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ELEANOR REBEHL : 1939 ORIGINAL ECLECTIC AND FASCINATING SCRAPBOOK OF AN ARTISTIC AND POETIC YOUNG WOMAN'S ROAD TRIP ACROSS THE UNITED STATES TO THE FAMOUS NEW YORK WORLD’S FAIR

Folio - over 12" - 15" tall. On offer is the extraordinary scrapbook and journal of Eleanor Rebehl, a young woman who travels from Portland, Oregon to New York City for 1939 World’s Fair. The scrapbook contains many black and white photographs taken with skill, postcards and maps from across the United States, amateur, impressionistic drawings by Eleanor herself, and detailed accounts of her activities and thoughts throughout this incredible trip. The scrapbook is entitled, “Summer 1939” and is subdivided into “Bicycle and boat trip with Beepske - 4th July, week” and “To New York and World’s Fair motoring with Mother & Dad, month of Aug., + last week July.” Eleanor is obviously very deeply in love with art, as each city her family stops in is accompanied by a trip to the local art museum or gallery. There are pages of description of artists and their artworks, accompanied by Eleanor’s flowery prose in approval or dislike. She also seems to be quite fond of education, as she speaks at length of the “Cathedral of Learning” in Pittsburgh and also includes a number of education related items in the scrapbook. This first section of a bicycle trip with her friend “Beepske” is only six pages long. It contains a number of photographs, each one with a small description under it (e.g. “4th July,” “Dismantling our cabin,” “Leaving Fenton’s,” “Finis - of a perfect trip”). It also contains a brief description of the whole trip: “Boat - Portland - Astoria at night. Cycle - Astoria - Seaside in rain. After 12 mi., got a ride in a trailer full of crabs. Stayed in seaside with Mrs. Fenton first nigth, and in a cabin for 4 days after. Came home in sunshine, but first cycled the full 25 mi. To the Astoria boat. The “New York Trip” section takes up the rest of the scrapbook. The first page of the book is the poem “The Desolate Field” by William Carlos Williams, written out in Eleanor’s cursive handwriting. Above the poem is a drawing by Eleanor. Eleanor is very poetic in her descriptions of sights seen and places travelled. She writes often in metaphor and simile and is very fond of poetic exasperations. “Phoebus! Lost is the sun”. The first day Eleanor and her parents travel from Portland to Boise, Idaho. She writes: “By afternoon, passed in hot sun though fields of shining wheat, with pale, dry tumbleweed rolling over it & the stubble of fields a hard hot wind spiraled into trails of dust pink everywhere.” The second day they go on to Kemmerer, Wyoming. Describing Wyoming she writes, “and now, mid-afternoon, we’ve ridden for miles and miles over great sand-dunes covered with sage. On they go to Nebraska and then to Iowa. “Our evening in Iowa was an exciting one. All day I’d seen translucent, tufted rose clouds, dappled gray, in the distance, which looked as if they might hold some strange vision.” “A cup flew from the window and shattered on the floor. With the diminishing of the storm, sleep - vision!” From Iowa they go onto Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, West Virginia, and on the 7th day out of Portland, they come to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Eleanor takes a number of photographs of the countryside, which she eventually pastes into the scrapbook. There are also a number of drawings, both full page sized and doodle sized of her surroundings. Eleanor takes particular delight in Pittsburgh, visiting the Carnegie Museum and the Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh. At the Carnegie Museum, Eleanor notes the Japanese artists she sees and comments on each one: “Hokusai - crude” “Hiroshige - personality-color-sprightly.” The Cathedral of Learning is a “place for education, built with the beauty of a Gothic cathedral.” A large, 23 page book about the “Classrooms in the Cathedral of Learning” is included after this section. From Pittsburgh, the family moves onto Philadelphia. Eleanor visits the Philadelphia Museum where she sees paintings by Duchamp, Renoir, Picasso, Poussin, Lipchitz (“I love his work”), Chirico, Dufy, “oh, everybody! And i had 20 minutes to see all these wonders and the intricacies of the period rooms in the museum.” Finally, they reach New York City. This section begins with four drawings by Eleanor, one of “a N.Y. skyline draw from the ‘Boat to Statue of Liberty’” and three “From Empire Bldg.” She writes, “Today we went under the Hudson River, through the large white-tiled tunnel, and arrived in N. York. Stopped at Wall Street for the first sensation of looking up a sky-scraper - a dizziness almost comparable to looking down a great distance.” The family soon starts sightseeing, going to the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller center, the Empire State Building. Many pages are taken up by Eleanor’s observations of artists and their artworks in the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum. There are pages of photographs included as well. A number of photographs are described with just the word, “Getto.” They are photographs of New York City’s lower east side, at the time a working class and impoverished section of Manhattan. There are also photographs of Eleanor riding the subway and sightseeing around Greenwich village. In NYC, Eleanor seems to depart from her parents, and stays with her friends Ede, Freddie, and Dot in their apartment in Greenwich Village. There are a couple of pages describing the major events Eleanor participates in during her week in the city, including “shopping all over N.Y.,’ visiting the various art museums, seeing Times Square, and on the day before she leaves, seeing the World’s Fair. Eleanor’s description of the World’s Fair focuses mainly on the architectural and artistic elements of the fair. She describes the W.P.A., Sciences, and Beachmont Buildings, the “Little Theater” playing documentary films, and the “Masterpieces of Art Gallery.” Here writes more about artists such as Hieronymus Bosch and El Greco. Eleanor also describes the main World’s Fair Fountain, the various attractions around the fair, the fashion of the people seen, and the fireworks display she sees at the end of the night. From NYC, Eleanor takes a circuitous route back to Portland by herself. First she travels to Philadelphia on a Greyhound bus by herself. In Philadelphia, she meets back up with her parents and they go on to Niagara Falls, then into Canada. “Besides finding this a land of plenty, we find the people most courteous. Daddy just had the generator or something in the car fixed by a garage man, and one of the assistants, unasked, brought me a cool drink of water and suggested I sit in a comfortable chair in his office. So here we are reading the Toronto “Globe and Mail.” From Niagara they go onto Detroit. Of course, Eleanor stops at the Detroit Museum of Art and speaks highly of artist Diego Rivera. In Detroit they also visit the Edison Institute and the Ford Motor Plant. A large map of the Ford Motor Plant and a smaller postcard of the “Edison Institute Museum and Village” are included in the book. From Detroit they move onto Chicago, where Eleanor speaks pages upon pages about artists she sees in the Chicago Institute of Art. From Chicago they go to Milwaukee, then Minneapolis, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The last entry in the scrapbook is Eleanor’s description of going through Yellowstone National Park. “There was a bubbling hot ‘mud volcano’, slushing with grayness and steaming with odors of sulphur. Within a few nods bubbled the ‘Dragon’s Head Volcanoes.’ It was a 5ft opening on the side of a cliff, and it kept saying ‘gullup-goo’ - and every time it uttered a secondonardy, hollow ‘gooo’ it sprayed from its mouth hot white water of sulphur.’ Also contained in this extraordinary scrapbook are over 25 loose photographs of the trip (undated and unlabelled) and a number of postcards from places such as Minnehaha Falls, Minnesota; Gettysburg, Pennsylvania; and Mukwonago, Wisconsin. There is also a small book of “Certified Art Prints” with their accompanying negative slides. Finally, a large letterman patch in the shape of the letter “B” and made out of felt is included loose in the scrapbook as well.. Manuscript. Book Condition: Good

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