Art Dealers' Papers Come to Light Online: Completed Digitization of Brummer Gallery Records

43 E. 57th St. Gallery Photo Album: [photograph no. 03]. Street view of the New York Brummer Gallery

«I'm very pleased to share that Watson Library has recently finished the bulk of in-house digitizing and have posted online a considerable amount of archival materials from the Brummer Gallery Records, completing a yearlong project generously funded by the Kress Foundation. This is the first of a series of posts dedicated to the papers of the galleries of Joseph, Ernest, and Imre Brummer, now housed in The Cloisters Archives.»

Personal photograph no. 089: [Ernest Brummer, Egypt 1912]

43 E. 57th St. Gallery Photo Album: [photograph no. 12]. View from inside the New York Brummer Gallery

The Brummer digitization project began in the fall of 2012. (To learn more about the Brummer Galleries, the scope and content—and first phases of digitization—of this collection, see Cloisters librarian Michael Carter's Highlights post here and the finding aid here.) The portion of records on which I have focused spans several fragile sales ledgers and inventory binders, as well as six very full archival boxes, which house thousands of original manuscripts and additional annotated materials valuable for scholarly research.

The aspects I was fortunate to have been assigned represented the careful review and digitization of old photographs and key personal and business documents of Joseph and Ernest Brummer. The project's workflow included further editing; approving and uploading the new digital files; cross-referencing and matching up additional miscellaneous materials with existing files and object numbers (in order to improve search results); and, finally, adding descriptive metadata online for the archival materials and related index cards—with transcription and ad hoc translation work along the way! Today, this unique collection of documents (a treasure trove for historians), once only available onsite at the Cloisters, is now easily accessible and searchable online for all to explore.

Ernest Brummer Correspondence, 1913-1924 (loose alphabetical order): Letter from Nov. 18, 1913

Correspondence (includes correspondence between Joseph and Ernest) 1932-1934. One of several sales receipts

The kinds of fascinating artifacts I've held in my hands have been as diverse as the subjects and stories they reveal. As the finding aid notes, the boxes contain all sorts of gallery-related correspondence, receipts, cablegrams, personal letters, envelopes, notes, and postcards, etc., as well as Brummer family passports and photographs taken in Paris, Cairo, Hungary, and beyond, plus shots of the former New York gallery on East 57th Street (pictured above), and even personal artwork by Joseph Brummer (included below).

Personal photograph no. 121: [Ida Heller Brummer ("Mama")], drawing [by Joseph Brummer?]

Personal photograph no. 128: Sculpture by Joseph Brummer

It's worth noting that most of the material is in a rather fragile state: large binders with extremely acidic and brittle paper; very old photographs and negatives; beautiful letterhead stationery and handwritten notes on fine, folded "onion" paper; or loose pages with faint pencil scribbles and sketches, which are easily smudged and therefore lost. So, besides contributing to the Museum's growing digital collections—providing quick and convenient online access and search capability—I view the work of digitizing and effectively preserving the materials, using various resources, systems, and pieces of equipment here at Watson, as a challenging task, but ultimately a very important and personally gratifying one.

Samples from subseries, Joseph Brummer Personal Files I. Correspondence, passports, death notices, etc., including documents of Joseph's dating back to his youth, ca. 1883 (left and middle) and Beata Brummer's passport issued in 1925 (right)

In the end, this small slice of the collection represents about five thousand more digital files to discover (with too many pieces of metadata to even count), so choosing just a few to highlight here was not easy! Following the MetPublications and the Costume Institute's Digital Collections, the Brummer Gallery Records rank as our third most visited digital collection, with over 8,400 page views in September alone, averaging about fourteen minutes per visit—well above the average time spent on standard pages in the digital collections—so we're already seeing a great deal of engagement with the material.

Finally, we are adding still more material and metadata, creating additional entry points and enhanced site usability, and will explore even more of the boxes in future blog posts, so stay tuned! In the meantime, please continue to explore, engage with, and comment on the collection, especially if you have insights on any of the correspondence or referenced art objects.