The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced the completion of a collaborative project coordinated by the Met’s Thomas J. Watson Library to preserve and digitize the early exhibition catalogs of Knoedler & Company, a renowned art gallery in New York.

In total, we digitized 898 catalogs, checklists, and unpublished materials from the Watson, Arcade, and Knoedler collections, comprising approximately 14,000 pages of content created between 1869 and 1946. Many items include extensive handwritten annotations- in several cases, more than one copy of a particular catalog was digitized to capture these unique additions.

Knoedler & Company was established in 1857 and has been among the most important art dealers in New York City for a century and a half. Following the pattern of Watson Library’s successful collaboration with the Frick Art Reference Library on the Macbeth Gallery project, we worked with Knoedler & Company and the Arcade libraries (Frick Art Reference Library, Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives, and the Museum of Modern Art Library) to identify Knoedler exhibition catalogs, pamphlets, and checklists in our collections to create a series that is as complete as possible.

Access to these items is available through the libraries’ respective online catalogs, Watsonline and Arcade, as well as the OCLC library cooperative catalog, WorldCat. The catalogs’ contents are full-text searchable in Watson Library’s digital content management system, CONTENTdm.

The project was made possible by the Lifchez Stronach Fund for Preservation at the Thomas J. Watson Library and funds from the Frick Art Reference Library.

Illustration: An image from the Catalogue of an exhibition of woodcuts by Albrecht Durer : March 6th to April 7th, 1928.