NYPL Researcher Spotlight: Blair Asbury Brooks

By Jeanne-Marie Musto, Librarian II
January 3, 2025
headshot of Blair Asbury Brooks, looking into the camera, with chin resting on her right hand.

Blair Asbury Brooks

Photograph by Sarah Kurz.

This profile is part of a series of interviews chronicling the experiences of researchers who use The New York Public Library's collections for the development of their work.

Blair Asbury Brooks is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She will defend her dissertation, "Heinz Berggruen: Dealing and Collecting Modern Art in the Shadow of World War II," in spring 2025; she plans to expand and adapt it into a trade book. For a decade prior to entering the doctoral program she worked at contemporary art galleries, and still advises clients on art acquisitions. She describes those experiences as invaluable to her examination of the often opaque art market.

When did you first get the idea for your research project? 

At a dinner in 2017 Gretchen Berggruen, the late wife of John Berggruen, Heinz’s oldest son, was telling me about her father-in-law. I went home and ordered his autobiography, Hauptweg und Nebenwege (Highway and byways), named after a work by Paul Klee. I started with the French edition, probably because I liked its title best: J’étais mon meilleur client (I was my best client). I had been looking for a dissertation topic and had just written a paper on Dr. Grace McCann Morley, the founding Director of the San Francisco Museum of Art (today the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art), and her extraordinary efforts to build a contemporary art scene in San Francisco in the 1930s. I had also written both my undergraduate and masters theses on Peggy Guggenheim and her legacy as a dealer and collector. Upon reading Heinz Berggruen’s autobiography, it was clear that he was a lens through which I could expand my research on these and a number of related topics. Berggruen (1914-2007) worked for Morley in San Francisco in the late 1930s. He had fled the National Socialists in his native Berlin and arrived in the Bay Area in 1937. After the war he returned to Europe and opened a gallery in Paris. Berggruen was, like Guggenheim, a dealer and collector of modern art who eventually had an eponymous museum (the Museum Berggruen in Berlin), so I could continue to feed my interest in the twentieth-century art market and legacy-building efforts of its participants.  

painting of progressively smaller quadrilaterals in shades of blue and orange

Paul Klee, "Hauptweg und Nebenwege," 1929. Oil on canvas (original panel), 33 × 26½ in. Despite his prolific dealing in works by Klee and affinity for this work in particular, Berggruen never owned it. Today the painting is in the collection of the Museum Ludwig, Cologne.

Wikimedia Commons. Original: Museum Ludwig, Cologne, inventory number ML 76/3253; transferred from the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum on February 23rd, 1976.

What brought you to the Library? 

I first moved to New York to get a masters degree at Columbia and relied on NYPL in conjunction with Columbia’s Avery Architectural & Fine Arts Library. Then I wrote a couple of fiction manuscripts, which required a steady stream of research materials as well as books I could pick up at my local branch.   

On a non-research front, I was a member of the Young Lions Conservators for a number of years. I relished the programming with authors and the chance to go into seemingly hidden jewel-like rooms after hours. I still remember the first event I attended. I didn’t know a soul and nervously started talking to the nearest person who caught my eye. Seventeen years later, she and I are still friends.

What's your favorite spot in the Library?

I’ve just started working from the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities. The focus emanating from the other researchers is invigorating, and it has just the right balance of formality and coziness. If coffee were allowed, it would be perfect.

Describe your research routine.

As I’m researching and reading, I always have a parade of documents open so that I can take notes and input information into various bibliographies, chronologies, spreadsheets, and lists of ongoing research avenues. It often feels overwhelming as I toggle between them, but when I’m writing and relying on those organizational documents, I’m always retroactively grateful. Once, when I rediscovered a very detailed spreadsheet I’d already made, I muttered aw, thanks buddy aloud, seemingly to my former self. Luckily no one heard me.  

Black and white photograph of a man looking at the camera; behind him is a painting of a woman.

Photograph of Heinz Berggruen in Berlin in 2000, in front of Pablo Picasso's 1936 painting "Dora Maar avec ongles verts" (Dora Maar with green fingernails). Berggruen acquired the work in 1998 at the auction of Maar's collection. It’s now at the Museum Berggruen, Berlin.

Wikimedia Commons; © Oliver Mark / CC BY-SA 4.0.

What research tools could you not live without?

Inquisitiveness. I like my go-to-app WordWeb’s definition: “a state of active curiosity.” Without it, everything else peters out. It really is a tool. It’s the mechanism through which you remain not only open to and interested in the research paths that present themselves, but also proactively in pursuit. 

What’s the most unexpected item you encountered in your research?

Doodles. I love going through papers by Important People and finding that amongst the Important Documents are those timeless, mindless scribbles.

Describe a moment when your research took an unexpected turn.

It was less an unexpected turn than a rabbit hole. My research into a series of collage exhibitions Heinz Berggruen organized at his Paris gallery, Berggruen & Cie, in the 1950s turned into a bit of an obsession…and a full dissertation chapter on its own. I’m turning it into an article.

How do you maintain your research momentum?

When I can’t focus or I feel a mental block, I pivot to another area of research. It feels like procrastination, even though it all needs to be accomplished at some point, and that little diversion from my predetermined schedule is energizing. I tell myself that I’m being a rebel.

After a day of working/researching, what do you do to unwind?

Rather unoriginal, but I go to the gym. There I listen to podcasts (Pod Save America and How Did This Get Made are favorites) or audiobooks (anything by David Sedaris, over and over) and do whatever feels good—weights, TRX, jumping rope, running until I remember that I hate running. 

Looking up past several levels of a building to a domed skylight.

The interior of the Museum Berggruen, looking over the top of Alberto Giacometti's 1960 sculpture "Grande femme debout IV" (Large standing woman IV).

Photograph by Blair Asbury Brooks.

What's your guilty pleasure distraction?

This reminds me that I need to stop watching so many shows about murder and espionage.

What tabs do you currently have open on your computer?

So many that my computer has been getting hot. There’s also a new humming sound, which can’t be good. Gmail is always open, as is a Google Translate tab. The New York Times, too. Then there are tabs relating to tracking down works of art—museum and auction house websites, artnet’s price database, etc. NYPL’s newspaper databases have been invaluable. I’m also grateful to the institutions that have digitized their archival materials, even though I think they’re the ones making my computer hum.

Is there anything you'd like to tell someone looking to get started?

Find a topic that you want to live with for a (potentially) very long time. If you find your mind wandering to the subject unprovoked, that’s a good sign.

What's your favorite spot in midtown for taking a break?

My friend, Samantha Small, who is also working from the Vartan Gregorian Center for Research in the Humanities, and I take lunch breaks in Bryant Park. We're still figuring out what to do when we're scared off by inclement weather.

Have we left anything out that you’d like to tell other researchers?

Thanks to nypl.org, the Library is a vast resource even when you’re not there in person.