100 Years of Art History at Your Fingertips

Libraries used to be repositories of books and collections that were held close, in some cases available only to preapproved researchers by appointment. The East Hampton Library is embracing a more contemporary model, wherein its collection is accessible to researchers in their homes and offices. 

For several years, it has scanned items in its Long Island Collection as well as many decades of issues of The Star. And while far from completed, its new Local Artist Research Archive, which launched on Jan. 23, is already well on its way to becoming a crucial reference source for anyone who wants to dig deep into the East End’s artistic heritage.

Dennis Fabiszak, the library’s director, said recently that the digital archive so far has about 5,000 documents, with another 45,000 still to scan. “It’s show catalogs, postcards, letters, magazine articles, slides, personal notes, photographs not available anywhere else — some great stuff and a lot of things people have never seen.” A document can consist of one page or several if it is a long article or exhibition catalog.

Although the Long Island Collection has kept some artist files over the years, the bulk of this database will be from Guild Hall’s archives. The museum and performing arts center donated its archives to the library before it began the renovation of its building and theater several years ago.

The digital archive currently includes items from 200 of some 1,000 artists. Mr. Fabiszak said he hopes to have the rest finished by this summer. “It will make it much easier to really retrieve what users want.”

Although it is easy to search for and cross-reference specific names, so much more can be gleaned by simply paging through the archive. In just minutes of scratching the surface, an unfamiliar name claiming several documents led to a discovery of Albert York, a once-prominent East Hampton artist.

In his youth, York studied art in Toronto and Detroit and worked with Raphael Soyer. The archive contains reviews of his paintings, mostly landscapes, from Art in America and Arts magazines, exhibition opening announcements, and an appraisal by Fairfield Porter that was significant enough to be included in an anthology of Porter’s writings edited by Rackstraw Downes.

Porter noted that York was popular among a small group of cognoscenti and, despite his real talent as a painter, was marginalized by the greater art world because of a sense that he was old-fashioned. “Instead of mural-sized and bland, they are small and intense,” Porter said of York’s paintings. Further, “they do not contain the hectic emotion of expressionistic paintings. . . . They contain an emotion that he has discovered outside of himself.”

For someone who has dedicated a number of years to familiarizing herself with the broad range of artists who worked here throughout history, as this writer has, this was a meaningful discovery, but it didn’t stop there. Page after page of archival entries revealed unfamiliar names: Diana Chang, Antonio Ciccone, Faith-dorian Wright, Warren Brandt, and so on. It was fascinating to click on their bios, their notes to Guild Hall, the articles written about them, and the announcements of shows of their work. 

Guild Hall was and is uniquely positioned to be a repository for such detailed and thorough history. It is the only institution on the East End that has claimed “artist members” throughout its existence. That is not to say that museums like the Parrish did not support local artists through exhibitions, acquisitions, and research. York was actually included in several of the Parrish’s group exhibitions over the years, and one of his paintings from the permanent collection is currently on view there.

Brandt, who died in 2002, also has an extensive listing in the Parrish database, an undertaking that is more interpretive in its approach as opposed to archival. A resident of Water Mill for several decades, he was friends with Franz Kline and Roy Lichtenstein, according to the Parrish, which also has a couple of his paintings. 

But Chang, Ciccone, Faith-dorian Wright? These are names of artists who were familiar to the community at the time of their activity but have since faded from collective memory. They, too, however, are part of this history, and having their artistic endeavors back in circulation could help deepen our understanding of in the recent and not-so-recent past.

Although the lesser-known artists offer some of the best moments on the site, there is no dismissing the importance of the material related to some of the most famous artists associated with the region. Andy Warhol’s documents span several pages in the database, as do Willem de Kooning’s. Typing their names in the search field yields their own documents as well as other artists’ that reference them.

Since this is a work in progress, Jackson Pollock’s documents have not yet made it into the archive, nor have Roy Lichtenstein’s or Franz Kline’s. A simple search will yield other artists’ documents that reference them, but nothing else. 

There is no real order to the scanning process, and as a result it is very democratic. The boxes of paper files went into a storage facility out of order and are emerging the same way. “We’re not handpicking artists” according to perceived importance, either, Mr. Fabiszak said. “We’re going from the front of the box to the back of the box in order.”

All of the new scanning has required the library to acquire new equipment and hire temporary employees. The library has benefited from a bequest by Claus Hoie, a fund-raising event, and a $4,000 individual contribution. Further donations would speed up the process, Mr. Fabiszak said. “I would love to have five scanning stations and have people scanning all day long.”

The artist archive is only one of several projects the library has pursued or is pursuing. Staff members continue to expand the Long Island Collection with material they have acquired or borrowed from other sources. “The collection is huge and has as many items as the library itself,” Mr. Fabiszak said. When they find something that relates to the collection from another source, such as a library or historical society, they offer to scan the item and then send it back with a high-resolution digital image that they can both use for their websites.

“We’re working on better ways for people to use the collection and to use it from where they are,” he said. “We love people to come visit, but we want to be convenient to people, too.”