Abstract
The Leo Castelli Gallery launched pivotal mid-twentieth-century artistic careers, including those of Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Although well-studied for its artistic impact, the Castelli archives—as well as those of other gallery artists such as Frank Stella and early collectors such as Burton and Emily Hall Tremaine—include a curious trove of artists’ financial records and related correspondence. This paper argues that these records form an “economic provenance” that is important both to both art market analysis and art history. This economic context is sometimes overlooked because of the contested relationship between art and markets. In this context, the archive can support new forms of financial analysis and expand the practice of art history and art markets, to better include the economic lives of artists and artworks. This essay explores the interdisciplinary and material nature of a specific universe of mid-twentieth-century American documents and offers a preliminary taxonomy for indexing artists’ financial records in digital and physical archives.
Recommended Citation
Whitaker, Amy C.
(2019)
"Economic Provenance: The Financial Analysis of Art Historical Records,"
Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: Vol. 6, Article 27.
Available at:
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol6/iss1/27
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