An interview of Alan Fink conducted 1997 Jan. 22 and Jan. 29, by Robert F. Brown, for the Archives of American Art, at Fink's Alpha Gallery, Boston, Mass.
JANUARY 22, 1997 SESSION: Fink discusses his childhood, early education, and first profession; traveling in Europe and meeting his future wife, the painter, Barbara Swan; and becoming interested in art.
JANUARY 29, 1997 SESSION: Coming to Boston in 1951 largely because Barbara Swan was there; first work as a gallery manager (1951-1967) for Boris Mirski; the New York dealer, Edith Halpert with whom he worked closely; the painter and head of Brandeis University art department, Mitchell Siporin; Leonard Baskin, and David Aronson; the lack of support for young local artists from Boston institutions; the major local collector of young local artists, Jerry Goldberg and Abe Pollin who followed his example; the increased number of Boston art galleries in the 1960s as art collecting grew; great success of a show of African masks at Mirski Gallery; his last years with Mirski; opening of his Alpha Gallery in September 1967; and taking on some of Mirski's artists, including Michael Mazur, Robert Birmelin, Philip Gausman, Barbara Swan, Marianna Pineda, Harold Tovish, Elbert Weinberg, and others.
Biographical / Historical:
Alan Fink (1925-) is an art dealer in Boston, Mass. and is married to Barbara Swan.
Provenance:
This interview is part of the Archives of American Art Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and administrators.
Restrictions:
Transcript available on the Archives of American Art website.
Occupation:
Art dealers -- Massachusetts -- Boston Search this
The Boris Mirski Gallery records measure 6.2 linear feet and date from 1936-2000, bulk 1945-1972. They include gallery administrative files; artist files including correspondence, exhibition and loan paperwork as well as photographic documentation of artwork; gallery correspondence; financial materials including outgoing and incoming invoices and sales records; printed materials promoting the gallery and its artists; press materials; and a number of photographs of Boris Mirski at events and with others, as well as photographs of artwork. Artists particularly well represented in the collection include David Aronson, Leonard Baskin, Hyman Bloom, Esther Geller, Rico Lebrun, Michael Mazur, Arthur Polonsky, Ben Shahn, Mitchell Siporin, Barbara Swan, and Karl Zerbe.
Scope and Contents:
The records of the Boris Mirski Gallery, which showed the avant-garde art of the Boston Expressionist school, as well as New York and international modern art styles and non-western art, measure 6.2 linear feet and date from 1936-2000, bulk 1945-1972. They include gallery administrative files; artist files including correspondence, exhibition and loan paperwork as well as photographic documentation of artwork; gallery correspondence; financial materials including outgoing and incoming invoices and sales records; printed materials promoting the gallery and its artists; press materials; and a number of photographs of Boris Mirski at events and with others, as well as photographs of artwork. Artists particularly well represented in the collection include David Aronson, Leonard Baskin, Hyman Bloom, Esther Geller, Rico Lebrun, Michael Mazur, Arthur Polonsky, Ben Shahn, Mitchell Siporin, Barbara Swan, and Karl Zerbe.
The administrative files cover a number of topics including documents related to various properties, mortgages, and insurance, copyrights, legal cases, administrative events, and select group exhibitions at the gallery.
The artist files document each gallery artist's exhibition history in the gallery and include correspondence with the artist as well as files documenting significant outside exhibitions, projects and the placement of artworks. While exhibiting
artists showed a range of sculpture, painting, and drawing at the gallery, there was a tendency towards
highly expressive figurative artwork sometimes referred to as Boston Expressionism, often associated with
the first generation Jewish American experience.
The gallery correspondence, primarily with patrons and institutions, is arranged alphabetically with select regular correspondents of the gallery having their own file, in addition to a folder of holiday cards.
The financial files include both outgoing and incoming transactions as invoices and sales records, organized by patron or vendor.
The printed materials are a records of the printing activities of the gallery as well as a press archive, with select printed materials from outside the gallery reflecting the activities of the gallery and gallery artists.
The photographic materials include both images that include the gallerist as well as images that document artworks.
Arrangement:
The collection is arranged as 6 series.
