An archive covering the period 1939 through 1941 for the avant garde San Francisco art gallery Courvoisier Gallery which was located at 133 Geary Street. Courvoisier Gallery was founded by Guthrie Courvoisier and operated by him until he turned the gallery over to the young society entrepreneur Jay D. McEvoy in 1939 who ran the gallery until 1941, when Mr. Courvoisier again took over. In addition to showing new artists as well as stocking the classic and well known painters of the day Courvoisier was the first art gallery that recognized that the Walt Disney created cels were works of art and could be sold to the public as an art medium. Courvoisier himself left the Gallery and worked with Disney to market these cels and then continued on after 1941 as the primary source where the cels could be obtained through an exclusive agreement arranged with Walt Disney studios.
The correspondence consists of a 12x 12” file box full of several hundred letters to the gallery in file folders, most with retained carbon copies from a legion of artists, clients, consignors, collectors, society patrons, other art galleries, museum directors and art suppliers. The material furnishes a broad and introspective look at the inner workings of a modern art gallery of pre-war San Francisco. Some of the more interesting groups of correspondence include approximately 30 important letters to and from the artist, Jean Varda, (some signed Yanko, his Greek name) who emigrated from Greece and lived for many years in Sausalito. Much of the writing concerns Varda’s attempt to stay in the United States, despite efforts from the immigration authorities at Ellis Island to deport him. McEvoy worked diligently with lawyers to help him achieve work status to stay in San Francisco, and apparently was successful, as he was the first to show Varda’s work, at least on the West Coast. Other correspondence includes 4 Moholy-Nagy letters, approximately 30 pieces of Frederic Taubes material including telegrams, letters, gallery announcements, carbon replies etc., 18 pieces of Abe Rattner correspondence, a file of 20 pieces of material concerning the Italian Sculptor, Antonietta Paoli Pogliani. Other artists and individuals included are a Thor Heyerdahl T.L.s., artists, Dewit Peters, Micaela Martinez D. Mendelowitz, Ethel Mundy, Justin Murry, George Post, 2 A.l.s. from Peggy Guggenheim, the sculptor Jacques Schneir, Porter Woodruff, letters from the Irish playwright Edward Lindsay-Hogg, the etcher William Hayter, H. Halit, 2 letters from California impressionist Armin Hansen, Ernest Haskell, Roas Hooper Dwight Shepler, collector Jerome Hill and a host of people all involved in the art world in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. The last files include some McEvoy social correspondence and the letters and legal documents that close the gallery with Courvoisier again taking over from McEvoy, some including unpleasant financial disputes between the two.