Carol Vogel (New York Times) notes that some 350 or more boxes stuffed with receipts, photographs, letters and other records chronicling the history of the Leo Castelli Gallery are being given to the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art in Washington. LC helped launch the careers of Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein and Frank Stella, as well as many others. The gift includes sales transactions, exhibition reviews, letters from artists and collectors, and photographs from the gallery’s beginings in 1957 to the year Castelli died (1999). “This is the holy grail of postwar American art,” said John W. Smith, director of the archives.
Holy Grail? more like the Rosetta Stone. Still it’s a great gift.