POUGHKEEPSIE, NY.- Its impressive collection of 17,000 works of art has been more than 140 years in the making. Now, the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center is finally getting its own handy guidebook.

The widely respected Prestel Museum Guide series has just published the new book The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College: The History and the Collection. This makes the Art Center the first U.S. college or university museum to have its own Prestel Guide. Prestel Publishing is a world leader in the fields of art, architecture, photography, design, cultural history, and ethnography – spanning such important museums as the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford, the Alte Pinokothek in Munich, and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris – and its guides are sold around the world.

The Art Center will celebrate this milestone publication on November 29, as part of the weekly “Late Night at the Lehman Loeb” series, held Thursdays 5:00 pm - 9:00 pm. At 6:00 pm on November 29, Art Center director and Prestel guidebook author James Mundy will give a brief talk about the project, followed by a book signing. Tours led by curators Patricia Phagan and Mary-Kay Lombino will begin at 6:30 pm. They will focus on several key works in the Vassar collection, as well on the Art Center's new special exhibition, Saul Steinberg: Illuminations, a tribute to the artist known for his work in The New Yorker. All events are free and open to the public.

The Lehman Loeb Art Center’s collection charts the history of art from antiquity to the present, including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, and glass and ceramic wares. Choosing 90 to highlight in the Prestel guide, from the thousands of significant works, was no easy task for director James Mundy, and the museum’s curators.

“The works were chosen to reflect the range and quality of the collection,” said Mundy. “So, they are the ‘greatest hits’ but across all chronological periods, media, and cultures.”

Among the pieces featured are an Egyptian sculpture in red granite, Head of Viceroy Merymose from His Outer Sarcophagus (Dynasty 18, Period of Amenhotep III), c. 1375 B.C.; Pieter Claez's Still Life With Food and Drink, c. 1640; Frederick Church’s Autumn in North America, 1856; Marsden Hartley’s Indian Composition, 1914-15, which is featured on the cover of the guidebook; Francis Bacon’s Study for Portrait IV (1953), one of the artist’s paintings after Velázquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X; and Vassar’s first Cubist painting by Pablo Picasso, Glass, Guitar and Musical Score (winter 1922-23), given in 2005 by Virginia Herrick Deknatel, Vassar class of 1929, in honor of Frances Daly Fergusson, now Vassar’s President Emerita.