Series 1: Administrative Files, circa 1948-1995 (0.5 Linear feet; Box 1)
Series 2: Artist Files, circa 1945-2000 (2.7 Linear feet; Boxes 1-4, OV 7)
Series 3: Gallery Correspondence, circa 1936-1976 (1 Linear feet; Boxes 4-5)
Series 4: Financial Files, circa 1958-1974 (1.2 Linear feet; Boxes 5-6)
Series 5: Printed Material, circa 1944-1981 (0.7 Linear feet; Box 6, OV 8)
Series 6: Photographic Material, circa 1945-1976 (0.1 Linear feet; Box 6)
Biographical / Historical:
The Boris Mirski Gallery (est.1944; closed 1979) was a gallery in Boston, Massachusetts owned and operated by Boris Mirski (1898-1974). The gallery evolved out of various businesses owned by Mirski from the late 1910s, including his first formal gallery established alongside a framing shop on Charles Street in Beacon Hill in 1927. The gallery moved to its final incarnation on the lower level of 166 Newbury in 1972, and closed in 1979 following the gallerist's death in 1974.
Boris Chaim Mirski, born 1898, immigrated to the United States at the age of fourteen, leaving behind his troubled youth as a Lithuanian Jew in a harsh political climate that included frequent pogroms. At the advice of his mother, an activist in the resistance, Boris acquired a number of marketable skills including metalwork and framing, which allowed him to establish a lucrative business while he developed opportunities to show art that interested him. Early in his career this included a home for non-western and "primitive" art styles from around the globe, as well as the work of emerging local artists. Mirski's gallery created opportunities for artists working against the generally conservative tradition of the Boston School, and helped establish an identity for the local avant-garde. The gallery program had strong ties with the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston alumni and faculty, and frequently hosted exchange shows with New York City's Downtown Gallery, whose director Edith Halpert acted as a mentor. While exhibiting artists showed a range of sculpture, painting, and drawing at the gallery, there was a tendency towards highly expressive figurative artwork sometimes referred to as Boston Expressionism, often associated with the first generation Jewish American experience. Gallery artists included David Aronson, Leonard Baskin, Hyman Bloom, Esther Geller, Rico Lebrun, Michael Mazur, Arthur Polonsky, Ben Shahn, Mitchell Siporin, Barbara Swan, and Karl Zerbe.
Related Materials:
Related materials include Archives of American Art's Oral history interview with Boris Mirski, 1973 June 19.
Provenance:
The Boris Mirski Gallery records were donated by Deborah Mirski Brown, Boris Mirski's daughter from 1989-1996, with additions in 2007 and 2017.
Restrictions:
Use of original papers requires an appointment and is limited to the Archives' Washington, D.C., Research Center. Contact Reference Services for more information.
Rights:
The Archives of American Art makes its archival collections available for non-commercial, educational and personal use unless restricted by copyright and/or donor restrictions, including but not limited to access and publication restrictions. AAA makes no representations concerning such rights and restrictions and it is the user's responsibility to determine whether rights or restrictions exist and to obtain any necessary permission to access, use, reproduce and publish the collections. Please refer to the Smithsonian's Terms of Use for additional information.
Ca. 600 letters, 1961-1990, from artists, authors, poets, editors, curators, publishers, critics and others, primarily in response to Taylor's reviews, columns, and books, and some supplying information for his columns. Among the correspondents are Darby Barnard, Claire Leighton, Will Davenport, Fritz Eichenberg, Clement Greenberg, Jack Levine, Patrick McGilligan, Henry Schwartz, Beverly Swan, William Styron, John Updike, and Tom Wolfe. A 1983 letter from Davenport encloses a mss. of a paper he wrote in 1956, "Search for the Most American of American Painters." Also included are 5 scrapbooks, 1952-1957, containing clippings of Taylor's reviews and columns, and letters of appreciation; and loose reviews and articles by Taylor written for various Boston area arts magazines.
Enclosed in the correspondence are a few photographs, including two of Taylor, 3 of Carl Nelson, one of G.D. Hackett and Andre Kertisz, and one of Fred Allen and Herman Wouk.
Biographical / Historical:
Art, literary, and music critic; author; educator; lecturer, Boston, Mass. Wrote for the Boston Herald, 1952-1967, Boston Globe, 1968-1989. Columns for New Boston Review, later appearing in Atlantic Monthly, were written under pseudonym Count Bibesco.
Provenance:
Donated 1984 and 1990 by Robert Taylor.
Restrictions:
Use of original papers requires an appointment and is limited to the Archives' Washington, D.C., Research Center. Contact Reference Services for more information.
