The album acts as a guest sign-in book, scrapbook and journal of the Liebman family’s upstate life and travels. Aline Meyer Liebman was a painter and photographer, as well as an important collector and patron of the arts. Significantly, she was an early supporter and founding member of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). She and her husband, industrialist Charles J. Liebman, were often found in the company of artists such as Alfred Stieglitz, Marsden Harley, Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Edward Weston, Baron de Meyer, and many others.

The book begins with the most significant inscriptions and photographs, those of Diego Rivera (1885-1957) and Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). Their warm inscriptions are accompanied by a large sketch by Rivera, showing two men and two women atop a hilly landscape. Diego Rivera was honored with a major retrospective at the fledgling Museum of Modern Art in 1931, but this visit likely coincided with Rivera’s work on the famous frescoes for Rockefeller Center initiated in 1933. The drawing is accompanied by three small snapshots and one souvenir tintype showing Rivera, Kahlo, and artist Lucienne Bloch (1909-1999), Rivera’s assistant on the Rockefeller Center murals. Bloch is known for her photographic documentation of Rivera’s controversial centerpiece “Man at the Crossroads” before it was demolished, as well as her portraits of Kahlo and her own artistic output. Along with her autograph, Bloch included a charming drawing of a small cat next to a mushroom and some leaves.

Another interesting page, dated May 24th 1936, is signed Edward Steichen and his second wife Dana. Also on the page is a bold autograph by the soprano Hulda Lashanka, who added a stanza of music alongside her name. On another page is a large, detailed drawing by painter Stefan Hirsch (1899-1964), Liebman’s teacher at Barnard, who was included in four early exhibitions at MoMA between 1930 and 1932, including “Murals by American Painters and Photographers in May 1932; his 1927 portrait of Aline Meyer Liebman is in the Jewish Museum, New York. Elsewhere, there is a drawing by painter and sculptor Maurice Sterne (1877-1957), who had a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933. Also contained in the album are signatures of significant artists from various cultural fields: a drawing of Pine Tree Farm by industrial designer Raymond Loewy; a charming drawing on letterhead by architect, Lee Simonson, whose wife quite literally sealed her signature with a kiss; a signature by art-deco artist Pierre Brissaud; and a poem and signature by author Susan Yorke (under pseudonym Suzette Telenga); a poem by and photograph of Mary Frances Thompson Fisher, best known as Te Ata, an actress and citizen of the Chickasaw Nation known for telling Native American stories, and her husband George Clyde Fisher, known as Clyde Fisher, a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and later the head of the Hayden Planetarium; as well as the signatures of William Osgood Aydelotte, Henry Hilgard Vilard, Cora Guggenheima; Justin Thannhauser; Bruce Alva Gimbel, New School founder Alvin Johnson; and much more.

The album contains many photographs of the guests, the facilities at Pine Tree Farm, and the trips that the Liebmans took to Paris and other lodgings in scenic upstate New York such as Whiteface Inn at Lake Placid and Sekon Lodge at Saranac Lake. They also document the building of their other vacation home at Saranac Lake called Pinehurst in 1937. Additionally, some pages contain interesting memorabilia such as pressed flora and or postcards from various vacation locations. The album serves as a sunny time capsule of the Liebman’s countryside leisures alongside the leading creatives and thinkers of the era. Many of the photographs are undoubtedly by Aline Meyer Liebman herself, who studied photography with Clarence White and maintained her own darkroom.

Aline Meyer Liebman was born on June 24, 1879 in Los Angeles, California; her brother was financier and Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer (1875-1959). She moved to New York in 1893 and attended Barnard College to study fine art. She had multiple gallery exhibitions throughout the 1930s but began collecting modern art and was a pioneer in photography patronage around the turn of the century. It was through her dedication to the arts that famous artists such as Alfred Stieglitz and the Riveras flocked to her. Later in her life, she was also passionate about philanthropy for her community in New York and for refugees. She died on August 21, 1966 in New York City, leaving behind her two children, Charles and Adolph.

Liebman is remembered today as a major client and supporter of Alfred Stieglitz, and a staunch advocate of fine-art photography before it became widely accepted.