The relationships between collecting, art and society are based on the ability of the artistic work to communicate with the viewer. This communication comes from the exhibition of the artistic work inside the museum. Sooner or later, the artistic work generates documentary information that becomes the memory of the museum materialized in the different typologies of catalogs. Documentary management and its ability to create a historical narrative is the objective of this paper, using the Basque Fine Arts Museums as a case study. Basque autonomy began with the 1979 Statute of Autonomy and, later, with the internal jurisdictional delimitation of the Territorial Territories Act of 1983, the three Basque provincial institutions consolidated the autonomous cultural management in their respective territories. Both events directly influenced the increase of the museum funds and the artistic literature that they generated. Documentary management and memorandum of the Basque museums, has materialized in the production of catalogs, whose textual typologies and categorizations have been decisive in the construction of an autochthonous artistic memory, very influential in the development of the history of national and local art.