by Jon Lackman | 19 July 2010 | Uncategorized
More on the history of American collectors from the L.A. Times:
With names like Morgan, Getty and Huntington attached to impressive collections available for public view, the history of art collecting in America has acquired a new level of scholarly scrutiny … Art historians tend to concentrate on connoisseurship and aesthetics. That’s beginning to change. Thanks to expanding views of art history, a fresh crop of scholars intrigued with the socioeconomic context of collecting and the provenance of art objects are giving American collectors a new level of scrutiny and respect. “The history of collecting is so deliciously interdisciplinary,” says Inge Reist, who directs the fledgling Center for the History of Collecting in America at the Frick Collection in New York … So far, the archives directory encompasses about 5,000 collections in 500 repositories documenting the lives and activities of 1,500 American collectors … The Getty Research Institute, established in 1982, has a much broader reach than the Frick center, but its special collections contain an expanding trove of letters, business records and libraries of American collectors, dealers, artists and critics. The enormous archive of Joseph Duveen, the dealer known for selling the collections of impoverished Europeans to fabulously wealthy Americans, including Frick, Huntington and Mellon, is in great demand, says Marcia Reed, chief curator and head of collection development at the Getty’s research library.
Why all the interest in the history of collecting? Is it related to the prominence of contemporary collectors? Some would even say preeminence. In the opinion of individuals such as collector Adam Lindemann, “declining budgets mean that the world’s leading museums, once the bastions of art, can no longer compete with deep-pocketed collectors.”
