The Center for the History of Collecting is a research institute of the Frick Art Reference Library, which is attached to The Frick Collection. It promotes and sponsors the study of the history of collecting.
History
Housed in the Frick Art Reference Library at 10 East 71st Street in New York City, the Center for the History of Collecting was established in 2007 to encourage and sustain research on the development of public and private art collections in Europe and the United States from the early modern period to the present. The center supports a broad range of intellectual initiatives. It organizes and hosts a regular calendar of symposia, specialist lectures, and study days, and it contributes to undergraduate and graduate seminars taught in collaboration with local colleges. It also offers long and short term fellowships in the history of collecting, which attract scholars researching diverse aspects of cultural history. In addition, the center created and continues to expand a major digital archive of art collectors and dealers, and it is collaborating on the creation of software that will aid in the study of visual history. The center has an active publications program and awards a biennial book prize for excellent contributions to the History of Collecting in America. From its inception under the leadership of founding director Inge Reist, the Center has had an advisory committee consisting of academics, collectors, librarians, archivists, and curators. In 2014, a Fellows Committee was introduced to garner financial support and to gather a dedicated community of individuals interested in engaging with collecting practices, especially through visits to the homes of private collectors.
Symposia, Lectures, and Publications
Between 2007- 2015, The Center for the History of Collecting organized the following symposia on the history of collecting:
May 2015 – Seen through the Collector’s Lens: 150 Years of Photography
January 2015 – El Greco Comes to America: The Discovery of a Modern Old Master
May 2014 – The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and Modern Latin American Art in the United States
September 2013 – Going for Baroque: Americans Collect Italian Paintings of the 17th and 18th Centuries
March 2013 – Money for the Most Exquisite Things: Bankers and Collecting from the Medici to the Rockefellers
March 2012 – The Dragon and the Chrysanthemum: Collecting Chinese and Japanese Art in America
May 6, 2011 – Reflections across the Pond: British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response
November 2010 – A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Paintings in America
March 2010 – The Collector’s Choice: Art on Display in American Private Collections
May 2009 – Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals
March 2009 – The American Artist as Collector: From the Enlightenment to the Post-War Era
November 2008 – Collecting Spanish Art: Spain’s Golden Age and America’s Gilded Age
April 2008 – Power Underestimated: American Women Art Collectors
February- March 2008 – Turning Points: Modern Art Collecting 1913-
May 19, 2007 – Turning Points in Old Masters Collecting, 1830- 1940
The Center has an active publication program, issuing books that draw on the scholarship presented in the symposia. Many of these have been published in association with Pennsylvania State University Press as volumes of The Frick Collection Studies on the History of Art Collecting in America. Titles include:
Reist, Inge Jackson., and Rosella Mamoli Zorzi, eds. Power Underestimated: American Women Art Collectors. Venezia: Marsilio, 2011.
Reist, Inge Jackson., and José Luis Colomer, eds. Collecting Spanish Art: Spain's Golden Age and America's Gilded Age. New York: Frick Collection in Association with Centro De Estudios Europa Hispánica, Madrid, and Center for Spain in America, New York, 2012.
Reist, Inge, ed. British Models of Art Collecting and the American Response: Reflections Across the Pond. Burlington: Ashgate, 2014.
Reist, Inge, ed. A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Paintings in America. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015.
The center also organizes special events such as movie showings and lectures by important scholars, artists, and collectors. For instance, in 2013, the center presented a lecture by artist and author Edmund de Waal, and in 2014, it hosted a conversation between Sir David Cannadine, Lord Rothschild, and Duke of Devonshire.
Collaborations
The center regularly collaborates with academic institutions, including Barnard College, Columbia University, and New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, to offer graduate and undergraduate seminars and graduate workshops on the history of collecting. Alongside local museums, it also organizes and participates in study days that contextualize major museum exhibitions within the history of collecting. In addition, it facilitates oral and video histories of dealers and collectors who have helped to shape American collecting through the twentieth century. In this effort, it has partnered with the Archives of American Art on a two-year project to produce a series of oral histories of collectors.
Digital Scholarship
The Center for the History of Collecting created and maintains an archives directory, which is a growing index of collectors, dealers, auction houses and galleries, presented with historical notes and with the locations of their archival materials. In 2011, the Art Libraries Society of North America awarded the Archives Directory its annual Worldwide Books Award for Electronic Resources, which recognizes achievements in digital librarianship or in curating visual resources. The center is also currently collaborating with scholars at the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering to develop a digital platform that will facilitate the storage, comparison, and manipulation of digital images.
Prizes and Fellowships
Each year, the Center grants a total of six short-term and long-term fellowships to pre- and post-doctoral scholars focusing on the history of collecting. It also awards a biennial book prize for a distinguished publication on the history of collecting in America. The book prize honorees include:
2013, Jennifer Farrell, Get There First, Decide Promptly: The Richard Brown Baker Collection of Postwar Art, New Haven: Yale University Art Gallery, 2011
2011, Mary L. Levkoff, Hearst, the Collector, New York: Abrams, 2008.
2009, Julia Meech, Frank Lloyd Wright and the Art of Japan: The Architect's Other Passion, New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001.
