The Archives of American Art: The Ultimate Gold Mine in Culture Studies

Allan Stone Gallery archives research is a case study of one of the Smithsonian’s unsung treasure troves.

I like to write about unsung heroes in the art world. They’re inconspicuous for lots of reasons. I’ve written about young, undiscovered artists such as Henri-Paul Broyard and Angela Lorenz, who makes artist’s books, a delicious medium that’s literary, visual, hand-crafted, and mostly unknown, except to connoisseurs. I love writing about museums in America’s heartland, where the chattering snoots goeth not.

Then there are places that aren’t obvious but very much foundational to the art-history field. Today I’m writing about archives, specifically the Archives of American Art (AAA). It’s a tiny part of the Smithsonian, but it’s essential to original-source research. Owning 20 million documents and telling an infinity of stories, the AAA is the ultimate trove for exploring not only American art but American culture. It’s the world’s biggest and most far-reaching archive of American visual culture.

The AAA started its work in 1954, founded by E. P. Richardson, the director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, and Larry Fleischman, the philanthropist and great dealer in American pre-war art. Richardson was one of the earliest American art scholars. In his day, American art, especially art before 1900, attracted neither interest nor love in academia or, for that matter, in most high-end museums. Most American art was seen as antiques, and derivative to boot.

As scholars, critics, students, and collectors took the field more seriously, Richardson and Fleischman saw a new need for an archival library to gather the paper stuff of life — letters, files, photographs, diaries, records, and ephemera — before things got trashed or lost.

In 1970, after years of operating at the Detroit museum, the Smithsonian took over the archive. It’s a research center of the highest order. I can’t think of a serious scholarly topic in American art that doesn’t demand a dive into archives. As federal art programs go, the AAA and the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities, with its program of indemnifying exhibitions, are in the pantheon of effectiveness and value. These two are the gold standard of good, useful government. The archivists there, who have many specialties, are really curators and scholars.

I’m writing about the AAA now because I’m using it. Some of my readers are wondering what I’m doing in Washington. I’m writing a biography of the eclectic art dealer Allan Stone. His gallery spanned 60 years, from 1960, about the time the American art market went from inchoate to a real system catering to multiple tastes and advancing careers, to a few years after his death in 2006.

The Stone family gave his gallery archives — every piece of paper in every file cabinet — to the AAA in 2020. Over the years, the AAA has put millions of records on microfilm and, now, is scanning them, but Covid lockdowns kept the Stone archive in the raw: 105 boxes, each about 30 pounds, with each box having 20 or so file folders packed with paper. No one has ever looked at these, except the cataloguers from the Stone estate. My Stone work is a good case study of what the AAA is and does. An enormous amount of time and planning went into the gift by both the AAA’s staff and the Stone-estate trustees.

In reading through the Stone archives, I’m looking not only for facts, such as who showed what when, who bought what and for how much, and the mechanics of everyday relationships. I’m defining Allan’s taste, what curators call his “eye.” An eye for the visceral, the luscious, the precious, for human scale and resonance with the values that make us human.

Allan discovered Wayne Thiebaud and represented him for 40 years. I haven’t gotten to the Thiebaud boxes but hear they contain a long correspondence between Allan and Wayne about aesthetics. Until, say, the late ’90s, people wrote letters and spent time collecting their thoughts.

Allan discovered Richard Estes, whose quirks and craft he admired. He represented Willem de Kooning and Joseph Cornell. He discovered David Beck, a modern Old Master and the best artist no one knows. I found a draft essay, never published, describing Beck as “cheerful and unnerving, hilarious and tragic, absurd and mundane.” That’s what Allan loved.

I’m finding dozens of in-house catalogues that museums prepared for shows of work by Allan’s artists in the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s. These weren’t widely distributed. The scholarship is often very good, and it’s contemporaneous with the art itself. I’m also learning how well Allan’s artists did financially. He selected artists for the long haul and for long-term growth. Beck’s first sale was for $500. Thirty years later, his last went for $500,000.

Allan’s artists often started out as very poor and naive. A young Bob Arneson, whom Allan had just added to his stable, wrote to ask what he should do if someone wanted to buy something directly from him. Answer: Do it for friends and family, but don’t make a habit out of it. Later, Arneson said he considered Allan to be a collector, not a dealer. In the three years he represented him, Allan bought all of Arneson’s art for himself.

Allan opened his shop in 1960. He’d practiced law, hated it, and dreamt of his own business buying and selling art he liked. Next to no one switched careers then. He had four young children. His first artist show was on the work of César, the French Nouveau Realisme artist who did sculptures made from compressed metal scrap. The archives establish clearly that he was obsessed with César. His art was tough, difficult, and counterintuitive. Letters tell us that’s what Allan liked.

On my last AAA visit, I read letters back and forth to Paris between Allan and César’s dealer there, negotiating loans. Right as the show opened, Allan had an ugly row with Eleanor Saidenberg, owner of the Saidenberg Gallery, a powerhouse New York shop that represented Picasso. I found a few blow-by-blow letters. She insisted that her place had the exclusive right to show César in America simply because Saidenberg, after all, showed all the other big French names.

