LIBRARY NOTES
Donald Oresman
Collecting Readers
Tuesday, May 12, 1998
Exhibition Gallery
Subject collections are common enough among book and art collectors -- cookbooks, artist self-portraits, Bibles, landscapes. But images of people reading, hardly an esoteric subject, appear not to have attracted much interest. My collection, largely works on paper and restricted to the twentieth century, may not be unique but is probably unusual.
Like most matters, it started accidentally. My wife and I have always been art collectors in a hit-or-miss way, from time to time buying what we liked when we wandered through the art dealers' galleries. That eclectic approach left me slightly uneasy, addicted as I am to orderly ways. What's the point of collecting without focus?
Sometime in 1980, we saw Jim Dine's portrait of his wife reading and bought it, continuing our aimless pattern. A few weeks later, we bought Larry Rivers's portrait of the poet Frank O'Hara reading. Something clicked. Readers became the focus from then on. The collection now runs to over 700 pieces.
We began assembling the collection by visiting art dealers, alerting them to our special interest, and reading auctions catalogs. The dealers have been critical. Without them, we could never have ferreted out most of our holdings. What are the criteria being used? Actually only one -- do we like the image? No attempt has been made to limit our collection to a Who's Who in Art. There are more relatively unknown names than known.
One of the largest groups represented is the 1930's prints by American artists who were among the more than 5,000 painters whose work was supported by the New Deal Federal Artists Project. The readers we collect don't have to be reading books or newspapers. There are bulletin board readers, movie marquee readers, soup can label readers, ticker tape readers. Most of the works are lithographs. There are also watercolors, drawings, and oils, as well as works on plastic, wood, metal, and newsprint.
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