St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin (http://www.gothicpast.com)
The Department of the History of Art and Architecture at Trinity College Dublin has launched a new website called Gothic Past, which contains downloadable images of Gothic architecture and sculpture in Ireland. This looks like it could be an important new resource for Irish material that is often hard to find.
It was a slow start to the year, but things have picked up in the last week or so. Let’s start with the big news from January:
Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), Saint-Séverin, 1909, Minneapolis Institute of Arts (photographed by Derek Churchill)
In addition to being New Year’s Day, January 1st every year is also Public Domain Day, a celebration of artists and authors whose works are entering the “public domain” because the copyright protection of those works has expired.
Technically, no major works will actually enter the public domain in the United States this year (or in any year until 2019), thanks to a series of complicated changes to United States copyright law since 1978. But in many countries, copyright protection ends 70 years after the death of the artist or author. So in those countries at least, works by anyone who died in 1941 would have passed into the public domain on January 1, 2012.
Artists who died in 1941 include a number of important late 19th- and early 20th-century figures, such as Émile Bernard, Maximilien Luce, William McGregor Paxton, John Lavery, El Lissitzky, Alexei Jawlensky, and Robert Delaunay (left).
The VRC’s website has a Copyright page with more information and links to additional resources.
Please note that I am not a copyright lawyer, so my comments here should not be mistaken for legal advice. You should always consult a copyright professional if you have questions about whether or not a particular work is in the public domain.
Last summer I posted links to obituaries for Cy Twombly and Lucian Freud. Let me add the names of a few more noteworthy figures in 20th-century art who have passed away since then:
ARTstor is releasing quite a number of new image collections as 2011 draws to a close. For the complete list of new releases, click here. A few of the most interesting of these recent collections are listed below (you can get additional information by clicking on each link):
Users of Mac OSX Lion and ARTstor’s Offline Image Viewer (OIV) have been out of luck so far this semester (read my previous post here), but a solution finally appears to be on the horizon. ARTstor is currently testing a new version of OIV that will be compatible with Lion, and expects to release it within the next week.
Keep an eye on VRC@UD for more information!
UPDATE, November 23, 2011: OIV for Lion has arrived! To download it, you first need to log into your ARTstor account. In the navigation bar at the top of the main ARTstor search page, click on Tools and select “Download offline presentation tool (OIV).” Make sure to click the radio button next to “OIV 3.1.2 for Mac (Java 6.x; Mac OSX 10.7)” before downloading.
The new Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened on November 11 in Bentonville, Arkansas. Housed in a building designed by architect Moshe Safdie, the museum features an impressive collection of American art amassed by Alice Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and heiress to the company’s fortune. Bentonville, a small city in the Ozarks of northwestern Arkansas, is also home to Wal-Mart’s corporate headquarters.
John Wilmerding, the distinguished historian of American art, advised Walton in her purchases for the new museum. Among the most important works at the Crystal Bridges are paintings by Asher B. Durand, Thomas Eakins, John Singer Sargent, George Bellows, Thomas Hart Benton, and Norman Rockwell. Despite its relatively small size and remote location, the collection has instantly become one of the best in the country for American art.
Some critics have had a hard time regarding the Crystal Bridges as anything other than the “Wal-Mart Museum of Art.” And Walton’s acquisitions in recent years have not been without controversy. In 2005 she outbid such New York institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art to obtain Durand’s Kindred Spirits, a major landscape of the Hudson River School, from the New York Public Library. But she failed in her attempt the following year to secure Eakins’s masterpiece, The Gross Clinic, from Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. After a citywide campaign to match Walton’s $68 million offer, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts arranged to purchase the work jointly in 2007, and thereby kept the painting from leaving the city. Both institutions were forced to sell other works by Eakins in their collections to raise the necessary funds.
Susan Davi and I will be offering an introductory workshop on ARTstor on Wednesday, November 9, from 2:00 to 3:30 pm in 116A Morris Library. We will offer tips and training on how to find and download images, create image groups, and use the Offline Image Viewer (OIV) for classroom presentations.
All are welcome to attend, but seating is limited. Please click here to register for the workshop.
Poster for the WPA's Federal Art Project, 1936 (photo from the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution)
The Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution has donated nearly 300 Works Progress Administration (WPA) photographs from the 1930s to Wikimedia Commons, the image collection affiliated with Wikipedia. These include portraits of artists like Charles Alston and Arshile Gorky, and photos showing artists at work on public murals and other Great Depression-era projects. You can view the complete collection here.
As works created explicitly for the Federal Government, most WPA works are not copyrightable and have therefore always been in the public domain. That means you can legally download and use these high-resolution images however you want, without having to seek permission.
Read more about this Smithsonian-Wikimedia collaboration here.
The 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.