Photograph of Francis Henry Taylor
As The Met and Watson Library celebrate their 150th anniversary this year, we at In Circulation have been highlighting key people and moments from throughout the Museum libraries' storied history. This week we would like to diverge slightly from our historical narrative to celebrate the recent completion of a massive joint in-house digitization project by Watson Library and Museum Archives: the Francis Henry Taylor Records.
Taylor, who served as director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1940 to 1955, is credited with making The Met more accessible to its visitors. One of his first decisions upon arrival at the Museum was to remove turnstiles that had long been in place at the Museum entrance. Under his leadership, the Museum tripled its membership and daily attendance figures rose dramatically. Taylor was also committed to expanding audiences through radio, television, and off-site art exhibitions. Taylor was highly regarded for strengthening The Met educational programming and public outreach, and he oversaw an ambitious program of loan exhibitions that enabled thousands of Met visitors to view masterworks from European collections. These notable successes landed Taylor on the cover of Time magazine, which in 1952 described him as an "epigrammatical, blunt showman" and "Custodian of the Attic" of America's finest art treasures. Taylor described his role to the magazine's reporter as "to look to the future rather than the past." Because Taylor was so keenly focused on broadening audience engagement with The Met, it seems fitting that we should make the documentation of this visionary leader openly accessible to researchers worldwide.
Lydia Bond Powell, "Television and the Metropolitan Museum of Art," 1945, Box 15 Folder 6, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives
The digitized office files of Taylor's directorship—which are full-text searchable and also discoverable through a detailed archival finding aid—include correspondence, meeting minutes, reports, memoranda, architectural drawings, and ephemera. The majority of the correspondence concerns Taylor's role as liaison between The Met and other museum directors, the Museum's staff and trustees, government agencies, educators, and arts and civic organizations. There is significant material related to architectural redesign and administrative reorganization of Met buildings, educational programs, emergency preparedness, as well as Taylor's involvement in the International Council of Museums (ICOM), his role as mentor to smaller American institutions, and engagements with various educational, government, and charitable organizations.
Organization Chart of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1943, Francis Henry Taylor, "Where is the Metropolitan Museum Going?,” Box 15 Folder 15, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives
Another focus of the records is Taylor's leadership of The Met during wartime, when he initiated the shipment of over fifteen-thousand of the Museum's most valuable works of art to safe storage at Whitemarsh Hall, near Philadelphia.
Evacuated artworks in storage at Whitemarsh Hall, near Philadelphia, February 1944, MMA photograph by Reuben Goldberg
To continue to attract visitors while many iconic Met artworks were offsite for safekeeping, Taylor mounted temporary loan exhibitions and concerts.
In the post-war years, Taylor worked with the U.S. State Department to facilitate exhibitions in American museums featuring artworks loaned from European institutions. The series included "French Tapestries" (1947), "Paintings from the Berlin Museums" (1948), "Van Gogh: Paintings and Drawings"(1949), and "Art Treasures from the Vienna Collections" (1950).
Check list (partial) of "Paintings from the Berlin Museums" exhibition, 1948, Box 16 Folder 2, Francis Henry Taylor Records, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives
To make Taylor's office files accessible for online study today, Met archivists began by physically organizing and describing the documents in a detailed inventory. Next, in collaboration with staff in the Museum's Watson Library, the entire collection was scanned in-house over the course of three years by one of our star scanning technicians, Liz Legere. Between the archival master files we store in the Museum's back-end digital asset management system and the production files we add to the Digital Collections, Liz generated over 28,000 files! We then matched the data from the finding aid to the production files, and voila—over 14,000 pages of content are available to researchers anywhere in the world. Most of it, with the exception of any handwritten materials, is full-text searchable. All of this work was generously supported by a grant from the Leon Levy Foundation.
The Museum Archives and Watson Library are pleased to make the Francis Henry Taylor Records easily accessible to a global audience through this new online presentation, and we encourage you to explore and learn about many aspects of Met history that they document, including artwork acquisitions, special exhibition planning, building projects, cultural diplomacy, fundraising, and more. We hope that sharing this knowledge and information from out of the Museum's past will inspire you to make new connections with Met collections and programs today.
For more in this series on the history of The Met libraries, click here.
