The Smithsonian Institution

The Oral History ProgramAuthor(s): Paul CummingsSource: Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 17, No. 1 (1977), p. 26Published by: The Smithsonian InstitutionStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1556885 .

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26

The Oral

History Program Paul Cummings

The Oral History Program of the Ar- chives, begun in 1959, continues to ex- pand its activities. Interviews are con- ducted to augment manuscript collec- tions or, when individuals have no papers, to stand as first-person docu- ments of their life and thoughts. It has been several years since a review of the activities of this program has been pub- lished and with the increasing interest in and usage of the transcripts we can now refer researchers to the forthcoming updated edition of the Checklist of the Collections, wherein each interview will be listed.

In Detroit, the founding office of the Archives, Dennis Barrie began inter- viewing artists, museum directors, col- lectors, craftsmen, patrons, and histor- ians in 1973. The program has been aided by the Matilda Wilson Foundation and the Michigan Council on the Arts and has produced more than forty inter- views through that office. Among the interviewees are Henry Booth, Ray Scott, Philip Adams, Charles Biederman, Otto Wittmann, Gerome Kamrowski, Ellen Lanyon, Hawkins Ferry, Lydia Winston Malbin, Peggy De Salle, William Milli- ken, and Donald Morris.

Since 1971, approximately eighty interviews have been conducted by Rob- ert Brown in the Boston office and addi- tional tapes have been donated to the Archives by artists' organizations or other interviewers. Interviewees in the Boston area include Rudolf Arnheim, Nancy Douglas Bowditch, Harry Calla- han, Charles Childs, W. G. Constable, Edwin Dickinson, Henry S. Francis, Peter Grippe, Bartlett Hayes, Jr., Edward Landon, John Laurent, Boris Mirski, Charles H. Sawyer, Harold Tovish, and Hudson Walker.

The newest office of the Archives opened in 1971 in San Francisco. In 1974, Paul Karlstrom began interviews on the West Coast. Over two dozen have been produced with, among others, the following individuals: Joan Brown, Hans Burkhardt, Bruce Conner, Constance Lebrun Crown, Imogen Cunningham, Thomas Carr Howe, Edward Kienholz, Suzanne La Follette, John McLaughlin, and James Newman.

The following issues of the Ar- chives Journal contain precis of tran- scripts: January 1968, vol. 8, no. 1, seventy-eight interviews; January 1969, vol. 9, no. 1, sixty-five interviews; Jan- uary 1971, vol. 11, nos. 1-4, 306 inter- views; January 1974, vol. 14, no. 3, seventy-four interviews. The precis in-

clude the individual's name, dates, occu- pation, name of interviewer, date of interview, number of transcript pages, and a brief listing of topics discussed. Starting with volume 13, no. 3, 1973, each issue of the Journal carries a report of the Oral History Program.

The New York office from the ear- liest years of the Archives has had an interviewing program. Twenty-five or thirty interviews are completed during an average year's time. In just under ten years, more than 225 interviews have been conducted from this office by Paul Cummings. The interview program of the New York office has been aided by grants from the Ford Foundation, the Edith Halpert Foundation, the Wyeth Endowment for American Art, the New York State Council on the Arts, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The first quarter of 1977 was a quiet one. The only interview conducted was with Victoria Barr. During an interview of several sessions which produced ten or twelve hours of tape, Miss Barr dis- cusses her life, education, travels, teach- ing, friends in the art world, women's organizations of the 1960s, and her development as a painter. She comments frequently on her unique position as the daughter of two prominent art histo- rians, and how it has affected her activities.

Regional Office Reports

Boston

Robert Brown

Diverse groups of papers were received at our office during the first quarter of 1977, some of which are additions to earlier collections, while others repre- sent the beginnings of new acquisitions.

The largest group comprises the thousands of field notes and photographs produced by the Early American Por- traits Survey of the WPA, the most ambi- tious art-historical research undertaking of the Depression. Loaned to the Ar- chives for microfilming by the Com- monwealth of Massachusetts (repository of the records since the project's abrupt termination in 1941), the survey in- cludes the New England states and New York State. Though some of the field workers and many of the supervisors were trained professionals, most of the

local contributors were not. Despite an inevitable unevenness in the quality of the entries, the fact that no part of the survey, which catalogs hundreds of un- known paintings, has been published clearly warrants its microfilming now by the Archives. The Portraits Survey is only a small part of the immense quan- tity of art-historical data still preserved in the Historical Records Survey material.

Laurence Schmeckebier, art histo- rian, former director of the Cleveland Institute of Art, and dean of the School of Art at Syracuse University, has given to the Archives the first group of his papers, a large portion of which con- sists of correspondence, notes, drafts, and photographs for his book Ivan Mes- trovic: Sculptor and Patriot, 1959. The remaining part of the gift includes an extensively annotated copy of Schmeck- ebier's An Appreciation of Art, prepared in 1944 for the Armed Forces Institute as a study guide to the visual arts. Both the Mestrovic material and the notes to the guide are of interest because of the large amount of data not incorporated in the final publications.

Before his death in 1974, the mural- ist and painter, Paul Sample, gave or loaned to the Archives many documents concerning his career at the Otis Art Institute and Dartmouth College, and his association with David Siqueiros. Now the Archives has been given some fifty sketchbooks and drawings of Sample's as well as material document- ing his years as a Life magazine artist in the South Pacific during World War II.

Byron Thomas, painter and teacher, has loaned the Archives a second group of papers which includes his daily jour- nal (kept for forty years), an autobiog- raphy, and large scrapbooks of photo- graphs and exhibition notices. A teacher of painting and drawing at Cooper Union, Thomas frequently summered at the New Hope, Pennsylvania, art colony in the 1920s and 1930s. His documents, which were meticulously maintained by him, are extensive and precise.

In February, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the New England office displayed a selection of 19th-century documents to complement an exhibition of American painting. This was the sec- ond in a series of cooperative exhibitions held at the museum. In Rhode Island another exhibit of Archives material opened, also in February, at the Art As- sociation of Newport. The show, consist- ing of twenty-six photographs of artists and photo-facsimiles of documents plus a text panel describing the Archives' purpose and organization, will tour the area starting in April.

Our extensive survey of records of the visual arts in Rhode Island was cornm-

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.41 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 12:13:55 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions