Treasures from the Archives of American Art

Creator: Edgar Preston Richardson

Richardson asks Kent to consider donating his papers to the Archives. Kent responded, "...I am naturally flattered by your interest...But, being still alive and intending to leave everything of mine to my wife, I am disinclined to make any decision about my 'remains' at this time."

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Archives of American Art brochure, 1958, showing damage from the fire at Kent's home in 1969. Rockwell Kent Papers. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Rockwell Kent, 1969 and 1971.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Reginald Marsh

Letter, June 10, 1953, from painter Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) to Lawrence Fleischman (1925-1997), who founded the Archives of American Art with E. P. Richardson. Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman Papers. Gift of Lawrence and Barbara Fleischman, 1954-2000. Marsh provides the "artist's conception" of his painting Eyes Tested (1944) in the Fleischman collection.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Benjamin West

A native of Pennsylvania, West settled in England in 1762. He became one of the best-known painters and teachers of his time. One of his American students, Charles Willson Peale, had written to West after the Revolution to ask if there might be a market in England for a portrait of General Washington. In his reply, West congratulates "you and my Countrymen in general" for their fortitude and wisdom in the war. He looks forward to the painting of Washington which Peale is sending, and asks for drawings of the uniforms worn by the American army.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: David Trumbull Lanman

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Frederic Edwin Church

Church writes about the chill of winter in New York, and teases Heade for not finding the Santa Marta mountain when he was standing at its foot, suggesting that a cloud of mosquitoes had obscured his view. Church and Heade shared a studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Martin Johnson Heade

Martin Johnson Heade first painted hummingbirds in 1862. The following year he traveled to Brazil to study and paint them. This book, holding Heade's notes on the iridescent creatures, was perhaps a preface for an album of hummingbirds that he planned, but never published.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: John Goffe Rand

Twentieth-century artists owe a considerable debt to portrait painter John Goffe Rand , the inventor of the collapsible metal tube for paint. Before Rand made the screw-cap tube, pigments ground in oil were tied in small parcels of animal bladder or tin foil. The parcels were punctured with pins to squeeze out the color; then the pins were replaced in the holes to seal them. Rand's first tubes were manufactured in England and later exported to the United States. Rand's invention was an immediate success, but although he held the British and American patents for his tube, he never gained fame or fortune. According to his obituary in the New York Post, he lost all his money when he invested in the aeolian attachment to the piano - a failed device for prolonging the sound of notes. To satisfy creditors, Rand turned over his British patent for the collapsible tube. While he retained his U.S. patent, he did not manufacture the tube in America. He died in obscurity. Rand's papers include an example of an early metal tube and two U.S. patents for improvements issued in 1841 and 1844.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Lilla Cabot Perry

The Archives includes a wealth of material on American artists who studied and traveled abroad, including Lilla Cabot Perry's photographs and glass-plate negatives of Claude Monet and his house and gardens at Giverny around 1889 to 1909. Perry (1848-1933), herself a painter, first went to Giverny with her husband, Thomas Sergeant Perry, a philosophy professor at Harvard, in the summer of 1889. The Perrys spent 10 summers at Giverny. They lived next door to Monet and were often invited to his studio. Perry later wrote her reminiscences of Monet in the American Magazine of Art (March 1927): "I had been greatly impressed by this (to me) new painter whose work had a clearness of vision and a fidelity to nature as I had never seen before." Her much-reproduced photographs convey the tranquil beauty of Giverny, which became a mecca for artists in the late 19th century. They are particularly important because they show the house, Japanese footbridge, pond, and gardens as they were when Monet first painted them.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Walt Kuhn

A high excitement is already evident 2 months before the show opened. He wrote, "We have adopted an emblem - Taken from the old pine tree flag of the revolution - I got the idea one morning in bed - [Arthur B.] Davies made the drawing and we'll have it on stationary, catalogues, posters and everywhere - We are also going to have campaign buttons - here is the design = = it will be about this size and very neat. We are going to get them by the thousands - give them to everybody - from bums to preachers - art students."

