The Academy Museum's own object pages credit named makers

The image

Among the artifacts on the Academy Museum's own collection pages is a study for a matte painting of Charles Foster Kane's Xanadu mansion in Citizen Kane (1941), rendered in black chalk on trace mounted on illustration board. Its maker field reads: 'Production design: Van Nest Polglase. Matte paintings: Mario Larrinaga, Chesley Bonestell, and Fitch Fulton.' That single line separates the credited production designer from three named matte painters on one film, which is the museum's own record, not an assumption about who drew what.

What the documents show

The museum's own exhibitions listing dates several of its inaugural shows, including 'Stories of Cinema: Story' and two 'Inventing Worlds and Characters' installations, to 30 September 2021, which is the museum's own dated record of when its galleries opened to the public. Its about page states a mission 'to research, develop, and present cinematic content' rather than to hold court on authorship. Object pages across the collection follow one consistent format, naming a maker, materials, the holding collection and an image credit for each piece, which is a documented curatorial habit rather than a one-off caption.

Production context

Editorially, that consistent object-page format looks designed for research use rather than display alone: a visitor or remote researcher can read exactly who is credited with a design and who executed a specific rendering, without the two being flattened into one name. For Xanadu's matte painting, that distinction matters for production practice: a 1941 art department routed a supervising designer's concept through specialist matte artists, a division of labor the museum's own record preserves rather than compresses.

Reference versus imitation

A caption that says only 'Van Nest Polglase's Xanadu' drops two-thirds of the credited makers from the museum's own record and mislocates authorship of the physical painting. The museum's format, maker, materials, collection, image credit, gives a reference practice exactly the fields it needs to cite an artifact completely rather than by the most famous name attached to it. Treating a museum-catalogued study as free-to-copy source material also skips the credit the object page itself supplies.

• Does a citation list every named maker on an object record, or only the best-known name?
• Is a museum's opening or exhibition date drawn from its own dated listing, not a guess?
• Does a credit distinguish a supervising designer from the artists who executed the work?

Opened to the public on 30 September 2021, the Academy Museum's own collection pages model the citation habit this site asks of its readers: name the designer, name the makers, and let the object record, not the most famous name, settle who gets credit.