The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives Announces Online Access to F. Kleinberger Galleries Inc. Records
December 3, 2020
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives is pleased to announce completion of a project make accessible online a collection of business records of the art dealer F. Kleinberger Galleries Inc. Digitized by a team from the Museum Archives and Thomas J. Watson Library, the records consist of more than 6,000 stock cards dating from the 1890s-1970s. They record essential provenance information about paintings, drawings, and other artworks bought and sold by Kleinberger in transactions with private collectors and museums from Europe, the United States, and South America.
F. Kleinberger Galleries Inc. was an art dealer established in Paris in 1848. In 1910, Kleinberger opened a New York branch, where Emil M. Sperling and his son Harry G. Sperling played leading roles. Harry G. Sperling eventually became President and owner, and upon his death in 1971 bequeathed to the Museum drawings and paintings, an endowment to support art purchases, and a trove of Kleinberger Galleries stock cards representing thousands of artworks bought and sold by the firm over many decades. In their analog form, the Kleinberger stock cards have long been a valued research tool in the Museum's European Paintings Department. Now they are freely accessible to a global audience, and can be searched through the Museum's Thomas J. Watson Digital Collections portal here.
Funding for the digitization of the F. Kleinberger Galleries Inc. records was provided by The Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation.
For further information about the F. Kleinberger Galleries Inc. Records, please email archives@metmuseum.org.
For general information about archival research at the Met, and other digital collections of historical records, please visit our webpage.
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Melissa Bowling
Archivist
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York, NY
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