Grace M. Mayer papers, 1891-1960 (bulk 1932-1958), 48 boxes (21 linear feet) Museum of the City of New York 1220 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10029 Telephone: 212-534-1672 Fax: 212-423-0758 [email protected] www.mcny.org © Museum of the City of New York. All rights reserved. Processed by Celia Hartmann, 2009; with additions in 2010. Finding aid reformatted by Lindsay Turley, March 2013. Description is in English Descriptive Summary Creator: Grace M. Mayer (1901 - 1996) Dates: 1891-1960 (bulk 1932-1958) Abstract: The Grace Mayer Files include day-to-day external incoming and outgoing correspondence related to researching, acquiring, preserving, exhibiting, and publicizing images of New York while she served as Curator of the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photography at the Museum of the City of New York; her files documenting exhibitions she organized at the Museum and as loans to other institutions; and documentation of the acquisition, appraisal, preservation, exhibition, research, and publicity of the Harry T. Peters and Gerald LeVino collections of Currier & Ives images at the Museum. Extent: 48 boxes (21 linear feet) Accession numbers: not applicable; institutional archives Language: English Biographical Note Grace M. Mayer was born in New York City in 1901, where she was educated privately and at Columbia University. After working briefly for a physician affiliated with Mt. Sinai Hospital, she began her career at the Museum of the City of New York as a volunteer in 1930. She quickly succeeded Robert Sinclair as Curator of Prints, and headed the renamed Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photography until 1958. While at the Museum, Mayer acquired, sometimes after years of patient nurturing and polite persistence, major collections of iconic New York print and photographic images. These include works by Berenice Abbott, Jacob Riis, Currier & Ives, the Gottscho-Schleisner firm, Wurts Brothers, LOOK Magazine, and Byron and Co. The latter is the subject of her 1958 book Once Upon a City: New York from 1890 to 1910 as Photographed by Byron, and Described by Grace M. Mayer. Mayer credited her interactions with individual collectors, print dealers, gallery owners, curators, and photographers for training her in “how to use prints and how to make them speak and tell a story,” according to a 1970 oral history conducted for the Archives of American Art. She was an original member of the Print Council of America, founded in 1956, in which she represented historical and museum collecting. With her assistance, Marshall Davidson’s 1949 book, Life in America and John Kouwenhoven’s 1953 Columbia Historical Portrait of New York served as guides to the extensive New York iconography in the Museum’s collections. Through her service on the boards of organizations such as Village Art Center, whose annual photography exhibits she judged, she expanded the popularity and reach of photography as an artistic medium. Under her aegis, the Museum of the City of New York was the first major museum to exhibit photography and the works of individual, often young, photographers including Abbott, John Albok, Alexander Alland, Shirley Burden, and Todd Webb. After taking a leave of absence to work with Edward Steichen on the Museum of Modern Art’s 1957/1958 exhibition, “70 Photographers Look at New York,” she resigned from the Museum of the City of New York in 1959 to serve as Steichen’s personal assistant in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art. She was named Curator in 1962. Retiring in 1968, she returned as volunteer Curator of the Edward Steichen Archive. For the rest of her life, she continued to promote photography as an art form and the careers of individual photographers, and to work on an unpublished biography of Steichen. In 1990 she received the International Center for Photography’s Infinity Award for Curatorial Achievement. The Museum of the City of New York recognized her accomplishments in its 1995 exhibition “Curating New York: The Legacy of Grace M. Mayer”. She died in New York City in 1996. Scope and Content The Grace Mayer papers include day-to-day external incoming and outgoing (in the form of carbon copies) correspondence related to her curatorial work, and a few internal memos; her files documenting exhibitions she was responsible for mounting at the Museum, or collaborated on as loans to other institutions; and documentation of the acquisition, appraisal, preservation, exhibition, research, and publicity of the Harry T. Peters and Gerald LeVino collections of Currier & Ives images. The latter include materials about the last living Currier & Ives artist, Louis Maurer. Series I (Correspondence) and II (Exhibits) complement each other in various ways. The Correspondence files include letters to and from donors and artists, often documenting their first contact with Mayer; some artists are also represented in the Exhibit files relevant to their work. Some exhibits are mentioned only in the Correspondence files, which serve as the collection’s sole evidence of them. The Correspondence provides an