Preface and Acknowledgments

Herbert, Robert L.; Apter, Eleanor S.; Kenney, Elise K.

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Preface and Acknowledgments

Robert L. Herbert (Editor), Eleanor S. Apter (Editor), Elise K. Kenney (Editor)

Description: The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalogue...

The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalogue Raisonné

~The Collection of the Société Anonyme was given to Yale University in 1941 by its founders and trustees, Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp. Until 1950 Miss Dreier continued to add a few works purchased in the name of the Société Anonyme; she also gave objects from her private collection and solicited gifts from artists and friends....

Author

Robert L. Herbert (Editor), Eleanor S. Apter (Editor), Elise K. Kenney (Editor)

PublisherYale University Art Gallery

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.ix-x

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00158.003

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-16882

Preface and Acknowledgments

The Collection of the Société Anonyme was given to Yale University in 1941 by its founders and trustees, Katherine S. Dreier and Marcel Duchamp. Until 1950 Miss Dreier continued to add a few works purchased in the name of the Société Anonyme; she also gave objects from her private collection and solicited gifts from artists and friends. The Société was formally dissolved on 30 April 1950, and the catalogue of the collection was published that summer. It was completed through Dreier’s long effort, with the steady collaboration of Marcel Duchamp and the editorial guidance of George Heard Hamilton. That catalogue is a marvelous assortment of texts whose historical importance and charm are evident to its fortunate readers. It was not, however, a catalogue raisonné. No histories of individual objects were given, measurements were often only approximate, titles were sometimes Dreier’s improvisations, and brief references to the acquisition of the objects depended more upon Dreier’s unreliable memory than historical fact.

For these reasons alone a catalogue raisonné of the collection is of value, even though its marshalling of factual evidence has tended to displace the beguiling eccentricities of the 1950 publication. The strongest justification for a new catalogue, however, was provided in 1953 by the arrival at Yale of many works—nearly three hundred—from Dreier’s private collection. She had acquired most of these with the same motives and interests that underlay the Société Anonyme Collection. Some of them had in fact been shown in Société exhibitions, and a few, confused in Dreier’s records, had once been considered part of the Société collection. The most useful catalogue, therefore, is one that combines the Dreier bequest with the Société collection. A few moments’ study of the new catalogue will convince the reader that it documents a cohesive ensemble.

In 1953, when the residue of Dreier’s estate came to Yale, it consisted of several parts. These were dispersed among university agencies. Works of art went to the Yale University Art Gallery, and most of them were duly accessioned; a number of unattributed and “minor” works were set aside, to be accessioned later if future curators thought them worthy. These were separately housed in the gallery and have only been accessioned during the work on the present catalogue. Publications from Dreier’s library, and that of the Société Anonyme, were scattered throughout the university, and those that duplicated university holdings were sold. No lists were kept, moreover, so it has not been possible to reconstitute the library. This dispersion was a tragedy that no librarian would now countenance, but in 1953 the events of the previous three decades did not yet seem to be part of history, and it did not occur to anyone to keep all these materials together. Dreier’s manuscripts and correspondence were partially sorted in 1953 and placed in the Rare Book Room (now Beinecke Library). Of the balance of her papers, some were added to the curatorial files of the Yale Art Gallery, and others, believed merely to be preparatory texts for the 1950 catalogue, were placed in storage.

The idea for a new catalogue came in 1973 when, seeking answers to questions about the collection, I located this stored portion of the archive and discovered that it contained a number of letters and a great many catalogues, pamphlets, periodicals, photographs, and manuscripts. Amidst these papers, Dreier or her correspondents had inserted works of art (sometimes as Christmas or New Year’s greetings). Further inquiries disclosed a treasure trove of documents in the gallery’s curatorial files for the years 1941 to 1950. When all the surviving archives were assembled in one place, it was possible to correlate the information scattered among them and to begin the new catalogue.

My colleague Eleanor S. Apter was principally responsible for sifting the archive and for developing the repertories of information essential to the catalogue. She constructed a history of the exhibitions of the Société Anonyme, no easy task in view of the nature of the evidence, which was dispersed throughout thousands of letters, programs, shipping receipts, and the like. She assembled evidence for Dreier’s acquisitions and ascertained most of what can be known about Dreier’s private collection (so often interwoven with the Société Anonyme’s). Mrs. Apter also did fundamental bibliographical research on myriad Société objects and established exhibition histories and bibliographies for a number of artists, including Duchamp, Duchamp-Villon, and Stella, who have the most complicated and lengthy entries in the catalogue.

Elise K. Kenney, my other coeditor, first took on the task of verifying and adding to the documentation for individual objects and artists: bibliographies, exhibition histories, dimensions, inscriptions, and so forth. She then put the separate texts and lists together to form the final manuscript and acted, in effect, as its copy editor before it was turned over to the Yale University Press. This required that rarest kind of precision, accuracy in many domains at once. Since Mrs. Kenney disguised her labor with seemingly effortless grace, her collaborators accepted her meticulousness as a special gift. They still regard it as a gift but recognize the extraordinary industry and self-denial which lay behind it.

Our associate Ruth L. Bohan, who worked with us for fifteen months, gave her time principally to American artists. She sifted the Société archives with that most exceptional of combinations, thoroughness and good judgment, and she brought to her texts an enviable knowledge of American cultural history.

