The Newark Museum opened to the public 100 years ago. In celebration they have mounted an exhibition that presents the institution as a place for discovery, not only of art, but also music. People and events are given the same weight as past exhibitions – all working to advance the Museum’s mission of welcoming people on to the campus and delighting them with innovative exhibitions and programing. Often, museums will celebrate an anniversary through key figures of the administration and highlights from the collection. Newark’s approach is refreshing in honoring the full organism. On view until April, 2010, so no rush. But, do try and get to Newark, the museum is an easily missed gem.

In 1892, photographer Paul Martin took a trip to Yarmouth. There on the Norfolk coast he set up his camera, disguising it as a leather box, and took some remarkable candid photographs of fellow holiday makers. Martin’s photographs make up a new show at the V&A’s Museum of Childhood, Victorians at the Seaside: Photographs by Paul Martin. The work opens to the public on April 20, 2009 and runs to July 24, 2009.

V&A Museum of Childhood, Cambridge Heath Road, London, E2.

John Robb’s latest book, The North Will Raise Again: Manchester Music City 1978-2008, covers the full scope of the Yorkshire city’s music scene over a thirty year period. Robb hits punk and Madchester, and investigates the current scenes. (via Retro to Go).

Michael Kimmelman’s review of the Le Corbusier exhibition stop in London (from today’s NYT) focuses on Britain’s admiration for an architect that never produced a building on its soil. Visitation and interest come against periods of time where the brutalist, concrete heavy, look of the modernist had come into question and viewed unpopular in London. Well worth the read.

Le Courbusier – The Art of Architecture is open to May 24, 2009.

Everyone loves a good historical mystery (especially those in the Antiques trade). The Bee has a short article on the story of Salem, MA cabinet maker Nathaniel Gould. Working from a single signed example, Kemble Widmer has studied Gould for 20 years. His research is indicative of the time, effort, and passion required to unveil the facts of early Americana.

Some of Gould’s work remains on view at the Massachusetts Historical Society, 1154 Boylston St., Boston, through to the end of April.

Examples and details follow.

Throughout the Cold War, the creation and reception of art in Germany was inseparably linked to divided political realities. Artists in East and West Germany redeployed the traditions of abstraction and realism in new national and international contexts, creating a wide range of powerful artworks, often responding to popular culture and technologies of reproduction.

This substantial and profusely illustrated book, with sixteen important essays by major art historians and cultural critics, is the first comprehensive look at the full extent of postwar German art. It includes work by Georg Baselitz, Willi Baumeister, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Hanne Darboven, Hermann Glöckner, Hannah Höch, Jörg Immendorf, Anselm Kiefer, Blinky Palermo, A. R. Penck, Gerhard Richter, Rosemarie Trockel, Werner Tübke, Wolf Vostell, and many others.

Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures is the catalogue for a groundbreaking international exhibition that reveals for the first time the contribution of both Germanys to the development of contemporary art.

Authored by Stephanie Barron, senior curator of contemporary art at LACMA, Art of Two Germanys is available from Harry N. Abrams.

On April 14, 1865, President and Mrs. Lincoln attended a play at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C. As the Lincolns watched the play, actor John Wilkes Booth entered their private box and shot the president in the back of the head. This Currier & Ives print depicts the event.

The above print and many other fine objects make up Lincoln Treasures an exhibition at the Chicago History Museum. Celebrating the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth, the Museum tells through its collections the story of Abe’s rise, his family life and his lasting legacy. Through August 16, 2009.

Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark, Chicago, IL.

Realizing the centuries-old dream of a passage to India, the building of the Panama Canal was an engineering feat of colossal dimensions, a construction site filled not only with mud and water but with interpretations, meanings, and social visions. Alexander Missal’s Seaway to the Future unfolds a cultural history of the Panama Canal project, revealed in the texts and images of the era’s policymakers and commentators. Observing its creation, journalists, travel writers, and officials interpreted the Canal and its environs as a perfect society under an efficient, authoritarian management featuring innovations in technology, work, health, and consumption. For their middle-class audience in the United States, the writers depicted a foreign yet familiar place, a showcase for the future—images reinforced in the exhibits of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition that celebrated the Canal’s completion. Through these depictions, the building of the Panama Canal became a powerful symbol in a broader search for order as Americans looked to the modern age with both anxiety and anticipation.

Seaway to the Future: American Social Visions and the Construction of the Panama Canal is out from University of Wisconsin Press. Missal is a Ph. D is Anglo-American History from the University of Cologne.

Available now from Amazon.

Harbor & Home: Furniture of Southeastern Massachusetts, 1710-1850 is a landmark study of the regions furniture and decorative arts. Essays from leading specialists Jack O’Brien, Gary Sullivan and Derin Bray set the scene and introduce major stylistic trends and makers. Brock Jobe, Professor of American Decorative Arts at the Winterthur Program in Early American Culture, spearheaded the project and offers his wisdom throughout.

Pre-order at Amazon.

Brooklyn’s City Reliquary hosts Over Spilt Milk: The Fight For Fair Price and Fair Profit in Depression Era New York. Through pamphlets, broadsides and containers, the exhibition (put on by the New York Food Museum) tells the story of the Consumer-Farmer Milk Cooperative. More info here. (via NotCot).

The City Reliquary is located at 370 Metropolitan Avenue.

More ephemera from the exhibition follows.