Tag Archives: Metropolitan Museum of Art

Metropolitan Museum of Art Waives Copyright

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Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk

Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bashi-Bazouk, 1868-1869, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Image: CC0)

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has dramatically expanded its commitment to Open Access. On Facebook Live this morning, Director and CEO Thomas P. Campbell announced that the Met would make 375,000 images of public domain artworks in its collection freely available for unrestricted use through its new Open Access Policy. This effectively supplants the Met’s earlier Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) and Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) programs, which limited their scope to academic and non-commercial uses. The Met’s images may now be used freely for any purposes, including commercial ones. As always in questions of copyright, this policy applies only to images of artworks which are themselves in the public domain, so most modern and contemporary art is excluded.

Images that are covered by the Open Access Policy are marked on the Met’s website with a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) symbol, meaning that the Museum has waived copyright and dedicated these images to the public domain. Artstor, the Wikimedia Foundation, and Creative Commons–all of which partnered with the Met on this initiative–will also be making these images available on their own sites.

With this new policy, the Met becomes only the second American institution (after the Walters Art Museum) to adopt the generous CC0 designation for its images. It is by far the largest art museum yet to have embraced such a sweeping vision of open access.

Art Museums in the News

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Tullio Lombardo, Adam, ca. 1490-1495, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Tullio Lombardo, Adam, ca. 1490-1495, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Here is a roundup of some recent stories from the museum world:

Open Access Images from the Met

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Edo culture (Court of Benin, Nigeria), Queen Mother Pendant Mask: Iyoba, 16th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Edo culture (Court of Benin, Nigeria), Queen Mother Pendant Mask: Iyoba, 16th century, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has made more than 400,000 images of public domain works in its collection available for non-commercial use through its new Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) initiative. You may now download images from its website and use them for scholarly purposes–including print and online publication–without having to request permission or pay a fee. The Museum is letting users decide if their own projects qualify as “scholarly” or “non-commercial”; you can find definitions and examples on the Met’s OASC FAQ page. You may also want to consult the fine print in the Terms and Conditions for the Met’s website. Commercial use of these images is not permitted.

This is not the first time the Metropolitan Museum of Art has made its images available for free. You have been able to download large images for personal use since its website was redesigned a few years ago, and its collection has been the cornerstone of Artstor’s Images for Academic Publishing (IAP) since that program’s creation. OASC gives users yet another avenue for accessing and using the Met’s images.

Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection at the Met

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The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has received a major gift in the form of Leonard Lauder’s collection of Cubist art, considered one of the greatest of its kind still in private hands. The 78 works in the Lauder Collection include 33 paintings by Pablo Picasso, 17 by Georges Braque, and 14 each by Juan Gris and Fernand Léger.

You can read the Met’s press release here, and an article about the donation in The New York Times here.

The Met’s New Website

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Metropolitan Museum of Art logoThe Metropolitan Museum of Art has recently redesigned its website. You can read an announcement here from the Met’s director, Thomas Campbell.

One feature which sets the new site apart from its predecessor is the ability to download large images of works from the Met’s permanent collection. The actual image sizes vary, but most are large enough to use in a Powerpoint presentation, and many of them are in fact quite large, so you can zoom in and make details if you need to. Many of the Met’s images are already available through ARTstor, but the new site provides another way to access this content.

The Met’s Terms and Conditions are also more generous than most. They do not permit unrestricted use of the images on their new site, as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Yale Center for British Art both explicitly do. However, the Met does permit you to use their images on a personal website, provided that the website is not-for-profit and non-commercial, that you do not alter the images in any way, and that you provide all accompanying caption information.