Alfred Werner Collection

The bulk of this collection consists of the published output of Alfred Werner. He wrote thousands of stories, reviews, and columns, and he was an editor of or contributor to, among others, the Viennese newspapers Gerechtigkeit and Die Stimme, the Chicago Jewish Forum, Arts Magazine, and Pantheon.

The single largest segment of the collection, Series II, Subseries 2, consists of work published primarily in the 1940s and 1950s. His focus was world affairs, with an emphasis on Jewish and Zionist issues. The main outlets for his work were the many mid-century American-Jewish publications such as the American Zionist, the Brooklyn Jewish Center Review, and Congress Weekly. He was also a frequent contributor to Jewish publications in Europe and Israel, to newspapers such as the Saturday Evening Review of Literature and the New York Post, and to political magazines such as Esquire, the Nation, and the New Republic.

The second-largest part of the collection, Series II, Subseries 3, consists of Werner’s art history publications. By the 1960s and through the end of his life in 1979, he wrote almost exclusively about art. His main topic was 19th and 20th century European and American art, with an emphasis on Jewish and Israeli artists.

The collection also contains a small amount of additional material pertaining to Alfred Werner’s professional career, including manuscripts, research materials, and published reviews of his work. It also includes a reference collection of over 1000 art photographs, primarily of works by artists Werner was researching. This subseries contains chiefly professional 8x10 black-and-white photographs, most with detailed provenance information on the reverse. There are also a variety of smaller photographs.

Finally, the collection contains some of Werner’s personal documents, such as vital records, manuscripts, typescripts, and published versions of his poetry (written almost entirely in German), typescripts of an early autobiography and a later impressionistic memoir (both in English), as well as about a dozen photographs of Werner.

This collection provides evidence of American political print culture in the 1940s and 1950s, and of the international art scene in the mid 20th-century, with a focus on Jewish, Israeli, and American art. It also provides a window into the robust American-Jewish print culture of the post-war United States, and showcases the success of a Austrian-Jewish émigré in the areas of political writing and art history.

The collection does not contain correspondence and manuscripts commensurate with Werner’s published output. These materials may be held in the related collection found at SUNY Albany.