Treasures From the Archives of American Art |
An online version of an exhibition in AAA's New York
Research Center
October 19, 2000 - January 5, 2001
Liza Kirwin, Curator of Manuscripts
When E. P. Richardson and Lawrence Fleischman first conceived the idea of a central repository for the primary records of art in America, they could not have foreseen the impact of their vision on American art history. This exhibition of treasures, from an overflowing trove, pays tribute to their initiative and salutes the thousands of donors who have given their papers to the Archives of American Art since its founding in 1954. Their contributions have made the Archives the world's premier collection of primary source material for the study of the visual arts in the United States.
The Archives’ treasures not only support broad-ranging inquiries into the development of ideas about art, but are themselves catalysts in the history of art. Hans Namuth’s blurred "action" photographs of Jackson Pollock at work in the summer of 1950 immortalized the artist while promoting a new image of the great American painter – masculine, impetuous and physically engaged in the creative act, an image that continues to inform our construction of the artistic persona.
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While Namuth’s photographs are satisfyingly weighty and accessible, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s collection of papers dolls are the opposite sort of treasure: fragile, feminine, and intimate, they are the childhood ephemera of a charmed life. The Archives is a place where the heavy and the light are preserved, where the famous and the obscure are immortalized. |
Our most treasured writings, such as the letters of Samuel F. B. Morse from the 1820s, have the power to transport readers to another place and time. As if conduits of unmediated experience, they capture the details of an artist’s life, as well as the values, attitudes, and assumptions of an art world. |
Gallery records are prized because they fix the transitory business of everyday life, whereas sketches and notes, such as Florence Knoll’s plans for her husband’s office, provide an intimate glimpse into the creative process, the ebb and flow of rough ideas. |
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The Archives’collection of Oral History Interviews is a treasure in itself. Begun in 1958 with funding from the Ford Foundation, the oral history interview program chronicles the great diversity of the American art scene, augmenting in a definitive way our perception of individual artists and their social worlds. The best examples yield a richness of detail and a sense of character not available in written records. "One never knows what is lucky in life," recalled print curator A. Hyatt Mayor in an oral history interview. "You know, the person you met on the corner, the telephone call you didn’t hear, those are things that change your life, as you find ten years afterward." The Archives’ interviews may clarify the life-changing events, but they also preserve the voice of the artist, curator, or collector telling their stories in their own words. Mayor is highly articulate and a delightful raconteur; Jay DeFeo takes a soul-searching approach, similar, as she says, to her recent experience in psychoanalysis; and Charles Burchfield is both poetic and opinionated. The oral history interviews allow scholars to eavesdrop on significant conversations and discern the particularities and the partial truths of a unique exchange. One can hear the steady creak of Burchfield’s rocking chair and when Pop artist Tom Wesselmann recalls his Great American Nude series from the early 1960s, an oldies station, plays "Earth Angel" in the background. The Archives of American Art holds all these and more. This sampling of letters, diaries, photographs, and rare printed material has been drawn from more than eighty collections. Curator Emeritus Garnett McCoy brought many of these treasures to light in Archives’ publications over the years. This exhibition mixes familiar nuggets with new gems. |
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