St. Louis Area Artists Files

Do you know the story behind the two murals depicting the history of aviation at Lambert airport? Do you have an old portrait of a family member and wonder if it was painted by a notable local artist? The Fine Arts department’s Local Artists Files can help you find the answers to these and other questions related to area art and artists.

The department has been collecting information on local area artists since the early 20th century. Hundreds of files, containing thousands of newspaper clippings, magazine articles, exhibition lists, questionnaires, gallery announcements, and other documents have been collected over the years, and the Fine Arts staff continues to create new files and add to existing ones. These files are housed in the Fine Arts Reading Room at Central Library, where they can be viewed in person. These archival materials cannot be checked out, but they can be photocopied.

About those airport murals: the files on the artists, Siegfried Reinhardt, Spencer Taylor and Solomon Thurman, contain newspaper clippings that tell the story of the murals from the time the Reinhardt mural was originally designed and executed, through the controversy it aroused, to the finished second mural by Taylor and Thurman. On a more personal level, many St. Louisans have portraits of family members painted by local artists. One such artist was Armin Stock, a successful local portraitist who had a prolific career in the mid-20th century. His file contains articles from the 1950s and 1960s that include his photo and some of his work, plus his obituary from 2003.

The staff of the Fine Arts Department will be happy to help you find information about local artists through our WebRef e-mail service (webref@slpl.org).