Knowing what you have is the first step towards long-term care of your artistic legacy.
Describing your artistic legacy plays an important role in establishing an estate. It all starts with a clear overview of what elements of the archive and oeuvre have been preserved. This helps you to take decisions and justify them, make choices, and explore the various possibilities. Additionally, describing your archive gives you insight into the organisation, composition and storage conditions of the legacy and offers the opportunity to set priorities and take action. The more you know about your own collection and the artistic legacy, the greater your ability to take the best possible care of it and make decisions based on preservation and management.
A few questions you can ask here are:
- What steps have already been taken to survey your legacy? Have you made a recent inventory of your work, specifically your artistic work? Is there a list / inventory of your archive?
- Have you got an overview of all your works that have been donated or sold during your artistic career? Do you still know who has those works?
- In what circumstances and condition are your oeuvre and archive stored? Where is the current storage place?
If there is no clear overview of the legacy, it is recommended to start by surveying it before making any further decisions, such as those involved in establishing an estate.
Drawing up an inventory of the artist’s oeuvre and archive is a long-term process, and also a growth process. It is concurrent with organising and managing an estate. As an artist or heir, you can start by making an archive audit and drawing up a placement list. This audit will give you a general overview of what has been preserved. It is also possible to determine the place, condition, scope and importance of the archive, along with certain activities required to make further progress. Later, as the process progresses, the artist or heir may decide to continue surveying everything step by step by drawing up an inventory and by describing and organising the artist’s oeuvre and archive.
In the section on ‘How to get started with an artistic legacy’, the CKV discusses the steps you can take to care for the artist’s archive and oeuvre, document the living and working environment and identify the intellectual legacy. Care for the artistic legacy also plays an important role in establishing and managing an estate. After all, the legacy is the core of the organisation, so it needs to be well preserved and easily accessible.
