Giving Tuesday 2025

With your help we’ve been making progress in our mission to:

“collect, archive, and share documentation of the Outer Cape’s

exceptional modern architecture, restore a group of important,

endangered modern houses, and relaunch those houses as platforms

for new creative work”

This year we completed the the Breuer house restoration and secured its

future. We hosted Tom Burr as the house’s first artist in residence and we

are hard at work on the huge project of preserving and cataloging the

Tamás Breuer Photographic Collection. For more on this see below.

Please remember us in your end of year giving.

The Breuer entry deck, before and after.

The Tamás (Tom) Breuer Photographic Collection

When CCMHT purchased Marcel and Connie Breuer’s summer home and its

contents in 2024, it also acquired more than 2,000 rolls of film shot by their son,

Tamás (Tom) Breuer between the mid-1960s and mid-1980s. CCMHT holds the

most comprehensive and significant archive of materials related to Cape

modernism, and this acquisition expands the archive with an intimate, decades-

long photographic account of the Breuer family’s life and their social milieu, both

local and international.

This remarkable collection includes pictures taken in Africa, Europe, and New

York City, but the vast majority are elegant, keenly observed black-and-white

photographs of daily life in Wellfleet. While a few of these images circulated

locally, most remained as unprinted negatives, unseen even by the people who

appear in them.

Tom’s photographs proved invaluable during the restoration of the Breuer house,

documenting the building and its interiors as they evolved, including additions,

furnishings, art, and how, over the years, those objects shifted around in a lived-

in home. They also record the surrounding landscape before decades of erosion,

tree growth, and human activity reshaped the ponds, beaches, and woods.Most importantly, the archive reveals the private world of the creative community

that surrounded the Breuers on the Cape. Tom recorded quiet domestic

moments as well as lively gatherings that brought together Bauhaus luminaries

with local artists, writers, and friends. Tom’s technique of taking multiple, rapid-

fire frames of the same subject creates a cinematic effect, as though someone

was shooting a decades-long documentary.

It has been said that if a bomb had fallen on Wellfleet in any August of the

1960s, American cultural life would have come to a grinding halt. The designers,

artists, writers, and political thinkers who congregated there each summer had

an outsized global influence, but deep in Wellfleet’s backwoods, they sought

peaceful isolation. These pictures pull back the curtain on their unseen world.

To make this significant photographic collection accessible to scholars and

the public, each roll must be cleaned, put in acid-free sleeves, scanned,

and recorded in a database noting subjects, locations, and other essential

information that makes them searchable using a variety of criteria.

Since 2023, we have also been conducting recorded Zoom sessions with

surviving family members of the individuals pictured, gathering context and

stories about the scenes depicted. The process is often emotional, as

participants are, in many cases, seeing these pictures of themselves and their

loved ones for the first time.

Select images from the collection have already appeared in books, articles, and

documentary films. Yet countless important photographic archives are lost each

year as creators pass away or as homes change hands. Many families simply

lack the time, resources, or equipment to preserve such materials.

CCMHT is fortunate to hold the rights to this collection—and fortunate that the

negatives survived years of neglect. The recent discovery of at least 400

additional rolls of negatives among the Breuer House materials makes this

archive even more significant, and the need to preserve it even more urgent. The

work of cleaning, digitizing, and cataloging each roll is painstaking, labor-

intensive, and costly. Much of the progress so far has been achieved through

the dedicated efforts of paid interns and our executive director, Peter McMahon.

Through an accident of fate, this important cultural asset has been saved. As

part of our stewardship of the Breuer House, and in keeping with CCMHT’s

mission to preserve and share the history of modernism on the Cape, we are

committed to ensuring that Tom’s photographs are fully digitized and made

accessible to scholars and the public.

This archive holds tremendous potential for:• Scholars researching the history of modernism and the many notable

individuals depicted

• Studies of the Hungarian and Jewish avant-garde diaspora

• Scholars and scientists examining the changing ecology of the Outer

Cape

• The Town of Wellfleet’s Historical Society and Historical Commission and

anyone else interested in local history, for detailed records of people,

buildings, and local infrastructure

Watch this space for more news on the archive.

Happy Holidays!