: a link will be made to the database from this webpage. Thanks to Polly Kwong, Keiko Kawakami, Asao Sarukawa and Alexander Meleshchenko, the nascent database has translated titles of Chinese, Japanese and Russian-language materials, and Hana Bristow is set to do the same for Czech and Slovakian publications. Rodney Palmer, May 2006

See Rodney Palmer and Thomas Frangenberg, eds, The Rise of the Image: Essays on the History of the Illustrated Art Book, Ashgate, London 2003, pp. 176-79 for the fruits of research completed in February 2001 on the reception of Pozzos design ideas in Brazil. John Onians ed., Atlas of World Art, Art Institutions Worldwide 2000 , Laurence King, London, pp. 316-17, maps many of the cities and institutions visited. .