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Clara Diament Sujo Papers
2018.M.31
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Title: Clara Diament Sujo papers
Date (inclusive): 1944-2014 (bulk
1981-2008)
Number: 2018.M.31
Creator/Collector:
Diament Sujo, Clara
Physical Description:
147.29 Linear Feet
(360 boxes, 7 flat file folders)
Repository:
The Getty Research Institute
Special Collections
1200 Getty Center Drive, Suite 1100
Los Angeles 90049-1688
Business Number: (310) 440-7390
Fax Number: (310) 440-7780
reference@getty.edu
URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10020/askref
(310) 440-7390
Abstract: The papers of Clara Diament Sujo
provide a comprehensive survey of the operations of CDS Gallery founded by the dealer and
art critic in New York in 1981. There is also documentation on the center of contemporary
art Estudio Actual created by Sujo in Caracas in 1968, as well as on her formative years
studying with Jorge Romero Brest in Buenos Aires, and her writings and lectures. The archive
comprises correspondence; financial records; scrapbooks; exhibition brochures; artist files;
photographs; videos; and works on paper dedicated to Sujo. Among the artists represented by
CDS Gallery and in the records are: Roberto Aizenberg; Jacobo Borges; Carlos Cruz-Diez; José
Luis Cuevas; Stephen De Staebler; Wilfredo Lam; Roberto Matta; Henry Moore; José Clemente
Orozco; Armando Reverón; Jesús Rafael Soto; Hedda Sterne; Joaquín Torres-García; and Adja
Yunkers.
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Language: Collection material is in English
and Spanish.
Clara Diament Sujo pursued a long career as a dealer of modern and contemporary art, first
opening the center of contemporary art Estudio Actual in Caracas, Venezuela, in 1968, and
then in 1981, CDS Gallery in New York, the name of which corresponds to her initials. Sujo
was instrumental in developing relationships between artists, collectors and museums in
Venezuela, Argentina, Mexico, Columbia and the United States. In nearly two hundred
exhibitions at CDS Gallery, Sujo actively promoted the work of Roberto Aizenberg; Jacobo
Borges; Carlos Cruz-Diez; Wilfredo Lam; Roberto Matta; José Clemente Orozco; Armando
Reverón; Jesús Rafael Soto; and Joaquín Torres-García, along with the work of other artists.
In 1979, the first major auction in New York of twentieth-century Latin American art was
organized by the Center for Inter-American Relations, an organization that was later
incorporated into the Americas Society whose goal is to promote the cultural heritage of the
Americas. The auction catalog acknowledges Sujo's contribution to the success of the
initiative. Held at Sotheby Parke Bernet, the sale is still regarded as a turning point in
the development of the contemporary art market. It would also have an important impact on
Sujo's career.
Sujo was born under the name Clara Diament in Buenos Aires in 1921, the daughter of a
Polish Jew who developed an export business in Patagonian fur garments (red foxes,
chinchilla and hares) for a Jewish market in Russia and Poland. Her parents were members of
a distinguished synagogue, the Templo Libertad in Buenos Aires, and frequent attendees of
the opera house, the Teatro Colón. From 1943 to 1946, Sujo worked in Chicago for the large
corporation Abbott Laboratories, an experience which was crucial-along with having helped in
her father's business from a young age-to honing the management skills that ensured the
success of her later ventures. In 1946, upon returning to Argentina, Sujo immersed herself
in an intellectual and artistic milieu, studying with the poet Jorge Romero Brest and
becoming in 1947 editor for the journal
Ver y estimar founded
by Brest. The rule of Juan Domingo Perón, while favorable to working classes, was also
marked by the dismissal of dissident university faculty and rising antisemitism. This, along
with the economic opportunities offered by Venezuela, finally prompted Sujo's move with her
three young children in 1953 to Caracas where she joined her husband who had found
employment there.
