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New-York Historical Society Museum Department records

Call Number

NYHS-RG 20

Date

1765, 1830-2018, inclusive

Creator

New-York Historical Society

Extent

213 Linear feet in 321 boxes of various sizes and 3 oversize folders

Language of Materials

The documents in the record group are in English.

Abstract

The New-York Historical Society Museum Department records include curatorial, collections management, exhibitions, outgoing loans, administrative, and object files created by museum staff. The bulk of the records range from the 1970s into the early twenty-first century, though there is important earlier material, including acquisition and other documents concerning the John J. Audubon watercolors and the Henry Abbott Egyptian collection. The most extensive portions of the record group relate to exhibitions and loans, and those files are rich with checklists, images, loan documentation, publicity material, research files, comment books, wall texts and labels, design elements, budgets and funding requests, and other like matter. The curatorial and collection management files include documents concerning proposed exhibitions, general exhibition scheduling, research inquiries, offers of objects for accession, object surveys, recommendations to the Board Museum Collection Committee, conservation, and other museum matters. There are also many object images, especially for paintings and drawings.

Biographical/Historical Note

From its founding in 1804, the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS) collected paintings, drawings and other museum objects, more commonly referred to as "cabinet" objects in the early 19th century. The collecting of these objects became significantly more ambitious in the late 1850s when N-YHS finally moved from a series of relatively small rented or donated quarters into a building of its own at 2nd Avenue and 11th Street in lower Manhattan. Almost immediately upon occupying this new building, N-YHS acquired the art collection formerly held by the New York Gallery of the Fine Arts, which was built on the private collection of merchant Luman Reed and included such works as Thomas Cole's Course of Empire series.

Despite N-YHS's stated focus in its founding documents on American and New York state history, its actual collecting often deviated from this charge. Ancient coins and medals and natural history objects were among the early deviations. With the expanded space at the 2nd Avenue building, and perhaps with the expectation of establishing a Museum of Antiquities, Science and Art in Central Park, in the 1860s N-YHS acquired many artifacts that would be obviously out of scope by the twentieth century. These included the Abbott Collection of Egyptian antiquities, James Lenox's ancient Nineveh sculptures, and European Old Masters from Thomas J. Bryan's collection. But this acquisitiveness also led in 1863 to the purchase of one of N-YHS's greatest treasures, the watercolors John J. Audubon had drawn for his Birds of America.

N-YHS's 2nd Avenue building allowed for free public access to the galleries, though as the collection grew through the 19th century the building became increasingly cluttered. But more important than the limited physical plant were the broader resource limitations, especially financial, which in turn led to limits on the ability to care for the collection. Into the early twentieth century, N-YHS operated with a very small staff of less than ten people, none of which were conservators or museum specialists. And as N-YHS began to plan for the installation of its museum collection in its new home on Central Park West in 1908, some members began to question the relevance to N-YHS of the non-United States historical objects. Indeed, the large Nineveh sculptures were left behind in the 2nd Avenue building, moved uptown only when the old building was sold in 1912. By 1916, criticism was being directed at N-YHS over the deterioration of the Egyptian artifacts, leading to the hiring of Caroline Ransom Williams and others to conserve and catalogue those objects.

The late 1930s were watershed years for the museum, as they were for N-YHS in general. The large bequest received from the Thompson family in the late 1930s allowed not only for the expansion of the Central Park West building and its gallery space, but the expansion of staff in support of the collections. In 1939, for the first time in its history, N-YHS put in place a professional museum staff, including a Curator of Paintings (Donald A. Shelley), a Museum Curator & Registrar (H. Maxson Holloway), a Painting Restorer (Ingrid M. Held), and assistants. This new organizational structure is reflected in the archives: the bulk of the Museum Department records date from 1939 and later as these new professionals established their own files and records; earlier museum-related records were maintained in the central accession ledgers, correspondence, and other files maintained by the Librarian, who was N-YHS's executive leader to that time. Still, for most of the following decades, the Museum Department staff amounted to fewer than ten people, with only one curator, Richard J. Koke, in place from 1949 to 1969. In 1970, Mary C. Black, a folk arts authority, joined Koke in the department as Curator of Paintings, Sculpture and the Decorative Arts. About the same time, in August 1972, N-YHS received accreditation from the American Association of Museums (AAM).

