In the early decades, the fonds archives received major donations in the form of many posthumous papers from Ernst Stückelberg, Rudolf Koller and Augusto Giacometti.
The documentation was built up in the 1970s, in particular from press articles and exhibition records, and it was then merged with the archives of the Lexicon of Swiss Artists (1918–1967). By the year 2000, the partial estates of Otto Meyer-Amden, Reinhold Kündig, Max von Moos, Hans Fischli and Fritz Pauli had also arrived.
In the 2000s, further valuable holdings were bequeathed to the archive, including document collections from the estates of Carlotta Stocker, Hans Aeschbacher, Otto Münch, and Giovanni and Alberto Giacometti. The Hodler archive of Carl Albert Loosli came to the institute on permanent loan from the Musée d'art et d'histoire Neuchâtel. From 2010 onwards, the collection was expanded to include, among many other donations, the partial estates of Alfred Heinrich Pellegrini, Annemie Fontana, Fritz Pauli and Peter Storrer, as well as letters from Ferdinand Hodler to Friedrich Büzberger. The most recent additions include letters from important Swiss artists to André Kamber and the comprehensive partial estates of Giovanni Segantini and André Thomkins, donated from family collections.