The Harper Collection
In the spring of 2025, the AUP Library received a remarkable donation of approximately 850 books on contemporary art history, significantly enriching its holdings in this domain. This exceptional collection, assembled by the late Ms. Yvonne Sanielevici, a devoted art enthusiast, was generously donated to the AUP Library by her son, Alan Harper, and his spouse, Catherine Dumait-Harper.
To date, approximately 250 titles from the Harper Collection have been processed, providing a preliminary overview of its contents. Assembled by Yvonne Sanielevici (1934–2024), the collection forms a focused library of mostly post-1945 art publications that reflects the intellectual and curatorial currents shaping the interpretation of modern and contemporary art in the early twenty-first century. Encompassing catalogs, monographs, and critical essays, it is dominated by volumes issued between 2004 and 2014, a period marked by the globalization of the art world and the expansion of modernist and postwar narratives beyond traditional European and North American frameworks. The chronological span of publication dates centers on the first decade of the new millennium and identifies Sanielevici’s principal collecting years as the early 2000s to mid-2010s.
Articles, notes and signatures associated with the processed titles.
Reflecting the exhibitions presented by major U.S. and European institutions, the collection necessarily preserves traces of a conventional art-historical narrative—from the foundations of European modernism to its postwar transformations. Publications devoted to Piet Mondrian, the Bauhaus, Wassily Kandinsky or Constantin Brâncuși anchor the early modernist phase, while the post-1945 period is represented through artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Alberto Giacometti, and Barnett Newman. Further volumes on artists as diverse as Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Robert Mapplethorpe, or Marina Abramović trace subsequent major artistic developments over the past 60 years.
Piet Mondrian, Self-Portrait, 1908–1909, charcoal and crayon on paper, 30 x 25,5 cm, Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.
Constantin Brâncuși. Self-Portrait with Polaire in the Studio [Autoportrait avec la chienne Polaire dans l’atelier], c. 1921, gelatin silver print, 23.9 x 17.9 cm, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris.
Yet, most significantly, moving beyond this European–American axis, the Harper Collection registers the shift in art-historical discourse that occurred from the 1990s onward, marked—most notably—by the incorporation of Latin American perspectives into the global canon. The holdings reveal a sustained interest in Latin American art, from a renewed institutional focus on historical figures such as Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington, and the 1960s Brazilian avant-garde with Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape, to a younger generation of artists including Gabriel Orozco and Ernesto Neto. Publications issued by the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, testify to the consolidation of Latin American modernism within a global framework, while also foregrounding the increasing visibility of women artists, whose work anchors several of the collection’s major narratives. Furthermore, catalogs on Hiroshi Sugimoto and Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, together with exhibitions on Japan’s Gutai group, situate the holdings within a wider trans-Pacific dialogue on gesture, performance, and material experimentation. This evolution reflects the ongoing broadening of the art-historical canon beyond conventional Eurocentric narratives and the emergence of a more global vision of modernism.
Frida Kahlo. Self-Portrait with Monkey, 1938, oil on Masonite, 49.5 x 39.4 cm, Buffalo AKG Art Museum
Portrait of Leonora Carrington by H. L. Mattison, c. 1975
Overall, the Harper Collection constitutes an intellectual and documentary archive of how museums, critics, and scholars between 1990 and 2020 redefined the map of modern and contemporary art. Its emphasis on Latin American conceptualism, feminist re-readings of Surrealism, and installation practices reveals a collector attentive to curatorial discourse rather than market value. Through its bibliographic coherence, the collection stands as a concise microhistory of globalization in art history—an archive of how modernism became plural.
Alan Harper, Catherine Dumait-Harper, and Jorge Sosa
A Selection of Book Titles from the Recent Donation
Lygia Clark: the Abandonment of Art by
Helio Oiticica by
Lygia Pape by
Gutai by
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