Bridgeman acquires Lebrecht

Smart move from Bridgeman here – they just bought the Lebrecht Music and Arts photo library – ‘the world’s largest image bank for classical music and related arts, with a collection of over 400,000 specialist images.’

The core Lebrecht collection covers every aspect of the lives and works of composers and authors, the concert halls and coffee houses where they worked, the societies they lived in – from Chopin to Chagall, Pink Floyd to Stalin, Plato to Nabokov.

Lebrecht’s Managing Director, Elbie Lebrecht, said this on her choice of partner: “When I let it be known that I was ready to sell the library that I had built up over 25 years, we had a number of very gratifying offers. Among these, we chose Bridgeman both because we knew and trusted them as colleagues for quite a while and because of their enthusiasm for our brand. There is an obvious synergy between our comprehensive coverage of the performing arts and Bridgeman’s of the visual arts. I am very happy to know that our archive, our reputation and, above all, our artists, our photographers and staff are in good hands.”