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Cloth covered notebook with lined pages and printed cover titled ‘Students MSS Book’ filled with writing and a few small sketches in pencil and ink. Front and back endpapers are also filled with writing. The notes appear to have been taken from readings, not lecture notes, as they are in paragraph form and occasionally have page references. Some of the subjects include Wagner, Fetichism, Maeterlinck’s ‘Wisdom and destiny’, Edmund Gosse’s ‘Ibsen’, pictorial composition, Cubism, modern painting, Matisse, Monet, Gauguin, Renoir and many other artists.

Notebooks document Munn’s student life in New York City and at the Art Students League Summer School in Woodstock. She recorded her lecture notes, essays containing reviews and summaries of books read, notations regarding books of interest, sketches, anatomical drawings, copies of historical works of art, poems, and occasionally ephemera. Under the tutelage of her teachers at the Art Students League – Andrew Dasburg, Max Weber, A.S. Baylinson, Stanton Macdonald-Wright and Henry L. McFee, she embraced modernism and gained exposure to literary, artistic and musical influences of her day. The notebooks show her to be an avid reader with a keen interest in the intellectual life of her time and in the artistic expression of other cultures and epochs. There is a particular delight in pattern and an underlying search for explanation and order. On the front pastedown of Notebook No. 8 she wrote, “Perfect beauty is the expression of perfect order, balance, harmony, rhythm. Beauty is a supreme instance of order intuitively felt, instinctively appreciated”. The notebooks are undated, with the exception of No. 5.

Fonds consists of nine notebooks kept by Kathleen Munn as a student at the Art Student’s League in New York City and at the Summer program in Woodstock, NY. The books contain a meticulous record of her exposure to ideas about artistic theory, philosophy and art history. Undated drawings, prints and unbound notes are also included, and a group of ‘arts-and-crafts’ inspired decorative designs. The fonds contains more than 1800 pencil drawings executed as studies for her mature work on the subject of the Christian Passion. Photographs of eight of these completed drawings are included. Fonds is comprised of the following series: 1. Notebooks 2. Life drawings and studies 3. Studies for ‘The Passion’