Of course, that’s ridiculous, but the art world then was small, territorial, and informal. Allan had chutzpah and cleaved to his own line. His show went on. These archives aren’t definitive. They point to the Saidenberg Gallery’s own archives and to MoMA’s archives since Dorothy Miller, MoMA’s longtime curator, got involved. Archival digging often begets more digging.

I just finished the Stone archives on Bugatti. Allan was obsessed with Bugatti cars, buying and selling them starting in the ’60s. “Bugatti’s to the chassis what Stradivarius is to the fiddle,” Allan wrote. There was a baby Bugatti, a car built for children, in Allan’s living room in his house in Purchase, N.Y. Allan was largely broke in the ’60s. Dealers then, aside from the ancient ones like Wildenstein, were lucky to make enough money every month to pay overhead. He spent on Bugattis, though.

For Bugatti collectors, every day is a full moon, and there’s never too much minutiae in Bugatti World. Two- and three-page single-spaced, typed letters go back and forth from Allan to sellers all over the world. I’m not mastering them but reading them all since no one knows what’s in them. I’m focused on aesthetics, mostly, since these cars are art. Allan loved their style, design, and intricacy.

Allan went to Harvard and Andover. His correspondents went to similar places. They’re all men. The language is high-end, country-club man talk that I don’t think exists anymore. Allan didn’t sound this way, but in some of the letters from his fellow Bugattistas, I can hear the Larchmont Lockjaw accent.

My goal is to finish the boxes by the end of September, so I’ll be back and forth to the Swamp. I’ve been going to museums in the evening since Washington, unlike ye olde Vermont, doesn’t shut at 5 p.m.

I don’t think the Stone archives would ever get lost or trashed, but, without the AAA, they’d go somewhere less accessible. The place’s American milieu is essential, too. The archivists have the macro and micro view of American culture and, of course, have a good sense of connections among archives. The AAA already owns Castelli Gallery’s mammoth archives. Allan’s and Castelli’s archives are complementary access points to American art from the ’60s and ’70s especially, though Allan was in many ways the anti-Castelli. How so? You’ll have to buy the book.

The AAA has staff called collectors. They’re scouts, negotiators, and scholars, knowing where archives lurk, understanding their relevance to research, and having gifts of persuasion. I suspect there’s a personality type that looks at giving archives as a stop on the way to the funeral parlor. The AAA collectors, I’m sure, are experts in organization, too. I bet artists aren’t at their best in keeping things in good order. The collectors are sleuths, too, and have to have a yen for the unexpected tidbits and, here and there, secrets and gossip hiding among the papyri. This past year, the AAA got the archives of the great land-art pioneer Nancy Holt and the art critic Robert Hughes. I imagine these are not without splashes of hot sauce.

There’s probably no archive in America that has more initiative. Right now, the AAA is doing an oral-history project about the Covid epidemic, which shut the country, every museum, gallery, and auction house, and left artists alone in their studios. It’s getting archives from many sources — the Stone archive is a new gift — but the place is targeting Asian-American artists, and that means Americans with roots in India and the Pacific Islands, China, and Korea.

The AAA’s got gallery space, too, in the Reynolds Center, the old U.S. Patent Office that’s now home to the National Portrait Gallery and the Smithsonian American Art Museum. The AAA is an archive and a library, but it’s also a museum. Letters, artist ephemera, and photographs can make for great viewing. It just closed a show on what’s called mail art. That’s art fitting in an envelope, sometimes the envelope itself, sent and resent in the mail to circumvent the tyranny of museums and the art market. It’s a subversive, mostly ’60s and ’70s movement. Funky stamps, postmarks, and calligraphy figure. Very fun.

The AAA once disseminated archives through microfilm. Praise the Lord, we live in a digital world now. I always got the machine with the poltergeist sending those little rolls spiraling toward the stars and planets. The AAA has launched a Herculean scanning project — remember, it owns 20 million documents — and is making sure archives of black, Hispanic, and women artists are digitized since they haven’t gotten the scholarly attention they deserve.

The AAA reaches people, nationally and internationally, through podcasts, a newsy journal that makes archives sexy, and how-to virtual classes teaching students about the joys and riches of primary sources. Lots of young art historians might think archives are boring and insidious, too, since primary sources might undercut à la mode agendas, horror of horrors. Using archives, then, is the antidote to fake, pop narratives. It’s also the best way to keep faith with the artists, dealers, collectors, and critics who make art history in the first place. The AAA just renovated its space for scholars to work on archives. I’ve been working seven hours a day there. It’s a comfortable, practical space.

When I research my institutional profiles, I always look at money. The AAA gets about 35 percent of its money from the government and needs to raise the rest from donors. For arcane reasons, this is a flip of what the feds usually give to the Smithsonian Castle’s institutional children. Archives and archival research, as a rule, don’t catalyze much glitz or glam unless you think, as I do, that knowledge — substance — sparkles like diamonds. I think the Archives of American Art is the smartest place for philanthropy to flow.

The interviews that AAA does with artists, dealers, art historians, collectors, and critics for its oral-histories collections are first-hand history and key to understanding the subject’s point of view. These make for compelling study, especially when the interviewee’s powers of self-censorship have dulled or, like mine, now play second fiddle to candor and the service of my readers and history.

They haven’t interviewed me yet. To quote Norma Desmond, “I’m ready for my closeup.” The AAA has great oral historians and interviewers. No need to disturb Mr. De Mille!