Modern Art and Oral History in the United States: A Revolution ...

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600 The Journal of American HistorySeptember 1991search projects. An immediate result of the conference was a project that collectedmore than three hundred interviews on New Deal federal arts programs. Later archivesundertakings, funded by grants from state arts councils, have examined regionaldevelopments in American art. Recent projects have recorded the experiencesof women and nonwhite artists. The archives' most recent project focuses on artistsin midcareer.4Strong regionally focused collections can be found at California State University,Long Beach; Claremont Graduate School; Columbia University; the Maryland HistoricalSociety; the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses of the University of California;and the University of Washington.5 The largest compilation of interviews withAfrican-American artists is at the Hatch-Billops Collection in New York City. TheChicago Historical Society and the Chicago office of the Archives of American Art,housed at and staffed by the Art Institute of Chicago, have focused on interviewingChicago's black artists, with emphasis on the influential social realist school thatflourished in that city's black community in the 1930s and 1940s. The Oral HistoryProgram at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), recently began a serieson African-American artists and gallery owners after noting that the black contributionto California's culturalife was virtually ignored in the numerous and extensivecollections dealing with the state's art. The southern California office of the Archivesof American Art has ongoing projects interviewing Latino artists and key figuresin the development of the women's art movement in the 1970s. Interviews at theHubbell Trading Post, Ganado, Arizona, are probably the single largest collectionin the United States relating to native American arts. The Hubbell interviews focuson Navaho weaving and other crafts, the influences an expanding market had ondesign and production techniques, and the interaction of Navaho and European-American artists who have settled in Arizona.The National Gallery of Art and the Museum of Modern Art have begun oralhistory projects to documen their institutional histories.6 These efforts deepen thehistorical record by adding information on debates and compromises behind decisions,often recorded only in the most perfunctory manner in board minutes. Animportant goal of the National Gallery project is to open institutional policies tointernal analysis by providing staff members with more detailed histories of the decisionsand personalities that shaped their current responsibilities. Importantopics4For a partial listing of interviews, see The Card Catalog of the Oral History Collections of the Archives ofAmerican Art (Wilmington, 1984). For a discussion of oral history collections on the federal arts, writers, andtheater projects, see Roy Rosenzweig and Barbara Melosh, "Government and the Arts: Voices from the New DealEra," Journal of American History, 77 (Sept. 1990), 596-608.5 For information and catalogs of collections, contact the Oral History Archives, California State University,Long Beach; the Oral History Program, Claremont Graduate School, Claremont, California; the Oral History ResearchOffice, Columbia University, New York; the Reference Division, Library, Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore;the Regional Oral History Office, University of California, Berkeley; the Oral History Program, Universityof California, Los Angeles; and the Manuscripts Collection, University Libraries, University of Washington, Seattle.This essay considers only archival oral history collections, but published interviews are a mainstay of art journalism.6 The National Gallery also houses a collection of interviews pertaining to the Index of American Desigr. TheRussell Lynes Collection in the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, contains thirty-two interviewsconducted by Lynes for Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art(New York, 1973).
Oral History 601for museum-related interviews include the influence collectors have had on museumpolicies, as well as the changes brought about by the increasing professionalizationof museum practice. In 1940 very few curators had advanced degrees; by 1990 anM.A., if not a Ph.D., had become a prerequisite for employment. Museum historiescan reveal how curators asserted their rights to shape exhibitions around their personalcritical perspectives. In related series, the Getty Art History Information Programhas used oral history to examine the working methodology of art historians,while the Getty Center for the History of Art and the Humanities and the UCLAOral History Program have initiated a joint project investigating the developmentof consensual standards in education, research, exhibition, and publication in theart historical field.7 Interaction of artist and curator is also a focus in the collectionof interviews on the development of photography as a fine art at the Center forCreative Photography at the University of Arizona.Oral Sources as EvidenceOral history collections have thrown a wide net across the field of practice. Not onlyartists but also those involved in collecting, interpreting, selling, and promotingart have been interviewed. Following more general social interest in gender andmulticultural issues, oral historians have collected interviews with women and nonwhiteartists. Oral history in the arts, from its early days in the 1940s, has beenconcerned with expanding the definition of what is significant. The regional andlocal orientation of most oral history projects promoted efforts to show, in the wordsof one interviewer, that while her community might not have witnessed anythingas exciting as the birth of impressionism, it was never mired in the Dark Ages either.8As a result, a substantial majority of oral history interviewsthe visual arts havebeen with artists, critics, and exhibitors outside New York City. Even the Archivesof American Art has taped approximately two-thirds of its interviews with figuresfrom outside the New York area. The picture of modern art found in interviewsis considerably different from that presented in most surveys of twentieth-centuryAmerican art. Few interviewees attained international prominence, but they hadfull careers as practicing artists and teachers. Oral history collections give a senseof the variety of experience and the attitudes prevalent among the rank and fileof professional artists at various times in this century.Not surprisingly, regionally based artists are obsessed with the New York art scene,the center where success is ultimately determined. The choice not to be at the centerhas to be explained and shown not to be prima facie evidence of failure. Lorser Feitelson,who relocated to Los Angeles in 1927 after having lived in New York and Paris,suggested in a 1964 interview how artists must negotiate their relationship to NewYork. He recalled that he disliked his new home "violently in the beginning, because7Complete transcripts for most of the interviews conducted for Marilyn Schmitt, ed., Object, Image, Inquiry:The Art Historian at Work (Santa Monica, 1988) are available at the Department of Special Collections, the GettyCenter for the History of Art and the Humanities, Santa Monica, California.8 Betty Blum of the Art Institute of Chicago discussed this with me in a telephone conversation, November 1990.
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Modern Art and Oral History in the United States: A Revolution ...

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