Collection Information

Size: Transcript: 37 pages

Format: Originally recorded on 1 sound tape reel. Reformatted in 2010 as 1 digital wav files. Duration is 1 hr., 4 min.

Summary: An interview of Frederic Stewart Bartlett conducted 1964 November 11, by Sylvia Loomis for the Archives of American Art.

Bartlett speaks of his early life in Colorado; his early museum experience at the Denver Art Museum; the art centers started under the New Deal; unnoticed artists of America; the art of the banal; contemporary problems in museums. He recalls Donald Bear, Gladys Caldwell, Frank Mechau and Holger Cahill.

Biographical/Historical Note

Frederic (Fred) Stewart Bartlett (1905-1988) was a museum director in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Provenance

Conducted as part of the Archives of American Art's New Deal and the Arts project, which includes over 400 interviews of artists, administrators, historians, and others involved with the federal government's art programs and the activities of the Farm Security Administration in the 1930s and early 1940s.

Quotes and excerpts must be cited as follows: Oral history interview with Frederic Stewart Bartlett, 1964 November 11. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.