Occupation:
Art critics -- Massachusetts -- Boston Search this
Swan, writing to her friends Rosalind and Edwin Miller, discusses her husband Alan Fink's positions as an art dealer and owner of the Alpha Gallery in Boston, mentioning artists Milton Avery, Gregory Gillespie, Don Gustin, Ellsworth Kelly, Boris Mirski, and Andy Stevovich. She writes also about her son Aaron's art career and daughter Joanna's career as assistant to Alan, her health problems dealing with lupus, family vacations and activities with Swan's mother and aunt, Peter and Edith Milton, and Bernard and Ninion Chaet, her numerous trips to New York and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for various art openings; and her friendship with poet Anne Sexton.
Other topics include her painting career, including illustrating Sexton's versions of Grimm's fairytales, portraits of various friends and commissions, exhibitions, painting style, and inspirations for her bottle and quarry reflection paintings.
Biographical / Historical:
Swan, a painter, draftsman, and lithographer from Boston, Mass., was friends of Rosalind Miller, a professor of psychiatric social work at Columbia University, and Edwin Miller, a Walt Whitman scholar and biographer of Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. The Millers are collectors of American textiles.
Provenance:
Donated 1992 by Rosalind Miller.
Restrictions:
Use of original papers requires an appointment and is limited to the Archives' Washington, D.C., Research Center. Microfilmed materials must be consulted on microfilm. Contact Reference Services for more information.
REELS 826-827: 697 letters, including letters to her parents and her future husband Alan Fink, and letters from Bernard Chaet, Maxine Kumin, Tillie Olsen, Anne Sexton, Andrew Stevovich, Elbert Weinberg, and the Cober Gallery; a 15-page diary; a scrapbook containing photographs, clippings, catalogs and miscellany; and many loose clippings and catalogs.
UNMICROFILMED: Photographs of Swan, Ellsworth Kelly, and other students of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston School; letters relating to Swan's career and from friends and relatives, including Bernard and Ninon Chaet and Edwin and Rosalind Miller; Christmas cards by Swan and other artists; drafts and a transcription of a talk by Swan on Harold Tovish; exhibition announcements and catalogs; clippings; and printed material on Anne Sexton.
Biographical / Historical:
Painter, illustrator, draftsman, and lithographer; Boston, Mass. Studied at School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston under Karl Zerbe. Ellsworth Kelly was also a student there. Swan collaborated as an illustrator with poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin.
Provenance:
Material on reels 826-827 was lent for microfilming in June of 1974 by Barbara Swan. She donated the photographs of Ellsworth Kelly in December 1974, and letters, writings, exhibition catalogs and miscellaneous printed material in 1992. Additional papers are expected.
Restrictions:
Use of original papers requires an appointment and is limited to the Archives' Washington, D.C., Research Center. Microfilmed materials must be consulted on microfilm. Contact Reference Services for more information.
Examines the Boston art scene in the late l930s and l940s, where traditional conservative artistic taste clashed with the emerging Boston Expressionists trained at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston School. Focuses on the artists' relationship to the newly formed Institute of Modern Art, and the uproar which resulted when its director, James Plaut, issued a statement viewed as antagonistic to artists explaining the change of name of the museum to the Institute of Contemporary Art. Discussing the events are artists Barbara Swan, Bernard Chaet, Ralph Coburn and Hyman Bloom, ICA director James Plaut and president Nathanial Saltonstall, art historian Pamela Allara, Nelson Aldrich and Lloyd Goodrich.
Publication, Distribution, Etc. (Imprint):
Boston: WGBH Educational Foundation, c1987
General:
First broadcast on WGBH January 1988.
Provenance:
Donated in 1993 by the WGBH Educational Foundation.
Restrictions:
Use of original papers requires an appointment and is limited to the Archives' Washington, D.C., Research Center. Contact Reference Services for more information.
An interview of Barbara Swan conducted 1973 June 13-1974 June 12, by Robert Brown, for the Archives of American Art.
Biographical / Historical:
Barbara Swan (1922- ) is a painter and printmaker from Brookline, Mass.
General:
Originally recorded on 2 sound tape reels. Reformatted in 2010 as 2 digital wav files. Duration is 3 hrs., 13 min.
Provenance:
These interviews are part of the Archives of American Art Oral History Program, started in 1958 to document the history of the visual arts in the United States, primarily through interviews with artists, historians, dealers, critics and others.