Sujo observed that Buenos Aires seemed like a satellite of Europe, with the beautiful
collection of the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenos Aires containing "no Latin
American art-hardly any Argentinian art." Instead the US presence in Venezuela, in part
motivated by the oil industry, was felt in all aspects of life in Caracas. The weight of
European tradition was less evident in Caracas, as well, noted Sujo. The director of the
Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas embraced Sujo's initiative to help form a collection of
contemporary art from Latin America for the museum, first acquiring a work by the Cuban
artist Wilfredo Lam which had been exhibited at
documenta in
Kassel. This initiative would become a pioneering project to promote the work of
contemporary artists from Venezuela and other countries in Central and South America.
While in Caracas, Sujo taught art history at the Ciudad Universitaria, the Escuela de Artes
Plásticas, the Instituto de Diseño Neumann, and as an art critic she contributed to numerous
journals and periodicals. As a director and script writer for Venezuela's National
Television, Sujo produced a series of documentary films on art in collaboration with the
movie director Angel Hurtado, who also served as cameraman for the project. In 1968, with an
inaugural show dedicated to the work of Marcel Duchamp, Sujo opened Estudio Actual in
Caracas, where she would continue to host exhibitions dedicated to contemporary artists,
including Robert Rauschenberg, Adja Yunkers, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Escobar Marisol. One of
Sujo's goals was to introduce Venezuelans, who were well versed in US pop music, to other
aspects of American culture, such as modern and contemporary painting, which they were less
familiar with, but which had stunned Sujo during her years exploring the prominent art
collections in Chicago.
The short five-hour flight from Caracas to New York would facilitate Sujo's friendships
with colleagues in New York, including curators Kynaston McShine at MoMA and Thomas M.
Messer at the Guggenheim who welcomed Sujo's collaboration for the organization of an
exhibition dedicated to the Venezuelan artist Soto in 1974. When a flood damaged seventy
works in the Estudio Actual in 1978, Sujo received regular advice from the conservation
departments at the Metropolitan Museum and the Guggenheim. The United Nations and the
Americas Society welcomed these forms of cooperation between the two continents. The
embassies in both countries were often actively involved in the exchanges.
The success of the 1979 Sotheby's Latin American art auction encouraged Sujo to explore
venues in New York. At her request in the late fall of 1980, Sujo's son Aly visited a
gallery space at 13 East 75th Street that was available for rent and conveniently located
near the Whitney Museum. Aly described the space as being in ruinous condition: "Los techos
estan en el piso y el piso en los techos: Te va a gustar." (The ceiling is on the floor and
the floor on the ceiling: You'll like it). Several months later, on May 4, the inaugural
show at the newly-renovated CDS Gallery at 13 East 75th Street entitled
Masters of the Americas contrasted works by artists from North
America with works by artists from Central and South America. The artists included were:
Juan Batlle-Planas; Pedro Figari; Lucio Fontana; Helen Frankenthaler; Arshile Gorky; Philip
Guston; Wilfredo Lam; Roberto Matta; Merida; Robert Motherwell; José Clemente Orozco; Amelia
Peláez; Emilio Pettoruti; Jackson Pollock; Cândido Portinari; Armando Reverón; Diego Rivera;
Rufino Tamayo; Joaquín Torres-García; and Adya Yunkers. The show was organized in
collaboration with the Argentinian art critic Marta Traba and featured loans from Israel,
Argentina, and MoMA. John Russell, the British art critic for the New York Times, praised
the show's intelligence and tact. In subsequent exhibitions, Sujo explored juxtaposing the
work of contemporary artists from different generations, and later the curatorial choices
made by artists in a series of shows called "Artists Choose Artists." In the first years of
CDS Gallery, Sujo would simultaneously organize an exhibition at Estudio Actual in Caracas
and in New York, while she later focused her activities on CDS Gallery alone. Prominent art
historians and art critics were often called upon to participate in the exhibitions held by
CDS Gallery. In 1988, for the show,
The Irascibles, dedicated
to the New York School, which featured loans from MoMA, the Met, the Guggenheim, the
Whitney, and other museums, CDS Gallery enlisted Irving Sandler as curator. In 1995, the
Galería de Arte Nacional (GAN) in Caracas organized an exhibition dedicated to Sujo's
personal collection of Venezuelan art, featuring ninety-nine works, some of which Sujo later
donated to the museum. From 1997 to 2003, Sujo loaned two hundred works to the Duke
University Art Museum to help it form a Latin American art collection. Sujo took an active
role advising private collectors and helped place drawings, paintings and sculptures in
museums that were increasingly displaying-as had been Sujo's wish all along-works by artists
from both continents side-by-side.
