A painter and a businessman, an emigre and an epicurean, W. Dieter Zander was an oddity typical of the shifting currents of the midcentury; his collection of six hundred lovingly preserved restaurant menus at the New York Public Library is a monument to everything he sampled course-by-course during his mouth-watering life. However, the menus are not of primarily gastronomic interest. In the collection’s focus on striking cover illustrations—ranging from avant-garde to kitsch—Zander preserved an important relic of pop aesthetics. In the menus, in the most literal way possible, we find the public’s appetite for fine art.
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