Rosalyn Deutsche’s fine sense of language gave consistency to artists’ biographies and interpretive texts patched together by many hands. Her gifts are such that she went far beyond her initial mandate and added historical insights at every turn. She also searched out and contributed many pieces of information to the dossiers of artists other than those whose entries she edited.

Daniel Robbins came to Yale as visiting professor for one term and devoted a seminar to the Société Anonyme. He counselled graduate students in the methods particular to research on twentieth century art; to the catalogue he contributed an exemplary group of interpretive texts and biographies, principally on cubist painters and sculptors.

Of the advanced graduates who worked on the catalogue, Lesley Baier and Nancy J. Troy achieved special distinction. Their work was blessed with unusual quality in all regards—sharpness of judgment, thoroughness, and clear writing—and it appears here substantially as first written.

My own task has been that of general editor. I have been supplicant, cajoler, teacher, learner, collaborator, apparatchik, and often, I fear, nuisance. I am chiefly responsible for the introduction and for the historical content of the biographies and interpretive commentaries; I have written many, and rewritten most. However, responsibility does not mean sole authorship. The work of Eleanor Apter and Elise Kenney appears in every artist’s entry, and that of Ruth Bohan and Rosalyn Deutsche, in many.

Graduate students contributed to this project in several ways. Some participated in two seminars that I conducted on the Société Anonyme, one devoted to cataloguing, the other to various issues not necessarily related directly to this publication. Most student research was undertaken in the four summers from 1976 to 1979, with funds raised by Alan Shestack. Mrs. Apter and I worked with the Société Anonyme and Dreier archives while the graduates pursued research in libraries at Yale and elsewhere. Only gradually would an artist’s dossier be completed, invariably the work of several researchers. After a certain stage of progress, circumstances permitted a few graduates to concentrate on the nearly final phase of the work for some artists, and in these cases their names appear at the end of the entries. In most cases, however, graduate research, widely dispersed, could not be acknowledged in this way. With my fellow editors, I wish to put on record our indebtedness to the following young colleagues, members of the graduate body at Yale at the time they worked with us: Adrienne Atkinson, Lesley Baier, Susan Ball, Mirka Beneš, Jeffrey Blanchard, Anna Chave, Donald Crafton, Dorothea Dietrich-Boorsch, Hilarie Faberman, Leila Kinney, E. Anne McCauley, Margaret Nesbit, Peter Nisbet, Kimerly Rorschach, Franklin Sayre, Veda Semarne, Kenneth Silver, Marc Simpson, Marcie Freedman Slepian, Nancy J. Troy, Scott Wilcox, and Fronia Wissman. In addition, Louise G. Scott and Dorothea Dietrich-Boorsch worked with us for several months as part-time researchers, and a succession of bursary aides assisted in all kinds of clerical and bibliographical work: Aaron Betsky, Sommers Draper, Miriam Lewin, Nancy London, and Eric Naegel.

Alan Shestack, director of the Yale University Art Gallery, supported the catalogue project from its inception and was the ideal colleague: he left us to our own devices, while he provided us with as much help and money as he could find (never enough, but more than we had hoped for). The entire staff of the gallery collaborated with us on this enterprise, their patience being as much appreciated as their skill. We would like especially to thank those who extended extra courtesies to us: in the director’s office, Diane Hoose, Michael Komanecky, Estelle Miehle, and Ethel Neumann; in the print room, James D. Burke (former curator), Richard S. Field, Rosemary Hoffmann, and Lucia Iannone; in the registrar’s office, Jane Krieger, Rosalie Reed, and Fernande E. Ross (former registrar); in the superintendent’s office, Fred D’Amico, Robert C. Soule, and Robert M. Soule. New photographs, including all color work and about three hundred black-and-white photographs, have been taken by Joseph Szaszfai and his collaborator, Geri T. Mancini; Louisa Cunningham and Diane Hoose facilitated our photo orders.

Elsewhere at Yale, we have particularly benefitted from the many kindnesses of the following: in the Department of the History of Art, Nancy Walchli; in the Art Library, Judy Bloomgarden, Helen Chillman, Robert C. Kaufmann (former librarian), and Nancy Lambert; in Sterling Memorial Library, Donald B. Engley, Lisa Grinold, and Louis Volpe; in Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Donald C. Gallup (former curator), David E. Schoonover, and Anne Whelpley. Our collaborators at the Yale University Press have been unfailingly cooperative and efficient: Barbara Hofmaier (who edited the entire manuscript with utmost care), Judy Metro, and Jay Williams.

Outside New Haven, our indebtedness was extended to librarians, archivists, collectors, scholars, and museum colleagues far too numerous to be mentioned. Special thanks are given at the conclusion of some artists’ entries, and in addition we would like to offer warmest appreciation to Robert L. Bercham, William Camfield, Janis Ekdahl, Gladys S. Fabre, Miriam Gabo, Anne d’Harnoncourt, Linda D. Henderson, Wulf Herzogenrath, Harry Holtzman, J. M. Joosten, Harry L. Koenigsberg, Jan Lancaster, Stephan Lion, Kynaston McShine, Hilda S. Mosse, Krisztina Passuth, Sandra L. Petrie, Trude J. Schiff, Michael Shapiro, Aaron Sheon, Roberta K. Tarbell, Richard L. Tooke, and Judith Zilczer.

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