References:
Oral history interview wih Clara Diament Sujo, 2010 June 8-16. Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution.
Diament Sujo, Clara. "Cronología," in
Una visión del arte venezolano
1940-1980: Colección Clara Diament Sujo, Galería de Arte Nacional, Caracas,
septiembre-noviembre 1995
. Caracas: La Galería, 1995.
Russell, John. "Art: New Gallery Offers Surprising Americana,"
The
New York Times
, July 17, 1981.
Open for use by qualified researchers, with the following exceptions: restrictions apply to
items that are fragile, items that have third-party privacy concerns or donor-imposed access
restrictions. Some items are unavailable pending rehousing by conservation. Born digital
content will be made available on-site only, through the digital preservation repository.
Born digital and audiovisual content is unavailable until reformatted. Contact reference for
reformatting.
Contact
Library Reproductions
and Permissions
.
Clara Diament Sujo papers, 1944-2014 (bulk 1981-2008), The Getty Research Institute, Los
Angeles, Accession no. 2018.M.31.
http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2018m31
Immediate Source of Acquisition
Partial gift of Clara Diament Sujo.
Processed by Karen Meyer-Roux in January-May 2019 with the assistance of work-study student
Lizbeth Hernandez.
The finding aid was reviewed by members of the Anti-Racist Description Working Group in
2022 and no revisions were made.
Oral history interview wih Clara Diament Sujo, 2010 June 8-16. Archives of American Art,
Smithsonian Institution.
The bulk of the records related to Estudio Actual reside in Caracas. Other ephemera
relating to Estudio Actual and CDS Gallery are also located in the Sujo collection, Hirsch
Library, The International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA). Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston.
Books moved to the General Collections can be searched in the Research Library's online
catalog under the provenance search phrase "Diament Sujo Collection." Books by Jorge Romero
Brest, Aly Sujo, and Jeannine Sujo were retained in the archive. See Series III, in
particular Box 360.
Scope and Content of Collection
The papers of Clara Diament Sujo provide a comprehensive survey of the operations of CDS
Gallery in New York that Sujo directed beginning in 1981. There is also documentation on the
center of contemporary art Estudio Actual created by Sujo in Caracas in 1968, as well as on
her formative years studying with Jorge Romero Brest, and her writings and lectures.
The archive comprises correspondence with collectors, galleries, museums, private dealers,
and artists; financial records; scrapbooks of press clippings; exhibition brochures; artist
files; photographs; videos; and works on paper dedicated to Sujo. Among the artists promoted
by CDS Gallery and represented in the records are: Roberto Aizenberg; Jacobo Borges; Carlos
Cruz-Diez; José Luis Cuevas; Stephen De Staebler; Wilfredo Lam; Roberto Matta; Henry Moore;
José Clemente Orozco; Armando Reverón; Jesús Rafael Soto; Hedda Sterne; Joaquín
Torres-García; and Adja Yunkers.
The archive is arranged in four series: Series I. Estudio Actual records, circa 1957-2003;
Series II. CDS Gallery records, 1981-2014; Series III. Clara Diament Sujo personal papers,
1944-2014; Series IV. Artworks, 1951-1999.
Diament Sujo, Clara
Romero Brest, Jorge
Art dealers
Art galleries, Commercial
Art -- Collectors and collecting
Art, Modern -- Collectors and collecting
Exhibitions -- New York (State) -- New York
Painting, Modern -- 20th century
Art dealers -- Archives
Audiocassettes
Black-and-white prints (photographs)
Born digital
Color slides
Correspondence
DVDs
Photographs, Original.
Printed ephemera
Video recordings
Diament Sujo, Clara
CDS Gallery