A generous donation from Anonymous adds to our growing collection of material documenting the 1960s.

The Words of Ugo Betti. Innocence and the Process of Justification in the Late Plays…
Los Angeles: Immaculate Heart College Press, 1965

Ugo Betti (1892-1953) was an Italian judge and poet. He is considered by some to be the greatest Italian playwright since Pirandello. He wrote his first poems while a soldier in German captivity (1917-18). They were published as Il Re Pendieroso in 1922. After the success of his first play, La Padrona, he worked exclusively in theater, for which he wrote twenty-seven plays.

Illustrated with eight serigraphs by Sister Mary Corita (born Frances Elizabeth Kent) (1918-1986), a Roman Catholic nun and educator who worked with silkscreen —  incorporating scriptural quotation, excerpts from well-known authors such as e.e. cummings and Albert Camus, song lyrics, and grocery store signs into her art. Kent belonged to the order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. While teaching at Immaculate Heart College her students included John Cage and Alfred Hitchcock. Her work, focused on the themes of love and peace, were popular during the social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. One of her best known works is “Love Your Brother,” a 1969 piece that features photographs of Martin Luther King overlaid with words in her handwritings. She is famous for her 1985 “Love” stamp.

Sister Mary said, “I really love the look of letters – the letters themselves become a kind of subject matter even apart from their meaning – like apples or oranges are for artists.”

Printed on Curtis all-rag paper at the Plantin Press, Los Angeles. Edition of two hundred and seventy-five copies.

The Plantin Press, a small private press, was begun in 1931 by Saul and Lilian Marks. Saul Marks learned the printing trade in Poland during WWI. He emigrated to the United States in 1921, where he met and married Lilian Simon. The Marks’ moved to Los Angeles in 1930 and set up shop in the midst of the Great Depression. Lilian Marks continued the press after Saul died in 1974, until she sold the business in 1985.

The donation included a catalog accompanying the exhibition, “Someday is Now: The Art of Corita Kent,” curated by Ian Berry and Michael Duncan, which traveled to museums in New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania and California between 2013 and 2015.

Someday is Now: the Art of Corita Kent
The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College
DelMonico Books, Prestel: Munich, London, New York, 2013