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Pablo Picasso

It is often the rough draft, the incidental comment, or casual record that reveals the rhythms of an age. Pablo Picasso's list of European artists for the 1913 Armory Show is a treasure, not only because it provides Picasso's recommendations for the first international exhibition of modern art in the United States, but for what the scrap of paper conveys about the collaborative efforts of the exhibition's organizers. Walt Kuhn, who played a major role in assembling the show, had limited knowledge of the European avant-garde. He relied on American artists then living abroad - Walter Pach, Jo Davidson, and Alfred Maurer - as well as individuals, such as Picasso, for introductions to contemporary European artists and dealers. With phonetic spelling, Picasso names Marcel Duchamp, whose Nude Descending a Staircase caused an uproar in the press, Fernand Léger, his countryman Juan Gris, among others. Curiously, he did not include Georges Braque, whose name was later added in Walt Kuhn's hand. In the end, the Europeans stole the show, overshadowing their American counterparts.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Association of American Painters and Sculptors (New York, N.Y.)

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Association of American Painters and Sculptors (New York, N.Y.)

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Arthur B. (Arthur Bowen) Davies

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Charles Sheeler

When the style of Charles Sheeler's painting began to take on Cézanne-esque qualities, his dealer, William Macbeth, did not approve: "Alas! I do not like the direction of your new work the least little bit. It is such a departure from old time sound methods, that I would not care to exhibit it. I hope it is only an experiment," he wrote. In this letter, Sheeler replied, "...Everyone who is sincerely trying to solve the enormous difficulties of artistic expression, is an experimenter and remains so as long as he is 'artistically alive.'"

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Alfred Stieglitz

McCausland met Stieglitz in 1931 through their mutual friend Paul Strand. Although their relations were later strained when Stieglitz attacked the Federal Art Project, McCausland wrote many favorable reviews of the exhibitions at Stieglitz's gallery. Always the champion of modern photography Stieglitz wrote, 'There is much misunderstanding about photography a too great eagerness to be an artist - a too great tendency toward formula which those not conversant with the actual evolution appears as original, etc.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Artists' Union (New York, N.Y.)

Published by and for artists, Art Front was contentious, provocative and politically sophisticated. The Artists' Union published the periodical from Nov. 1934 to Dec. 1937. Contributing writers included Stuart Davis, Meyer Shapiro, Harold Rosenberg, Fernand Léger, Louis Aragon, Lincoln Kirstein, Balcomb Greene, and Jacob Kainen.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Frida Kahlo

Kahlo writes about her contempt for André Breton and the European Surrealists: "They are so damn 'intellectual' and rotten that I can't stand them anymore....I [would] rather sit on the floor in the market of Toluca and sell tortillas, than have anything to do with those 'artistic' bitches of Paris."

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Jackson Pollock

When Jackson Pollock wrote this letter in 1951, his work was well known in New York art circles but had found few buyers. Through his acquaintance with several architects, he saw mural commissions as a way out of his financial difficulties. The following year, in a further effort to increase sales, he broke his connection with dealer Betty Parsons and made a new one with Sidney Janis.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Art of This Century

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Peggy Guggenheim

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Yasuo Kuniyoshi

Kuniyoshi, who was pro-democracy, anti-imperialist, and anti-fascist, was placed under house arrest, his funds impounded. He chose to live full-time at his studio at 30 East 14th Street, writing to Biddle, "A few short days has changed my status in this country, although I myself have not changed at all." Kuniyoshi repeatedly proved his loyalty to the United States government and was helped and supported by his circle of prominent American artists.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Joseph Cornell

In his entries from November 18, 19, and 20, 1951, he has burst of energy and inspiration to work on several boxes at once.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Frank Stella

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Robert R. McElroy

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Claes Oldenburg

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village was the epicenter of the New York avant-garde, a place where artists from overlapping social networks came together for experimental, participatory art programs. Bud Scott, the assistant pastor, invited Oldenburg to organize the 1959-1960 season at the Judson Gallery. His Ray Gun Spex included his happening Snapshots from the City, as well as presentations by Jim Dine, Dick Higgins, Al Hansen, Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms (canceled), and Robert Witman. Oldenburg, who was born in Stockholm, gave happenings a Swedish twist with the word "spex," which is Swedish for a comic skit, and perhaps a play on the words spectacles and specifications.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Barbara Fendrick

