ARTstor’s Tribute to Steve Jobs

Screenshot of ARTstor's search page, with its tribute to Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

Screenshot of ARTstor's search page on October 6, 2011

If you have gone to ARTstor’s search page in the past few days, you may have been greeted by a new image. The Macintosh 128K Home Computer pictured there is the original model released by Apple in 1984, and the one marketed that year in the company’s famous Super Bowl commercial. It’s ARTstor’s low-key tribute to the late Steve Jobs, Apple’s co-founder.

This image also highlights the Museum of Modern Art’s Architecture and Design collection in ARTstor, which includes images of a number of Apple products at MoMA. Also among the nearly 7000 images in this collection are works by such designers as Louis Comfort Tiffany, Hector Guimard, Antoni Gaudí, Marcel Breuer, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Frick Digital Image Archive

The Frick Art Reference Library in New York has just announced the online launch of the Frick Digital Image Archive. Drawing from the Frick’s vast photoarchive, this inaugural release includes 15,000 images documenting many lesser-known works of art that were in American private collections or on the New York art market between 1922 and 1967.

The Frick is also making available the documentation (without images) for these works plus another 110,000 works recorded in its photoarchive through Arcade, the catalog of the New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC).

You can read more here in the Frick’s press release. As anyone who has ever used the Frick’s photoarchive can attest, this is a major new online resource for scholars.

Dead Sea Scrolls Online

The Israel Museum in Jerusalem has teamed up with Google to digitize the Dead Sea Scrolls and make them accessible online. The Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project has just released the first five complete scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in 1947, and over the next decade fragments of nearly a thousand scrolls came to light. They are among the oldest and most important Biblical artifacts ever found, yet for years access to them was tightly controlled. The Huntington Library‘s decision in 1991 to make even its photographs of the scrolls available to scholars caused controversy at the time, so this latest development is truly welcome news.

OIV and Mac OSX Lion

Mac OSX LionUsers of ARTstor’s Offline Image Viewer (OIV) should be aware that it does not yet work with the newest Apple operating system, Mac OSX Lion (version 10.7). ARTstor is aware of this incompatibility and is working to fix it.

This problem occurs with every application when a new operating system is first released. The same thing happened with OIV when Apple released OSX Snow Leopard (version 10.6), and ARTstor worked quickly to solve that problem. For the time being, you may want to delay that purchase of a new Mac, make arrangements to use an older Mac instead, or even switch temporarily to using Powerpoint for your presentations.

Please feel free to get in touch with me if you need any assistance!

 

Réunion des Musées Nationaux in ARTstor

Réunion des Musées NationauxARTstor has just released the first 4000 of a projected 12,000 images from the Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN), the premier photo agency for works of art in French museums. Along with the collections of major Parisian institutions like the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay, the RMN’s holdings also include works in many of France’s palaces and regional museums. The addition of RMN images instantly boosts the strength of ARTstor’s collections of both French art in general and non-French art housed in French museums. This is easily one of the most significant ARTstor releases in recent years.

You can read more about the RMN collection in ARTstor here.

Downloading from ARTstor

A sample ARTstor registration form

A sample ARTstor registration form

ARTstor has made an important change to how it allows users to download images. From now on, you must be logged in to your ARTstor account in order to download images. This means that if you have not already registered for an ARTstor account, you probably should do so now.

I have always encouraged users to register for ARTstor, because many useful features are only available to you when you’re logged in. Registration is free, quick, and easy (see the sample registration form at left), and I’m confident that ARTstor will handle your email address responsibly.

You can register in the Log In area at the upper right corner of ARTstor’s Welcome screen. In order to register, you must be at a computer on the UD campus, but after that you can access your ARTstor account remotely for up to 120 days (see below). You may use any email account you want (it doesn’t have to be your UD email account), and it’s generally wise not to choose the same password you use for your email. You may also want to uncheck the two boxes (shown in the sample form at left) to avoid receiving any mailings from ARTstor.

To continue accessing your ARTstor account remotely, you will need to reauthorize it every 120 days (roughly once a semester). To do this, simply log in to your account from a UD computer, and you will automatically get another 120 days.

For more complete information on registering for an ARTstor account, you can find detailed instructions here, or watch a short You Tube video here.

 

Art in the News

Nicolas Poussin, Adoration of the Golden Calf (detail)

Nicolas Poussin, detail from the Adoration of the Golden Calf, 1633-34 (Photo © The National Gallery, London)

Two more art-related headlines out of Britain:

  • An obituary for figurative painter Lucian Freud, 1922-2011.
  • An article on the recent vandalism of two works by 17th-century French painter Nicolas Poussin in the National Gallery, London.

New Collections in ARTstor

Four new image collections have just been released in ARTstor. Click on the links below for further information about each collection:

 

One Last (Virtual) Visit to the Barnes Foundation

Barnes Foundation

Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania (image from www.nytimes.com)

The Barnes Foundation just closed its longtime suburban Philadelphia home in preparation for its upcoming move to a new building in Center City. The New York Times pays tribute to the original Merion museum in a fun interactive feature that lets you take a virtual tour of several of its rooms.

You can read a related article about the Barnes Foundation here.

New Website for the Ghent Altarpiece

IRR detail of an angel in the Ghent Altarpiece

Infrared detail of an angel in the Ghent Altarpiece, showing the underdrawing (IRR assembly from vaneyck.kikirpa.be)

Belgium’s Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage in Brussels has created a new website for images of the Van Eyck brothers’ celebrated Ghent Altarpiece, one of the most important works of Northern Renaissance art.

Only a preview version of the site is currently available, and its images are limited to infrared reflectography made during the recent restoration of the altarpiece. Infrared reflectography (IRR) is a tool in the technical examination of a painting to reveal the preliminary sketches, or underdrawings, that lie beneath the paint surface. These underdrawings often provide clues to the artistic process, such as what changes the artist made along the way, or even who the artist was.

The full site is expected to launch in January 2012, and it will presumably also contain full-color views and details of the altarpiece.

You can read a description of the project here, or visit the preview site at vaneyck.kikirpa.be.