Research

How Would You Explore The Knoedler And Duveen Archives?

Just the other day, I learned that the National Endowment for the Humanities had made a $300,000 grant to the Getty Research Institute to help make available the Knoedler Gallery archive. I’ve written about this archive before — it’s an important one and it’s big. Some finding aids have already been posted online.

The NEH grant will accelerate the processing of the archive, funding the “arrangement and description, and partial digitization” of the archive’s “1,400 linear feet of records documenting the acquisition and sale of European and American art in the United States between 1848 and 1971.” That work begins this July and is scheduled to conclude in October 2016. And, says the Getty:

The highest priorities for digitization are client correspondence, and forty-two volumes of stock books, sales books and commission books, which document artworks bought and sold by Knoedler. The digital collection will be made available in the GRI’s digital repository.

NPG x28132,Joseph Joel Duveen, Baron Duveen,by George Charles Beresford

Meantime, I also saw that the Â Samuel H. Kress Foundation gave the GRI a $110,000 award for a project titled the “Knoedler Archive Stock Books Database Acceleration.” It started in January and is set for completion in December 2015.

The project will transcribe eleven Knoedler stock books, from the period 1872 to 1970, representing approximately 30,000 acquisitions and sales records of paintings into the searchable database.

This two-year database project was originally conceived in conjunction with the collaborative GRI International research project An Art Market for America: Dealers, Collectors, Philanthropy and the Formation of American Museums. Once complete, the Knoedler stock books database will be a principal data source for the collaborative project, and made freely available to the academic community and interested public for new research and scholarship.

Some stockbooks are already online here.

In a separate project, the Duveen Brothers archives are being digitized with support from the Kress Foundation, and some of that material will be available online in June.

These are important documents; now someone needs to offer fellowships to explore them, perhaps with new digital tools.

Photos: Michael Knoedler, courtesy of the Getty (top); Joseph Duveen (bottom)

Insights: Cherry-picking Culture Track 2014

Culture Track, conducted by theÂ arts advertising/marketing firm LaPlaca Cohen, came out with its 2014 Culture Track the other day, the first since 2011. As usual, the survey — said to be the largest national tracking study of the attitudes, motives and behaviors of culturally active audiences in the U.S. — answered questions, raised some more, and included some puzzling responses about participation in the cultural sector.

I picked out a few things for comment:

The eldest and youngest — the pre-war and millennial generations — participate most frequently, which rings true since the first group has the most time and the second the fewest obligations, along with a need for activity. But a few comments:Â If, millennials consume culture largely to escape stress (as 73% do), why do cultural institutions keep offering them very active, participatory “experiences”? Much of this programming seems to be driving away the other most active group — the pre-war generation. 77% of them think that the programming has an unappealing topic that’s Â not intended for them.
Cell phones, and apps, are less an important means of communications with people than they are a means for cultural consumers to take photographs and tell people they were there. Only 15% use a cultural organization’s app — so let’s make sure the money spent developing apps is proportional to their use and worth it.
Loyalty to both visual arts and performing arts groups is down: 15% have memberships and 10% have subscriptions, down from 26% and 23% respectively in 2011. That’s not a shock, unfortunately. More than anything else for museums, people are members because they like the museum — not because they want to skip the line or get discounts. That’s surprising — were respondents being truthful? It makes me wonder.
While cost, logistics, the inability to find a companion to go with, and the lack of time keep people away more, 28% now say “inconvenient hours” are a problem, versus 20% in 2011 — need I say more? (I’ve already said it here many times.)

There’s much more in Culture Track. You can see it by clicking on the link in my first paragraph, above.

Art History For The 21st Century

In fall 2012, James Cuno, president of the Getty Trust, chastised art historians in an op-ed on the web for being behind the times in their use of digital tools. I agreed, and wrote a post about it. So I’ve watched to see what the Getty was going to do about it — and I outline some of those initiatives in today’s Wall Street Journal.

