Pietro Perugino, St. Augustine with Members of the Confraternity of Perugia, c. 1500. Carnegie Museum of Art, Acquired through the generosity of Mrs. Alan M. Scaife.

Without libraries, museums would be flying blind. We rely on our fellow information hoarders professionals to help us solve problems, guide us to resources, and occasionally go for a drink. In so many ways, libraries are the left to our right, and one of the places this relationship is most visible is provenance research.

Provenance research used to be a much more labor-intensive affair. Auction catalogues, travel diaries, and other archival material were held by a few libraries, and if you could figure out which repository had the material you were looking for, getting access was another issue entirely. Many books and papers were held in closed holdings that could only be accessed by appointment and by application. The researcher then had to travel to the library, get the book, maybe do a translation, and do the research.

Continue reading →

A sampling of the paper trail that often accompanies an artwork once it enters the collection. Photo: Bryan Conley.

When an artwork enters a museum’s collection, it usually has an extensive paper trail, and possibly an electronic trail, but that documentation doesn’t stop after acquisition.

Museum staff, volunteers, and students often do additional research into the artwork’s history, provenance, or significance. All of that knowledge generates tons of paper-condition reports, loan agreements, conservation treatment reports, photocopies of auction catalogs, scholarly articles, incident reports, the occasional MA thesis rough draft, magazine articles, bibliographies, sticky notes, letters, copies of letters, deeds of gift, wills, acknowledgements of gifts, and, prior to the adaptation of electronic collection databases in the late 1990s, card catalogs. Yes, catalogs plural.

All of this paper gets sorted and copied into curatorial files, donor files, and meeting minutes as a way of creating a structured story of an artwork’s existence prior to its arrival at Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA) and the mechanism by which we assumed stewardship of it. Some files are huge and stuffed full of handwritten letters on heavy official paper, with mounds of photocopied articles. Others are svelte, and contain only the trusty catalog document, lovingly typewritten by registrars long ago (and not so long ago, as the typewriter at CMOA still gets weekly use). But each of these paper breadcrumbs helps build a compelling narrative.

Continue reading →