One of the main concerns in the art and collecting community has been what would happen to the important Knoedler Gallery archive. According to the NY Times, the Getty Research Institute, for an undisclosed price has agreed to purchase the vast collection of information dating from about 1850 to 1971.
The NY Times reports
Source: The NY Times
Formed 165 years ago, the gallery helped shape many of this country’s greatest collections, including those of Paul Mellon, Henry Clay Frick and Robert Sterling Clark. Over the years Knoedler also bought and sold works by a roster that reads like a Who’s Who of 19th- and 20th-century art, including van Gogh, Manet, Winslow Homer, Frederic E. Church and John Singer Sargent, as well as more contemporary figures like Louise Bourgeois, Willem de Kooning and Barnett Newman.
This week the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles announced that it had bought the Knoedler Gallery archive, a vast trove dating from around 1850 to 1971 that incorporates stock books, sales books, a photo archive and files of correspondence, including illustrated letters from artists and collectors.
Taken as a whole, the archive offers a vivid inside look at the history of collecting and of the art market in the United States and Europe from the mid-19th century forward. “This is an archives that was born well before e-mail,” said Marcia Reed, chief curator at the Getty Research Institute. “So all the correspondence between artists and collectors is all intact, including how paintings were hung and framed.”
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