The 1930s were important in other ways for the museum as well. Deaccessioning of out of scope objects came to the fore. When the Central Park West building closed in 1937 for renovations and expansion, the Egyptian collection was loaned to the Brooklyn Museum. It never returned as N-YHS eventually sold it and other artifacts to the Museum in the 1940s. An ancient medical papyrus was donated to the New York Academy of Medicine. By the 1940s, the possibility of disposing of some or all of the European artworks was being explored, which eventually occurred over time from the 1960s through the 1990s. The deaccessions of the 1990s, not only of European Old Masters but of silver and other objects as well, were highly controversial in part because they coincided with N-YHS's fiscal crisis of the time. The severity of N-YHS's financial problems led to the closing of the museum galleries in January 1993 and, a month later, its withdrawal from the AAM's accreditation program. Deaccessions of out of scope collections came to be recognized as a necessary part of any recovery so auctions moved forward in the mid-1990s within a rigorous formal approval structure within N-YHS and with oversight by the New York State Attorney General.

Through the mid and late twentieth century, N-YHS was also strengthening its collection with such iconic accessions as the folk art collection of Elie and Viola Nadelman (1937 purchase), sculpture groups by John Rogers (1936 purchase), and Tiffany lamps from Egon Neustadt (1984 bequest), among many others. These objects, along with those on loan from other institutions, were installed in hundreds of exhibitions across the last half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. More notable for an organization that seldom, if ever, loaned its objects during its first century, in the 1930s N-YHS began to lend its museum objects regularly to institutions in the United States and internationally. These loans included about one hundred of the Audubon drawings, which left N-YHS for the first time in the mid-1990s to travel to various U.S. museums.

The conservation, care and storage of the museum collection received expanded attention in the mid-1980s with the hiring of a full time conservator, Holly Hotchner. Additional staff was later added and conservation labs created, which continue to the present. Hotchner became Museum Director in 1989, and the Department of Prints, Photographs and Architecture (commonly known as the Print Room) was transferred organizationally from the Library to the Museum, where it would remain until its return to the Library in 1998. Despite the many initiatives of the time, N-YHS's financial difficulties were too deep, leading to the loss of much of the staff and the closing of the galleries in 1993. Nonetheless, thanks in significant part to city and state funding, N-YHS's situation stabilized, key renovations and structural improvements were made to the building, and the galleries re-opened in May 1995 with the exhibition of N-YHS's collection highlights arranged to illustrate American history, Treasury of the Past. Major renovations continued in the 1990s culminating in 2000 with the opening of the Henry Luce III Center for the Study of American Culture, which housed nearly 40,000 objects for public access. Behind the scenes, collections management moved into the twenty-first century with the implementation of a desktop computer application for object level control.

Arrangement Note

The record group is organized in six series:

Series I. Select Collections Correspondence

Series II. Exhibitions

Series III. Curatorial and Administration Files

Series IV. Collection Management Files

Series V. Catalogues, Inventories & Surveys

Series VI. Object Images

Scope and Contents Note

The Museum Department record group includes curatorial, collections management, exhibitions, administrative, and object files created by museum staff. The record group includes some important 19th and early-mid 20th century material but most of the documents date from the 1970s and into the early twenty-first century.

The most extensive portions of the record group concerns exhibitions, especially those from the 1980s to 2012. Although there is great inconsistency in the level of documentation across individual exhibitions, overall the files are rich with checklists, images, loan documentation, publicity material, research files, comment books, wall texts and labels, design elements, budgets and funding requests, and other like matter. In addition to exhibitions installed at N-YHS, the record group also includes files of outgoing loans to other institutions, such as the first ever traveling exhibition of the Audubon watercolors in the 1990s, and proposals and plans for exhibitions that did not go forward.

The record group includes some accession records. These are principally found in the collections management/registrar files for the 1940s-1960s, but 19th century acquisition documents for the Audubon watercolors and the Henry Abbott Egyptian collection are in the files, as selectively compiled correspondence. This correspondence also includes records of the transfer of the Abbott and certain other out of scope collections to the Brooklyn Museum in the 1940s. The record group holds object photograph files, primarily for paintings and drawings, and these hold a small number of accession and other documents as well.

The record group holds the files of three museum directors or curators of the late 20th century, including Mary C. Black (1970-1982), Holly Hotchner (1989-1994), Annette Blaugrund (1989-1995), and to a lesser extent, Jack Rutland (circa 1995-1999). These files, and other general museum files, largely concern exhibition planning, object surveys and inquiries, offers of purchases or donations, and the like. The curatorial staff's records and recommendations related to the Board Museum Committee are in this record group, though these are subject to restrictions; see the Access Restrictions note. The files also include administrative matters, such as budgets, grant proposals, staffing, etc.