overview of the variety of collectors, artists, dealers, and potential lenders and donors with whom Mayer was in contact; the Exhibit files document the particular groups or individuals associated with specific topics or collections that she exhibited. Although the collection includes Mayer’s correspondence related to the exhibit of Jacob Riis’s images (through Alexander Alland’s contemporary prints in “The Battle with the Slum” [1947]), it does not document the Museum’s acquisition of the original glass negatives from his son, Roger Williams Riis. The collection includes her extensive correspondence with Percy Byron, but no editorial material related to her 1958 publication Once Upon a City. A note on her file mentions that she removed “500 clippings” about the book to her home office. The collection also does not include any drafts or other material related to her other written output: her yearly, often droll and self- deprecating, contributions to the Museum’s Annual Report and/or Bulletin. Arrangement The collection is arranged in three series, corresponding to the arrangement of files in Mayer’s office cabinets: I. Correspondence II. Exhibits (with an Appendix: Chronology of Exhibits) III. Currier & Ives (organized into three subseries) III.A. Collections III.B. Exhibits III.C. Background and publicity The original order of documents has been retained. Oversize materials have been removed to four separate oversized (OS) boxes, noted in the container lists; a removal notice is placed in an item’s original location. Series Descriptions Series I. Correspondence, 1929-1960 (bulk 1932-1958) Scope and Content Series I includes both incoming and outgoing letters and other materials showing the range of Mayer’s contacts, duties, and interests as she fulfilled the curatorial tasks of researching, acquiring, preserving, exhibiting, and publicizing images of New York. Her correspondents include owners of objects seeking to appraise or sell them, potential and actual donors of materials, seekers of information about New York places or events documented in the Museum’s iconographic collections, as well as artists, collectors, gallery owners, and her fellow curators at other institutions on whom she relied for expert opinions, and vice versa. Among the artists represented are Ludwig Bemelmans, who used images of Central Park in his murals for the Hotel Carlyle’s Bar; Charles Dana Gibson; the widow of painter Reginald Marsh; and cartoonist Bill Mauldin as well as New Yorker regulars Charles Addams, Helen Hokinson, Rea Irvin, and James Thurber. Photographers include John Albok, Alexander Alland, Shirley Burden, Samuel Gottscho and William Schleisner, Erich Hartmann, Lewis Hine, Wayne Miller, Beecher Ogden, Edward Steichen, Todd Webb, and Anne Segy Zane. For some of these, including photographer Richard Wurts, her references for their applications to institutions such as the Guggenheim Foundation are included. Her fellow curators include Peter Pollack (Art Institute of Chicago); Beaumont Newhall (George Eastman House); I. Jerome Smith (Henry Ford Museum, after serving as librarian at the Museum of the City of New York); Albert Ten Eyck Gardner and Hyatt Mayor (Metropolitan Museum of Art); Belle Da Costa Greene (Morgan Library); William Lieberman (Museum of Modern Art); Karl Kup, Frank Weitenkampf, and Arthur Carlson (New York Public Library); Carl Zigrosser (Philadelphia Museum of Art); Ala Story (Santa Barbara Museum of Art); and A. Bartlett Cowdrey (Smith Museum, after her tenure at the Old Print Shop). Mayer relied on collectors, both for loans and donations of objects and for their impassioned knowledge of and devotion to their specific areas of interest. These include Edward W. C. Arnold, whose collection was willed to the Metropolitan Museum but housed on loan at the Museum of the City of New York; Mrs. J. Insley Blair; J. Clarence Davies, whose donation of New York views in 1929 formed the basis of the Museum’s print collections; Bella Landauer; Mrs. Luke Vincent Lockwood; Irving S. Olds; Harry T. Peters; I. N. Phelps Stokes; Isadore Warshaw; Electra Havemeyer Webb; as well as dealers and gallery owners: Harry MacNeill Bland of the Bland Gallery, Helen Gee of Limelight Gallery, Harry Shaw Newman of the Old Print Shop, Robert Fridenberg; and book dealers Leona Rostenberg, Madeline Stern, and A. S. W. Rosenbach. Because Mayer retained carbon copies of almost all her letters (except, in a few instances, where she has noted “Ans. by card”), the series usually provides both sides of her written conversations. It also shows occasional glimmers of her famously dry humor: typed at the top of a letter from “Mrs. Marshall” regarding the possible donation of part of a photograph: “Sends in a scrap of cardboard. Is she nuts? Replied by card”; and added in pencil to a letter from James Hazen Hyde about arranging for his visit to the museum: “Came. Saw. Did not conquer.” Some early correspondence in the series was sent over the name of Museum Director Hardinge Scholle or Mayer’s predecessor Robert Sinclair; after 1957 some was sent over the name of her assistant Patricia (Patsy) Pulling.