Collection Guide
Collection Title:
Collection Number:
Get Items:
INVENTORY OF THE ROBERT WATTS PAPERS, 1883-1989, bulk 1940-1988
2006.M.27
No online items
View entire collection guide
Search this collection
Table of contents
Title: Robert Watts papers
Date (inclusive): 1883-1989 (bulk 1940-1988)
Number: 2006.M.27
Creator/Collector:
Watts, Robert, 1923-1988
Physical Description:
36.5 linear feet
(76 boxes, 9 flat file folders)
Repository:
The Getty Research Institute
Special Collections
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles, California, 90049-1688
(310) 440-7390
Abstract: American artist of mixed media, sculpture, and assemblage, best known as a founding member of Fluxus. The archive consists
of correspondence, manuscripts, personal documents, and many photographs and slides documenting Watts' work and affiliations
with artists. Also included are three works of art.
Request Materials: Request access to the physical materials described in this inventory through the
catalog record for this collection. Click here for the
access policy .
Language: Collection material is in
English
Biographical / Historical Note
Robert Watts, born in 1923, spent his childhood and adolescence in Iowa and Louisville, Kentucky. The son of a mechanical
engineer, Watts also earned an engineering degree, but after serving in World War II, went on to study art history at Columbia
University. His emphasis was the study of ancient art and architecture in the Americas and Australia; his Master's thesis
was on the masks of the Alaskan Eskimo (M.A. 1951).
For several years Watts worked as an abstract expressionist painter while teaching in the engineering department at Rutgers
University. By the late 1950s he had moved to the art department and had also begun to employ his engineering training in
his art, initially making boxes with electro-mechanical circuitry. Rutgers colleague Allan Kaprow, sculptor-chemist George
Brecht, and Watts together wrote a proposal for an experimental laboratory for multi-media art entitled "Project in Multiple
Dimensions" (1957-1958). Though never funded, this proposal articulated new assumptions about art in its relation to the everyday
and to increasingly accessible media technologies, soon to find expression in the happenings, events, and installations of
the 1960s, and eventually in the formation of Fluxus and Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.).
The everyday objects Watts reinvented as artifacts (cartons of eggs, stamps, floor mops) associated him with Pop Art, and
his pieces appeared in the landmark 1963 Bianchini Supermarket Show. Philosophically, however, he was most allied with Fluxus,
of which he was a founding and lifelong member. Persistently seeking ways to infiltrate commodity culture with art, Watts
de-emphasized himself as creator while brilliantly illuminating infrastructural systems such as the U.S. postal service, mint,
patent office or F.B.I. He worked in a wide range of novel media, including neon, laminates, Polaroid photography, video,
film, sound, and light. While his studies in ancient art inform much of his work indirectly, they most distinctly appear in
the African statues made of chrome. He collaborated with Fluxus associates on many events, workshops and festivals, including
Yam Festival (1963) and FluxYear/Gemini (1974; 1978). In 1967, Watts and George Maciunas worked with Herman Fine to create
a company called Implosions for producing and distributing ironic anti-commodities, such as disfiguring masks or transparent
plastic dresses.
As an art professor, Watts was equally ingenious, establishing an Experimental Workshop at Rutgers that he took to the University
of California at Santa Cruz in 1968. Believing that approaches to teaching art had to be radically changed, Watts encouraged
a collaborative and spontaneous approach to creating multi-media events, some featuring recurring characters in Watts' work,
like the Fur Family. In 1970 he co-edited an anthology,
Proposals for Art Education.
Though most often exhibited in group shows, Watts had significant solo shows at the Museum of Modern Art and Rene Block Gallery
in New York, the Ricke Gallery in Kassel, and at Multhipla and Francesco Conz Gallery in Milan. Since his death in 1988, Watts'
prescience as an artist has been increasingly recognized, most influentially in a 1990 show at Leo Castelli Gallery, in
Experiments in the Everyday: Allan Kaprow and Robert Watts (1999) and in
Off-Limits: Rutgers University and the Avant-garde (1999).