When Barbara Fendrick was Paley's exclusive representative, she kept meticulous records of his projects. Her notes cover the minutiae of their meetings, down to the color of Paley's socks. In this entry from May 31, 1984, she mentions a momentous event - the sale of Paley's jewelry tools at auction - an act that signaled his transition from the intimate scale of wearable art to grand public productions.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Ad Reinhardt

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Langston Hughes

In the late 1920s, Taylor, a native of Washington, D.C., was living in Greenwich Village and trying to establish himself as a theater designer. In partnership with Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, he founded The Golden Stair Press. Their first publication, The Negro Mother, helped to expand Hughes's audience. According to biographer Arnold Rampersad, Hughes joked to Van Vechten that copies of it "sold like reefers on 131st Street," and the book had seven printings.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Jasper Francis Cropsey

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Eadweard James Muybridge

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Oscar Bluemner

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Reginald Marsh

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Florence Knoll Bassett

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Jervis McEntee

McEntee mentions many artists of the period, including Sanford R. Gifford, Eastman Johnson, John F. Weir, Edwin Booth, J. Q. A. Ward, Worthington Whittredge, his teacher Frederic E. Church, and others. In his entry for March 24, 1874, McEntee recounts a conversation with Johnson: "We spoke of valuing our pictures more highly by not being so ready to exhibit them at clubs and other places merely to amuse people but to bend all our efforts towards a fine exhibition once a year at the Academy.... Another thing which I have always insisted on is that artists should always stand up for the dignity of their profession and not quietly listen to the conceited utterances of ignorant people who presume to set themselves up as authorities the moment they buy a few pictures." A die-hard representative of the National Academy's old guard, McEntee also comments at length on such subjects as the art market, patrons and collectors, his residence in the Tenth Street Studio Building, the Century Club, and the encroachment of European influences.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Samuel Finley Breese Morse

If playfulness is the mark of an inventive mind, then Samuel F. B. Morse's illustrated letter to his 33 year-old cousin is further evidence of his ingenuity. Morse, one of America's most prominent painters in the early 19th century and a founder of the National Academy of Design, invented the telegraph, as well as the dot-dash code used to transmit words over wire. In his letter, Morse attempts to "doze out a letter" before falling asleep. He writes, "I am busily engaged in painting my historical picture for the Steam boat [Una and the Dwarf, now in the collection of the Toledo Museum of Art], and am making great progress in it...I have relinquished the idea of lecturing at the Athenaeum this Season, as all my leisure time is devoted to our Academy, which is in a flourishing condition." The National Academy of Design was just 2 years old. Its purpose was to improve and advance art instruction. Morse, a strong advocate of academic training, was its first president.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Worthington Whittredge

These pages showing "Completed Commissions and other Pictures," from 1853 to 1856, include Whittredge's thumbnail sketches for important works such as From the Harz Mountains (April 21, 1853; now in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco), and Landscape in the Harz Mountains (April 21, 1852; now in the High Museum of Art), and a "duplicate" version (June 10, 1853; in the Detroit Institute of Arts). Whittredge, a native of Cincinnati, spent ten years abroad from 1849 to1859, studying at the Düsseldorf Academy, traveling, and painting. His ledger not only accounts for his sales, but documents his travels from Germany, south through Switzerland, to Rome.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Thomas Eakins

In the letter, Eakins describes his "far from conventional" portrait of President Rutherford B. Hayes: "The President once posed. I never saw him in the same pose again. He wrote, took notes, stood up, swung his chair around. In short, I had to construct him as I would a little animal."

