From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.
Art fairs are most often prized for the works on show, but they also offer an opportunity to exchange ideas. At a panel discussion at TEFAF in Maastricht last month, archives were the subject of conversation. Everyone I told about the panel fell into one of two camps: either they were busy working out a response that hid their incipient narcolepsy or they became fascinated to a level of extraordinary geekiness. Neither reaction was particularly reassuring.
Yet what emerged through the discussion was the idea that the more you look at something the more fascinating it becomes – not unlike a panel painted by Duccio, say. Yes, archives largely consist of dry documents tidied away on shelves and in record boxes that are visited – if they are visited at all – by researchers who like to hide away among the stacks. But they are also the engines that drive our appreciation for art. One person’s piece of marginalia is another’s gateway to history.
During the discussion, Julia Alexander, president of the Kress Foundation, mentioned that her organisation had funded the digitisation of the Archives of American Art. This archive holds the work of the Monuments Men – the Allied service personnel and civilians who, from 1943, took on the job of rescuing and preserving cultural property looted by the Nazis. In the archive is a list of works held in the collection of Hermann Göring. It is not Göring’s own list but one most likely compiled by a Monuments Men secretary. It shows how they would have encountered (and reacted to) this ill-gotten collection at the time, and so acts as a relatively unmediated portal to a particular moment.
While readers and film-goers are entranced by stories that promise to connect us directly with the past, the truth is that archives are the closest thing we have to a time machine. These old scraps of paper and other ephemera are a bridge to the people we are trying to reach, remember and understand. Far from being monuments to academic tedium, archives show how the world joins up; not to make it smaller but to show how large and interesting it can be. Today, many archives make a song and dance about being accessible to the public. We shouldn’t dismiss public access, but it must be remembered that the public will never use an archive in the way an academic does. Indeed, the academic work is probably all the more necessary in order to uncover the stories that excite the public. It turns out, then, that experts do still have their uses; in the realm of art history, they serve to make the world a more interesting place.
From the April 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.