Jacques Seligmann & Co. records, 1904-1978, bulk 1913-1974

Many of the exhibitions organized by Jacques Seligmann & Co., Inc., in the early 1930s helped develop Americans' taste for modern art and an interest in modern European painters, such as Juan Gris, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso. This subseries includes an 1936 exhibit of Picasso's works from his Blue and Rose Periods as well as a retrospective of his work. Another major exhibition project was the firm's participation in the 1940 World's Fair. Jacques Seligmann & Co. loaned artwork and antiques to the exhibition titled, Masterpieces of Art,which featured works by seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century artists, such as Francesco de Goya, El Greco, and Diego Velázquez from the Spanish School. Other artists' works that were represented included Paul Cézanne, Honoré Daumier, Jean-Louis David, Edgar Degas, Eugène Delacroix, Paul Gauguin, Theodore Géricault, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Edouard Manet, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Georges Seurat, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Vincent van Gogh. This subseries includes attendance records, correspondence, memoranda, and minutes of advisory committee meetings, whose director general in charge was Walter Pach. Germain Seligman served on the Exhibition Committee, and another Jacques Seligmann & Co. staff member, Rolf Hans Waegen, served as secretary. Other exhibitions represented in this subseries featured important masters drawings and seventeenth- through nineteenth-century French artists. Also included are exhibitions by emerging American artists. Further information on American contemporary painters can be found in Contemporary American Department (Series 8), the records of a subsidiary department of Jacques Seligmann & Co., Inc.

Significant correspondents found in this series include Alfred H. Barr, director of the Museum of Modern Art, and the well-known collector Duncan Phillips. Important lenders to the exhibitions held include the Cleveland Museum of Art; M. Knoedler & Co., Inc.; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Phillips Memorial Gallery; and Wadsworth Atheneum.

There are also correspondence, lists, announcements, printed material such as exhibition catalogs, newspaper clippings, and notes concerning individual exhibitions. Arrangement of the subseries is chronological by year of exhibition and notated by the first date listed for each entry. The span dates at the end of each entry describe the dating of material within the folder.

This subseries includes correspondence with clients and museums concerning loans, shipping, and administrative matters, and clippings about exhibitions held. Also found are lists of clients to whom exhibition catalogs were sent and a chronology of exhibitions held at the New York and Paris galleries.

In this subseries are exhibit text, brochures, printed material, and clippings originally housed in large scrapbooks that documented exhibitions held by Jacques Seligmann & Co., Inc.