By RANDY KENNEDY


The Hispanic Society of America, the lonely gem of a museum in upper Manhattan, is usually visited - when visited at all - for the collection of world-class Goya, El Greco and Velazquez paintings amassed there by its founder, the railroad heir and scholar Archer Milton Huntington.

But the society also possesses one of the world’s best libraries of material relating to Spain, Portugal and the Americas. The collection - letters, novels, maps, sailing charts, marriage contracts (including one from 1476 for Ferdinand and Isabella’s eldest daughter), catechisms, scientific treatises and other documents dating back as far as the 12th century - fills a huge floor in the museum.

When the French artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster visited these basement stacks for the first time two years ago, the impression that came over her immediately was “this Citizen Kane, Xanadu feeling,” she said in a telephone interview from Paris, where she lives and works part of the year. Sitting in the stacks, she began to envision a kind of parallel library.

And with help from a team of painters and the society’s librarians, she created one. “Chronotopes & dioramas,” an exhibition by Ms. Gonzalez- Foerster that is part of the Dia Art Foundation’s temporary partnership with the Hispanic Society, recently opened in a space next to the society.

The work presents a meticulously fashioned fantasy of a library in which shelves have become obsolete, and books, like examples of living creatures, are displayed in illusionistic dioramas evoking those of the American Museum of Natural History.

Franz Kafka, J. G. Ballard, Adolfo Bioy Casares and Gertrude Stein find themselves grouped together in the depths of the North Atlantic, as writers whom Ms. Gonzalez-Foerster sees as links between Europe and the Americas. Jorge Luis Borges and Roberto Bolano share company in the desert. And Paul Bowles, Elizabeth Bishop and the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade are classified under the tropical, their books displayed in a rain-forest diorama.

Though Ms. Gonzalez-Foerster, 44, was born in Strasbourg and educated in Grenoble, she has long been fascinated with South American culture, particularly the tropical-modernist melange of Brazil, where she spends half of each year.

In her work, books have long been important conceptually and as a kind of raw material, “almost like bricks” as she describes them, though bricks that seem almost sentient in the postmodern way of text liberated from its author. “With a library,” she said, “you slowly build a biography for yourself.”

Daniel Birnbaum, the artistic director of this year’s Venice Biennale, wrote that what she was primarily after, in his view, was to create “an atmosphere that draws out the melancholy inherent in objects in the world,” objects that have lost their meaning through over-definition.

“In Gonzalez-Foerster’s work,” he concluded, “genre no longer seems relevant.”


A painter places books in a diorama by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster.