Twice a Year Press. Circulars of other publications, incl. Stieglitz memorial portfolio, 1940-1947

From May 24 to Sept. 15, 1968, the Philadephia Museum of Art exhibited works from Dorothy Norman's art collection. The exhibition honored Norman's help in establishing the Alfred Stieglitz Center at the Museum and for her initial gift of more than 500 photographs by Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, Minor White, and other 20th-century photographers. Thirty-six black and white installation photographs document the exhibition, displaying Norman's collection of photographs, paintings, prints and sculpture. There is a small amount of correspondence pertaining to this exhibition as well as to one in London to which Norman was a lender.

Norman's own publishing venture is also documented here, with circulars and other ephemera for "Twice A Year: A Semi-Annual Journal of Literature, the Arts and Civil Liberties." The journal grew out of Norman's evolving philosophy. When interviewed in 1979, Norman recalled that during the late 1920s, she felt artists were not interested enough in civil liberties and the threat of censorship. Conversely she did not feel lawyers and other workers in civil liberties fully appreciated the arts. By the following decade, Norman also recognized her distrust of any dogmas or "isms," and that the battles for freedom could be fought differently yet with similar goals. "Twice a Year," which ran from 1938 to 1948, served as Norman's attempt to reconcile these discrepancies. Both the circulars and out-of-print list cite the contributing writers whose articles underscored the mission of the journal. Contributors included Roger Baldwin, Randolph Bourne, Franz Kafka, Anais Nin, Alfred Stieglitz, Louis Sullivan, George Bernard Shaw and Norman. The topics addressed included war, fascism, civil liberties, poetry, architecture, Hollywood, children's literature, and other writings of art. Other circulars pertain to the special publications also produced by Twice a Year Press. Among these titles are "Love Possessed Juana," an anti-fascist play by Angna Enters, "A Franz Kafka Miscellany," and the "Stieglitz Memorial Portfolio," which included reproductions of 18 photographs by Stieglitz and a number of tributes.

Also in this series is miscellaneous material pertaining to India, an interest Norman pursued in the 1950s, some photographs in which the photographer or subject are unknown and newspaper clippings.