The Peter and Renate Nahum Donation

The Peter and Renate Nahum Donation

PMC Librarian Emma Floyd introduces a valuable recent addition to the Centre’s Library collection.

In December 2012, the Centre’s Library received its largest ever gift: the Peter and Renate Nahum donation of over 2,000 books, exhibition catalogues, and journals. The scope of this donation is unprecedented in its subject range and depth, as well as in the number of noteworthy items that it contains.

The incredibly generous donors, Peter and Renate Nahum, ran “Peter Nahum At The Leicester Galleries” in St James’s for twenty-five years and continue to work as art advisers. Before becoming a dealer, Peter Nahum was a senior director of Sotheby’s and head of the Victorian and Modern British departments. He is also an author and was a regular contributor to the Antiques Roadshow on BBC TV for twentytwo years.

Cover designs from issue 1 of the journal Motif: A Journal of the Visual Arts, which were published in the early 1960s.

The donation comprises materials on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British art and artists. The depth of coverage on each artist is notable and has added greatly to the Library’s holdings. The donation was timely and arrived just as the Library’s collecting policy was expanding to include post-war and contemporary art. Its great strengths lie in areas such as Victorian painting and twentieth-century sculpture, where the Library’s holdings were already good. But it also makes major contributions to smaller areas of the collection, such as British Surrealism, the art of the Second World War, and post-war British artists’ exhibition catalogues. For example, it has more than doubled our holdings on the influential art historian and critic Herbert Read (1893–1968) and has added an entire set of books on the artists Maxwell Armfield (1881–1972) and Conroy Maddox (1912–2005).

Cover designs from issue 2 of the journal Motif: A Journal of the Visual Arts, which were published in the early 1960s.

There are treasures such as the very rare This Man: A Series of Wood-engravings (1939) by Elizabeth Rivers (1903–1964), as well as a number of books by Claude Flight (1881–1955) such as Lino-cuts: A Hand-book of Linoleum-cut Colour Printing (1927), The Art and Craft of Lino Cutting and Printing (1934), and the rare Christmas and Other Feasts and Festivals (1936). There are also copies of scarce exhibition catalogues, such as an original edition of This is Tomorrow, the catalogue of the seminal Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition held in 1956. There is great depth to the donation: for example, an original copy of Unit One: The Modern Movement in English Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture by Herbert Read (1934) is accompanied by catalogues of later commemorative exhibitions: Unit 1: Portsmouth Festival Exhibition 1978 (1978) and Unit One: Spirit of the 30’s: May–June 1984 (1984).

Claude Flight, Royal Academy Banquet, 1936. Digital image courtesy Paul Mellon Centre Library.

The donation also includes extensive runs of significant journals such as The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art (1890s–1960s), Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art (1940s) and The Year’s Art (1890s–1940s). Of particular note are a set of volumes of The Pageant, a short-lived journal from the 1890s; issues 1–7 of Motif: A Journal of the Visual Arts, from the early 1960s; and two issues of AXIS: A Quarterly Review of Contemporary “Abstract” Painting & Sculpture edited by Myfanwy Evans in the 1930s.

Claude Flight, Café Chantant, 1936. Digital image courtesy Paul Mellon Centre Library.

The donation is consulted regularly by the Library’s readers and has proved itself a useful tool for teaching groups of students. Our own research projects at the PMC have also been supported by various published series in the donation relating to the Royal Academy, such as Royal Academy Pictures, Royal Academy Illustrated, Academy Notes, and Academy Sketches. A selection of these will be appearing in the Centre’s forthcoming Drawing Room Display.

This donation has broadened and enriched the Centre’s Library holdings to an unprecedented degree and we are enormously grateful to Peter and Renate Nahum for their generosity. It has been catalogued and integrated into the Library collection and is available for consultation in the Centre’s Public Study Room.

For more information about this donation, please contact: collections@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk.

Cover designs from issue 4 of the journal Motif: A Journal of the Visual Arts, which were published in the early 1960s.