Art Historian Robert Storr Gives Vast Archive to Bard College

Curator and critic Robert Storr has gifted his library and archive to the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Spanning 25,000 volumes, the archive of the former Yale School of Art dean includes literature covering topics in 20th-century art history. Artist monographs, periodicals, and exhibition catalogues—some of are “rare,” according to Bard—are part of the vast gift.

The archive also spans a collection of studies produced by artists who have worked with Storr. Works by Louise Bourgeois, Yto Barrada, Luca Buvoli, Chuck Close, Leon Golub, Jenny Holzer, Deborah Kass, Gerhard Richter, and Rachel Whiteread are among the those included. Other works in the grouping are by Richard Artschwager, Francesco Clemente, Seydou Keïta, Raymond Pettibon, and Cindy Sherman; Storr bought those pieces directly from these artists.

In a statement, Tom Eccles, the curatorial center’s executive director and the founder of the school’s Hessel Museum of Art, called the gift “a gamechanger.”

CCS Bard is known for its curatorial graduate program and for having a powerful museum board that’s attracted major funding in recent years. Last year, the school announced a $50 million endowment to mark its anniversary; those funds derived from two of the school’s biggest patrons, philanthropist Marieluise Hessel and investor George Soros.

In 2016, Storr stepped down as dean of the Yale University School of Art after a 10-year stint. Prior to that, in 2007, Storr became the first American to curate the main exhibition of the Venice Biennale. He also acted as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art between 1990 and 2002.

The donation is intended to pay homage to Storr’s long-running ties to Bard, where he worked as a painting professor in the 1980s and later served on the school’s faculty between 1999 to 2008. Storr said in a statement that he hopes the archive can offer “pieces of the puzzle” for rising experts in the field, ones he says “aren’t likely to find in standard texts on modern and contemporary art or online.”