Digitisation and indexing of auctioneer's copies of the catalogues of the Munich auction house Hugo Helbing (1887-1937) Unique source material on the German art trade
The aim of the project supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) was - together with the Central Institute for Art History in Munich - on the one hand to digitise and make sustainable online provision of the previously known and not yet digitised hand copies of the catalogues of the Munich auction house Hugo Helbing (1895 to 1937) on the servers of the Heidelberg University Library. The annotated copies usually contain not only complete information about the consignors - and thus provenances - of the auctioned artworks, but also about the buyers and the prices attained at the auction. Generations of authorised signatories, managing directors, shareholders and employees of the Helbing company were the originators of the various types of annotations (manual protocol, estimated prices / limits, private sale protocol, protocols for authorities such as the Munich police department etc.). This unique source material on the history of the German art trade is of exceptional importance for many research questions.
On the other hand, the project included the scientific description of the annotatedcatalogue copies, a typification and systematisation of the auction annotations as well as the development and evaluation of a model for their structured recording on the basis of the Heidelberg annotation tool heiANNO.
The project is in the context of the “German Sales” portal, which has been set up for around 10 years, with which the Heidelberg University Library, together with various project partners such as the Art Library in Berlin and the Getty Research Center in Los Angeles and with the support of the DFG, is a unique open access provides the available source base for an important part of the art trade in German-speaking countries in the first half of the 20th century.
Running time: 01.01.2021–28.02.2022