Open for use by qualified researchers, with the exception of unreformatted audiovisual material. Access restricted for Boxes
2, 3, 4, and 7 pending the estate's further consideration.
Contact
Library Reproductions and Permissions .
Robert Watts papers, 1883-1989, bulk 1940-1988, Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Accession no. 2006.M.27
Acquired in 2006 from the Robert Watts Estate.
Lora Chin did the preliminary processing of the collection, and Annette Leddy further processed and arranged it.
Processed by Lora Chin and Annette Leddy
Digitized Audiovisual Material
Online access to
selected digitized audio and video recordings is available to on-site readers and Getty staff.
Scope and Content of Collection
The collection documents Robert Watts' development as an artist and art professor, with ample evidence of his relationship
with Fluxus colleagues, dealers and friends. Watts' Iowa family background is presented in photographs, correspondence, family
genealogies, health histories, legal and financial papers, and clippings dating back to the 1880s; together with report cards
and yearbooks, these offer a relatively clear picture of the artist's midwestern roots. Photographs portray his subsequent
years in the service and in New York while a student at Columbia, with summers on Monhegan Island, while graduate school term
papers and his Master's thesis on Alaskan masks reveal his early interest in artifacts.
Academic files convey Watts' career with nearly annual grant applications and project proposals. Professional correspondence
is mainly between Watts and his dealers, including Francesco Conz and Rolfe Ricke, along with certain curators and collectors,
such as Gilbert Silverman and Jean Brown. Personal correspondence, though containing photocopies of cards and letters from
George Brecht and George Maciunas and originals from Dick Higgins, is relatively scant.
Series IV, Work files is the core of the archive, containing hundreds of drawings for completed and unrealized projects, scripts
or scores, and certain completed objects such as the stamps, letterheads, and laminations.
FluxMed (1987), Watts' medical graphics based on 19th century French engravings, is present in various stages of its creation. The
greater portion of this series consists of source material, including postcards, clippings, and brochures for various electronic
or mechanical devices that inspired Watts and that are accompanied in some cases by drawings or calculations regarding their
adaptation to Watts' projects.
Series V, Photographs and slides contains fourteen photograph albums that Watts assembled. A unique record of the artist's
intermingled life and art, they are arranged more thematically than chronologically. Some of these images also appear in the
photograph files, including numerous images of Pamela Kraft, Watts' longtime partner and model.
Series VII, Printed matter contains nine flat files, mostly of Fluxus posters with striking graphics and abundant information
on events, artists, and ideas. Also included is a comprehensive collection of clippings containing reviews or articles about
Watts or his associates.
Series X, Audio visual contains all the films Watts made along with the sound tracks or music that accompanied them.
Three art objects are included in the collection.
Boxes 2, 3, 4, and 7 are sealed, pending the Estate's further consideration.
Numbers in brackets within folder entries were assigned by the Estate.
Arranged in eleven series:
Series I. Personal, 1889-1989
Series II. Academic files, 1949-1988
Series III. Correspondence, 1960-1988
Series IV. Work files, 1939-1988
Series V. Photographs and slides, 1937-1988
Series VI. Other artists' files, 1957-1989
Series VII. Printed matter, 1883-1988
Series VIII. Books, 1940-1975
Series IX. Serials, 1961-1979
Series X. Audiovisual, 1957-1987
Series XI. Additions, 1962-1987
Kraft, Pamela
Maciunas, George, 1931-1978
Watts, Robert, 1923-1988
Fluxus (Group of Artists)
Implosions (Firm)
Art and Technology
Art, American--20th century
Art--Study and teaching
Conceptual Art
Happening (Art)
Performance art
FluxMed
Audiotapes--20th century
Compact discs--20th century
Drawings (visual works)--20th century
DVDs--20th century
Mail art
Mechanical drawings--20th century
Motion pictures (visual works)--20th century
Phonograph records--20th century
Photographic prints--20th century
Photographs, Original
Videocassettes--20th century
Brecht, George
Brown, Jean, 1911
Conz, Francesco, 1935
Kaprow, Allan
Maciunas, George, 1931-1978
Ricke, Rolfe
Silverman, Gilbert