My Cultural Conversation with Cuno is headlinedÂ Modernizing Art History, and it details his thoughts, as well as a few from others who work at the Getty, on digital art history.

Even though this is 2014, most curators and academic art historians remain a bit at sea about the real, as opposed to the theoretical, potential of exploiting digital technologies to create new knowledge in the art realm. But Cuno promised, as I wrote,

I’m convinced this is something the Getty has to enable. …We have the means to push the needle.

The Getty Foundation is sponsoring threeÂ institutes — at George Mason University, Harvard and University of California, Los Angeles — this summer, “where art historians can learn about the tools, methods and potential of digital art history.” Applications are closed, however, and as I understand it not everyone will be accepted.

I learned this morning of another such institute — also already full — at Middlebury College, sponsored by the Kress Foundation. It’s called the “Summer Institute on Digital Mapping and Art History” and runs Aug. 3 through Aug. 15.

I suspect we will need many more of these, along with a lot of good question that can be asked with the new tools, before we make great discoveries — but I am hopeful.

New Web Resources Everywhere, It Seems

Hard on the heels of the recent announcement by the Vatican, that itsÂ bounteous library had begun digitizingÂ all 82,000 manuscripts in its 135 collections — thanks toÂ help from theÂ Japanese Japanese technology group NTT Data — the Tate has made availableÂ a rich artistic resource. It’s called Audio Arts, and it consists of 245 hours ofÂ more than 1,640 interviews withÂ artists, critics and other art world figures. This one is already available here.

As the Tate’s press release describes it:

The list of interviewees …includes some of the most important artists of the late twentieth century. It features, among others, Marina Abramovic, Carl Andre, Joseph Beuys, Daniel Buren, John Cage, Tacita Dean, Michael Craig-Martin, Tracey Emin, Gilbert & George, Richard Hamilton, Mona Hatoum, Susan Hiller, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Anish Kapoor, Ellsworth Kelly, John Latham, Richard Long, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili, Gerhard Richter, Richard Serra, Nancy Spero, Sam Taylor-Wood, Mark Wallinger, Andy Warhol and Rachel Whiteread. Many artists were interviewed when they were beginning to be known, and subsequently at later dates, shedding light on the trajectory of their artistic careers and the development of their ideas and views.

This archive, acquired from Bill Furlong (seen interviewing Joseph Beuys) in 2004, involved more thanÂ “350 boxes of taped interviews on reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes and digital formats, as well as other material such as mock-ups of each issue, associated correspondence and photographs.” They’ve all been digitized over the past two years, with support from The Rootstein Hopkins Foundation.

More details are here. Start listening.

The New Stolen-Art Tracker Opens Its Doors

On Monday,Â Art Recovery Group PLC — the brand-new competitor to Art Loss Register — opened its offices in Kensington, London, and announced an impressive line-up of staff members.

ARG, you’ll recall, was founded last fall after ALR came under intensified scrutiny for its heavy-handed practices. The New York Times laid them all out in an article headlined Tracking Stolen Art, for Profit, and Blurring a Few Lines, published last Sept. 20. In it,Â Christopher A. Marinello, who was often ALR’s spokeman, said he was quitting and would start his own firm — that happened, with the founding of ARG, last October.

Now Marinello is really open for business. I couldn’t find a website, per se, but it does have a Facebook page entitled Art Recovery International. Among its new staff areÂ Mark Maurice, Executive Director, a corporate/wealth manager who has worked withÂ dealers and collectors Â worldwide and “has dealt with a number of high profile restitution and cultural patrimony cases involving complex cross border disputes,” and Dorit Strauss, who has been in the fine art insurance industry for more than 30 years, once as Vice President and Worldwide Specialty Fine Art Manager at Chubb & Son.

Here’s the rest of the press release, including details of the types of work ARG (or ARI?) will do — like “Location and recovery services involving stolen, missing and looted works of art” and “dispute resolution services in cases of defective title, illegal export and unclear authenticity.”

This service, as we know, is sorely needed. Let’s hope it can compete with ALR — competition is good.

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