Arrangement
This collection is organized into the following two series: Series 1: Correspondence, Posters, and Publications, 1941-1992; and Series 2: World War II Artifacts, 1939-1945.
Please see the individual series arrangement notes for additional information.
Abstract
George Roseborough Collins (1917-1993) was an American Field Service (AFS) ambulance driver during World War II and an art historian and professor at Columbia University. The George R. Collins Collection consists of World War II automotive instructional booklets and maintenance manuals, newspaper clippings on World War II history and the local AFS student exchange programs chapter, World War II artifacts and posters, and his post-war personal correspondence.
Administrative/Biographical History
George Roseborough Collins was born on September 2, 1917, in Springfield, Massachusetts to Lucy Roseborough Mackay and Harold Fisher Collins. Collins attended Newton High School in Newtonville, Massachusetts, and went on to Princeton University where he received his B.A. and M.A. in art and architecture (Classes of 1939 and 1942, respectively).
In 1942 Collins enlisted as an ambulance driver with the American Field Service (AFS) and was attached to the 11th Company (Coy) in Syria and Libya. In 1943 he served with the British Eighth Army along the Adriatic front with C Platoon of the 567 Coy, and from September 1944 through May 1945 he trained new AFS recruits in Naples, Italy. Collins also assisted with displaced persons recently liberated from the Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald concentration camps in Germany before finally being repatriated in August 1945. Collins was commended by his superior officers for his skill in vehicle maintenance during the war, and was awarded the 1939-1945 Star, Africa Star with Eighth Army Clasp, Italy Star, and France-Germany Star.
Following the war, Collins taught art history at Columbia University from 1946 until his retirement in 1986. During this time, Collins was considered the foremost expert of Antonio Gaudi’s Catalan architectural style. Collins collected an extensive research file on Gaudi and Catalan modernismo from the 19th and 20th centuries, known as the Amigos de Gaudi U.S.A., which became the George R. Collins Archive of Catalan Art and Architecture at the Art Institute of Chicago. Throughout his academic career Collins was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.
George R. Collins died on January 5, 1993, at age 75.