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Madame X created a scandal at the Salon of 1884. French society was shocked by her deathly white pallor, hennaed hair, and provocative dress. Sargent kept the painting in his Paris studio, and later in his London studio. More than 20 years after the Salon, he exhibited Madame X in London, Berlin, Rome and San Francisco, and finally sold it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1916.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

All three Duchamp brothers participated in the Armory Show the year prior to when this photograph was taken.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Lilla Cabot Perry

The Archives includes a wealth of material on American artists who studied and traveled abroad, including Lilla Cabot Perry's photographs and glass-plate negatives of Claude Monet and his house and gardens at Giverny around 1889 to 1909. Perry (1848-1933), herself a painter, first went to Giverny with her husband, Thomas Sergeant Perry, a philosophy professor at Harvard, in the summer of 1889. The Perrys spent 10 summers at Giverny. They lived next door to Monet and were often invited to his studio. Perry later wrote her reminiscences of Monet in the American Magazine of Art (March 1927): "I had been greatly impressed by this (to me) new painter whose work had a clearness of vision and a fidelity to nature as I had never seen before." Her much-reproduced photographs convey the tranquil beauty of Giverny, which became a mecca for artists in the late 19th century. They are particularly important because they show the house, Japanese footbridge, pond, and gardens as they were when Monet first painted them.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Lilla Cabot Perry

The Archives includes a wealth of material on American artists who studied and traveled abroad, including Lilla Cabot Perry's photographs and glass-plate negatives of Claude Monet and his house and gardens at Giverny around 1889 to 1909. Perry (1848-1933), herself a painter, first went to Giverny with her husband, Thomas Sergeant Perry, a philosophy professor at Harvard, in the summer of 1889. The Perrys spent 10 summers at Giverny. They lived next door to Monet and were often invited to his studio. Perry later wrote her reminiscences of Monet in the American Magazine of Art (March 1927): "I had been greatly impressed by this (to me) new painter whose work had a clearness of vision and a fidelity to nature as I had never seen before." Her much-reproduced photographs convey the tranquil beauty of Giverny, which became a mecca for artists in the late 19th century. They are particularly important because they show the house, Japanese footbridge, pond, and gardens as they were when Monet first painted them.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Alexander Calder

With this invitation to Ben Shahn, Alexander Calder enclosed a map to his home that is reminiscent of his mobiles.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Rockwell Kent

In 1969, Kent lost his home in a fire. The Archives of American Art salvaged his papers, though they had been under six feet of water. Kent wrote, "We wish that the whole house, with all its now irreplaceable contents had been sent to the Detroit Archives." Later, he gave this ringing endorsement: "In letters to other artists I am occasionally asked for my advice as to what they should do with their records. My advice is...'offer them to the Archives of American Art.'"

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Hiram Powers

In the mid-nineteenth century no American art work was better known than Hiram Powers's marble statue the Greek Slave An arrestingly lifelike, nude female figure whose hands were chained, the Greek Slave combined the forces of sensuality and moral restraint in a display of exquisite workmanship. Viewers responded with an outpouring of articles, editorials, letters, poems, and songs. This scrapbook chronicles the popular reception of the work as it toured the United States between1847 and 1848, the events that established its national notoriety. Included are newspaper clippings from New York, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Boston, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Louisville, followed by obituaries for Powers in 1873 from American and Italian newspapers and a 1876 reminiscence of the sculptor.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Thomas Eakins

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Macbeth Gallery

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Andrew Wyeth

Wyeth had his first exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1937. In this letter to his dealer Robert W. Macbeth, Wyeth he makes a sketch of his watercolor The Bay to show exactly which painting he took home "with the rest of the discarded water colors." A month earlier Macbeth had written to Wyeth insisting that he sell only through the gallery. Wyeth's remark, "I will abide of [sic] our letter of November 8th and 24th 1937," refers to his newly established exclusive contract with the Macbeth Gallery.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Max Yavno

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Alfred Stieglitz

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Gertrude Käsebier

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Gertrude Käsebier

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Herbert Matter

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Harry M. (Harry Morey) Callahan

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Edward Steichen

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Irving Penn

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: George Platt Lynes

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Carl Van Vechten

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Roy Fox Lichtenstein

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Adolf De Meyer

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Frederic Edwin Church

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Louise Dahl-Wolfe

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Arnold Newman

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Arnold Newman

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Arnold Newman

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Everett Shinn

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: Thomas Cole

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Creator: John French Sloan

Learn More

• Additional information about this image

Kerfoot, Meyer, and Haviland wrote for Stieglitz's journal Camera Work.

Learn More

• Additional information about this image