Graduate Intern, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford CT
Posted July 8, 2014
The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art is seeking a graduate intern from the Masters of Library & Information Sciences program, Archives Management concentration for the summer of 2015 to assist with a planning project to prepare for the digital scanning of selected documents and visual images in its Archives. If funded, the internship will last approximately eight weeks (Monday – Thursday) and pay a stipend of $5,600. The intern will work closely with Gene Gaddis, William G. DeLana Archivist and Curator of the Austin House, to conduct a collections survey of two essential but very different periods in the Museum’s history, to assure their preservation and to make them readily available to scholars and to the public.
The first section encompasses the records that begin in 1841 when Daniel Wadsworth proposed building a gallery of the fine arts in Hartford. John Trumbull encouraged Wadsworth to commission pictures from artists such as Thomas Sully as early as 1807, introduced him to the paintings of Thomas Cole in the 1820s, and, shortly before construction of the Atheneum, urged Wadsworth and key subscribers to the building to purchase approximately fifty works from the recently dissolved American Academy of Fine Arts in New York, among them the iconic portrait of Benjamin West by Sir Thomas Lawrence. It was an auspicious beginning, and two of the Hartford citizens who contributed to the original building were the father and grandfather of the four-year-old John Pierpont Morgan, later the greatest benefactor in the museum’s history.
The second section will include large sections from the papers of the Atheneum’s Chick Austin, the Museum’s first professional director. Arriving in Hartford from the Fogg Art Museum in 1927, Austin immediately began transforming the Atheneum into one of the most advanced art institutions in the United States, with a surprising series of American “firsts” in regard to the museum’s architecture, its exhibitions, and its acquisitions. Eugene Gaddis, William G. DeLana Archivist and Curator of the Austin House, was fortunate enough to rediscover Austin’s office files untouched in a sub-basement of the museum in 1980 when he spent time here as a consultant. They represent a dazzling trove of correspondence from figures such as Alexander Calder, Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, Aaron Copland, Martha Graham, Agnes de Mille, Lotte Lenya, Kurt Weill, Mondrian, Le Corbusier, Salvador Dali, and Lincoln Kirstein, whose letters and telegrams from London and Paris document George Balanchine’s immigration to America, sponsored by Austin himself and by the Atheneum. The result led to his book, Magician of the Modern: Chick Austin and the Transformation of the Arts in America.
If you are interested contact
Eugene R. Gaddis
William G. DeLana Archivist and Curator of the Austin House
Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
600 Main Street
Hartford, CT 06103
Gene.Gaddis@wadsworthatheneum.