In addition to the image files mentioned above, the record group holds other descriptive material for objects, including lantern slides of works by American and European artists, John Delafield's 1830 inventory of ancient coins and medals held by N-YHS, Leonidas Westervelt's inventory of his Jenny Lind Collection, and annotated manuscript versions of Catalogue of American Portraits in the New-York Historical Society (1974), Glass Paperweights of the New-York Historical Society (1974), and American Landscape and Genre Paintings in the New-York Historical Society (1982).

Access Restrictions

N-YHS restricts Board of Trustee and Executive Office files for 50 years following the departure of a President and Chief Executive Officer. This restriction pertains to portions of this record group. Any restrictions are further described in an Access Restrictions Note at the relevant series and subseries level.

Most of the materials in this collection are stored offsite. For more information on making arrangements to consult them, please visit www.nyhistory.org/library/visit.

Use Restrictions

Taking images of documents from the library collections for reference purposes by using hand-held cameras and in accordance with the library's photography guidelines is encouraged. As an alternative, patrons may request up to 20 images per day from staff.

Application to use images from this collection for publication should be made in writing to: Department of Rights and Reproductions, The New-York Historical Society, 170 Central Park West, New York, NY 10024-5194, rightsandrepro@nyhistory.org. Phone: (212) 873-3400 ext. 282.

Copyrights and other proprietary rights may subsist in individuals and entities other than the New-York Historical Society, in which case the patron is responsible for securing permission from those parties. For fuller information about rights and reproductions from N-YHS visit: https://www.nyhistory.org/about/rights-reproductions

Preferred Citation Note

This collection should be cited as the New-York Historical Society Museum Department records (NYHS-RG 20), The New-York Historical Society.

Location of Materials

Most of the materials in this collection are stored offsite. For more information on making arrangements to consult them, please visit www.nyhistory.org/library/visit.

Related Archival Materials Note

This finding aid relates to just one record group of the New-York Historical Society archives. For information about the other record groups and for overall information about the archives, please see the Guide to the New-York Historical Society Archives (NYHS RG Archives). Other record groups that are processed and available to researchers and are especially related to the New-York Historical Society Museum Department records (NYHS-RG 20) are as follows:

The N-YHS governance level minute books and so-called official papers include much material concerning N-YHS's museum matters, especially with regard to acquisitions. For years through 1938, see: New-York Historical Society management committee records (NYHS-RG 1). For years subsequent to 1938, see New-York Historical Society Board of Trustees records (NYHS-RG 18).

Museum accessions were documented, along with library accessions, in ledgers through 1938 and in 1943-1945. See New-York Historical Society collection accession registers (NYHS-RG 15).

N-YHS's central correspondence files include documents relating to all aspects of N-YHS operations, including the museum, from the institution's earliest days to 1982. See New-York Historical Society general correspondence (NYHS-RG 2).

Photographs of exhibitions, galleries, and objects, among other matter, can also be found in the New-York Historical Society pictorial archive (NYHS-RG 5).

Press releases, press kits and press coverage of exhibitions can also be found in New-York Historical Society press clippings (NYHS-RG 7) and New-York Historical Society public relations material (NYHS-RG 8).

Correspondence and other documents related to some museum objects were maintained in legal files, especially if the object was the result of a bequest or other gift. For example, those records include acquisition documents for objects received from Frederic De Peyster (Crawford's The Indian), Thomas J. Bryan, Katharine Prentis Murphy, Katherine Rogers (Rogers statuettes), and many others. See New-York Historical Society bequests, gifts & related matters (NYHS-RG 16).

Accruals Note

Further accruals to the record group are expected over time.

Collection processed by

Margaret Kaczorowski, Katherine Palm and Larry Weimer

About this Guide

This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on 2023-08-21 15:49:45 -0400.
Using Describing Archives: A Content Standard
Language: Description is written in: English, Latin script.

Processing Information Note

Various portions of records from the Museum Department were physically processed during the early 1990s to the early 2000s, mostly in terms of refoldering documents to archival folders. Related material was also gathered together in boxes, though some material remained in original storage boxes. In 2016, archivist Larry Weimer established an overarching arrangement for all the Museum Department records in the archive and, with archivist Margaret Kaczorowski and archival intern Katherine Palm, completed a baseline inventory and finding aid for the entire record group. Certain steps were taken with the material, including physical arrangement of folders and re-boxing, in order to facilitate its use by researchers, but an overall minimal level of physical processing was implemented. Consequently, much of the material remains in its original folders and unarranged within folders.

About 40 additional feet of material was transferred to the archives from the museum in 2017-2020; this was added to the finding aid in April-May 2021 by archivist Larry Weimer.

Repository

New-York Historical Society
New-York Historical Society
170 Central Park West
New York, NY 10024