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Not mailed until May 30 as we decided to count the photos - average 500 to a box ie. 5000 photos.

May 16, 1978

Dear Mr. Fredericksen,

Thankkyou for your good letter of May 8th, not only because it confirms your interest in our photograph files, but for the good news that the Getty Museum plans a research source for the Southwest.

To begin with our archives, again I am sorry to have missed your visit, for I suspect that Mr. Saligman had forgotten that some five years ago we had more or less promised them to the Archives of American Art and that I had done considerable work on the sifting of the files for extraneous material - a task by no means completed, as my time was somewhat limited in these last few years when my husband's health problems consumed much of it. Nor, of course, did I know of your affiliation with the Archives.

Naturally, I have recently been in touch with Mr. McNaught, who is in charge of the Archives affairs here in New York and heis to come to the Gallery one day thisweek. He tells me that they would hold the files here in the city and I would be allowed to finish sorting them. So, it would be a question of your museum negotiating with the Archives for "who gets what". 

As for the photographs, I should perhaps start by explaining why they are called "research files". This is because in the folder concerning each artist or each school and/or period, there is not only a photograph of any work by this artist or school which has been owned by the gallery, but there are examples from other sources. In addition, almost all of them contain notes, clippings, and references pertinent to them. For instance, the Manet file not only has such information, but also contains a list (possibly somewhat out-dated),but still useful) of every Manet owned in a European private collection.

Such a file often saves considerable time for a dealer's researcher and might do the same for a museum. However, if you wish to file the photographs separately, I am afraid it would be up to your staff to undertake it at this point. Of course, your staff would have the use of any of the material you wish to keep. Thus, this is what we have to offer you - 

1) Artists - Ten storage type file boxes (that is, each drawer is a "stacking box"), containing approximately 550 folders with one photograph of a painting or object owned by the gallery, plus whatever photos of the same artist we had been able to gather - sometimes quite numerous. As well as the above described material.