Manfred Heiting Library

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Manfred Heiting’s lifelong passion for photography and photobooks began in the 1960s, when he met Ansel Adams while working as a young art director. The German designer and scholar built an encyclopaedic photobook library, which was devastated in 2018 by California wildfires that claimed 20,000 items in his Malibu home. The National Gallery of Art has now acquired more than 4,500 objects from Heiting’s library, from a Dutch Golden Age emblem book with hand-coloured illustrations to Aleksandr Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova’s 1935 “parachute” issue of the Soviet magazine USSR in Construction (pictured). Heiting tells The Art Newspaper that most of the important books in his collection survived the fire, because they had been stored in another residence in preparation for his “magnum opus”—a history of the printed image from Gutenberg to 1980.

Cy Twombly paintings and drawings

Menil Collection, Houston

Since 1995, a nine-room pavilion at the Menil Collection has housed the only permanent retrospective exhibition of Cy Twombly’s work, which he designed in collaboration with the architect Renzo Piano. To celebrate the gallery’s 30th anniversary this year, the Cy Twombly Foundation has promised the Menil two early paintings, Volubilis (1953, pictured) and Untitled (1954), along with 121 drawings ranging from 1954 to 2005. The pieces reflect essential themes in the artist’s practice, such as classical antiquity and eroticism, and his conviction that “the line is the feeling”. With works on paper spanning diverse media including watercolour, oil and collage, the gift also complements the Menil Drawing Institute’s mission to promote the study of drawing.

Jon A. Lindseth, Lewis Carroll Collection

Christ Church, Oxford

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson taught mathematics at Christ Church college in Oxford for years before dedicating himself to writing under the alias Lewis Carroll. His best-known work, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), originated in the stories he invented to entertain the daughters of the college dean, Henry Liddell. Now, a major collection of letters, manuscripts, books, illustrations and other Carroll materials has been donated to Christ Church by the American philanthropist, collector and scholar Jon A. Lindseth. Among thousands of items are early editions of the Alice books, an original drawing for Through the Looking-Glass (1871) and more than 100 photographs Carroll took of noted figures such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Highlights of the Lindseth collection are on display for the first time in the UK until 17 April.