Archives are organised around names. Catalogues, indexes, card files and search boxes all assume that a person can be identified by a single, stable label. People’s lives are rarely so tidy. Over the past few months, several of the artists we’ve written about have turned out to be hiding in our records, and in other people’s, under names we weren’t searching for.
This post brings those cases together and suggests some ways of searching around the problem. It follows on from the questions we raised in “Is This an Archive?” about who decides what a record contains. A name on an index card is one of those decisions. Someone chose what to call a person, and that choice now decides whether we can find them.
Married names
Marriage is one way a woman becomes hard to find in the archive. Dorothy Missen, whom we discussed in “Women of the Borough Group,” was born Dorothy Bergan. She met her husband, Len Missen, in Bomberg’s class, one of several relationships that began there. Records made at different points in her life may use different surnames.
Janina Baranowska’s case shows how quickly this can happen. She studied under Bomberg from 1947 to 1950. By her own account, given to the journalist Anna Maria Grabania, she married the architect Maksymilian Baranowski on 21 December 1947, a few months into her studies. She was born Janina Zbaraszewska, so any record from her first months at the Borough could carry either name.
Sometimes the same person used different names in different parts of their life. Bomberg’s wife exhibited throughout this period as Lilian Holt, while taking Bomberg’s name in her personal life. Even a single scholarly article can cite her own writings as both “Lilian Holt” and “Lilian Bomberg née Holt.” Her daughter, Dinora Mendelson, belonged to the Borough circle under her maiden name. Her 2005 letter to the Tate Archive, among Leslie Marr’s papers, and her oral history interview at the British Library are both recorded under her married name, Davies-Rees. A search under either name alone finds only half of her.
Grammar
Some names change as they move between languages. Polish surnames commonly have gendered forms: a man in the family would be Zbaraszewski, a woman Zbaraszewska. English-language records don’t always keep the distinction, whether through a cataloguing convention, a transcription slip or a misunderstanding, so a woman can end up recorded under the masculine form. Diacritics and punctuation create further variants: Nałęcz may be entered as Nalecz, and Bohusz-Szyszko may lose its hyphen. Each variant is another route into the records, and another way to miss them.
Transliteration
Names and places that cross writing systems pick up several spellings. Baranowska reached the Anders Army’s headquarters near Tashkent, in present-day Uzbekistan. English-language accounts call it Yangiyul, and Polish ones Jangi-Jul or Jungi-Jul. The same problem affects names transliterated from Cyrillic, Hebrew or Yiddish, each with its own history of conventions. For a collection rooted in Bomberg’s East End, where migration and many languages are central to the story, searching under only one spelling can hide important connections.
Simple misspellings
Errors creep in everywhere, including careful scholarship. In one footnote of Kate Aspinall’s peer-reviewed article on Bomberg’s teaching, which we’ve relied on and admire, the historian Leon Betsworth appears as “Betchworth.” On an art student’s blog, Dennis Creffield becomes “Cressfield.” Once an error has been published or copied into another catalogue, it becomes a search term in its own right. That’s why it’s worth recording misspellings as well as correcting them, so future researchers can trace where an error came from.
The labels change too
It isn’t only names. Betsworth found that on the Borough Polytechnic’s registration cards between 1946 and 1953, students including Auerbach, Holden, Mead, Oxlade and Richmond entered their occupation as “student” when they first enrolled. After a year or two with Bomberg, they were describing themselves as “Artist” or “Painter.” These are small changes, but they show how people came to see themselves, and how the institution recorded them. A search by category can miss someone just as easily as a search by name.
How to search around the problem
These are the habits we’ve found most useful:
List every variant before you start. Include the birth name, married names, masculine and feminine forms, spellings with and without diacritics, and likely misspellings.
Use wildcards, but check the rules. Searching Zbarasz* can catch several endings at once, but catalogues handle wildcards differently, and some don’t support them at all.
Search through other people. Husbands, teachers, classmates and dealers are often better indexed than the person you’re looking for. Baranowska, for example, can be traced through Bohusz-Szyszko’s circle and the records of Group 49.
Search by date and place rather than name. An exhibition list for a particular year and venue may contain the person under a name you didn’t expect.
Check how women were listed at the time. Some mid-century catalogues and membership lists recorded married women under their husbands’ names.
Keep a log of your searches. Note the terms you tried, the catalogues you searched and what turned up. This makes your research repeatable, and helps you tell a genuine alternative name apart from a catalogue error.
Record what you find, and label it. When cataloguing, add every known variant to the record, but distinguish a documented alternative name from a spelling error. They aren’t the same thing, and the next researcher needs to know which is which.
A call to archives
We’re sure these aren’t the only cases in our records. If you know a Borough student or Bomberg associate who worked or exhibited under another name, or if you’ve found one of our artists under a spelling we haven’t listed, please get in touch. We’ll add verified variants to our records and update this post as the list grows.
Finding someone in an archive isn’t always a matter of looking harder. Sometimes it means learning to search differently.
Sources consulted: Kate Aspinall, “Artist Versus Teacher: The Problem of David Bomberg’s Pedagogical Legacy,” Tate Papers no. 33 (2020), notes 15, 17, 38 and 39; Leon Betsworth, “David Bomberg and the Borough: A Different Class,” The British Art Journal 17, no. 2 (2016): 52–57; Anna Maria Grabania, “Kobieta w czerwonej sukni,” Nowy Czas (2009); Jarosław Koźmiński, “Janina Baranowska (1925–2022),” Tydzień Polski / MyPolska.UK (2022); Tate Archive, Marr Papers, TGA 20057/1/8.