Collecting Information on Collectors (Via art market monitor)

Collecting Information on Collectors:

"“The history of collecting is so deliciously interdisciplinary,” says Inge Reist, who directs the fledgling Center for the History of Collecting in America at the Frick Collection in New York. “It opens so many doors.” The center was established in 2007, after years of planning, “to stimulate awareness and study of the formation of fine and decorative arts collections from colonial times to the present, while asserting the relevance of this subject to art and cultural history.”"

So far, the archives directory encompasses about 5,000 collections in 500 repositories documenting the lives and activities of 1,500 American collectors. Researchers who visithttp://research.frick.org/directoryweb/home.php find, for example, that information about New York taxi tycoon Robert C. Scull and his wife, Ethel (known as “Spike”) — who collected contemporary art voraciously in the 1960s and scandalized the art world when they cashed in at auction in 1973 — is available in interviews, papers and record books at the Archives of American Art in Washington and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.