Tag Archives: modern art

Guggenheim Foundation in ARTstor

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Over 750 images from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation are now available in ARTstor. The collection will eventually include about 7,000 images, with works of art at the Foundation’s five museums (including the flagship museum in New York and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice), installation views of Guggenheim exhibitions, and architectural views of its world-famous museum buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright in Manhattan and by Frank Gehry in Bilbao, Spain. The strength of the Guggenheim’s collections is in modern art, so copyright restrictions prevent some works from being included in this release (perhaps most notably those of Picasso).

You can read ARTstor’s announcement here.

Art in the News

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KodakIt 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:

  • The bankruptcy of Eastman Kodak should come as no great surprise to anyone in this digital world, but it’s a sad loss nonetheless. Long before JPEGs there were Kodachrome slides, and long before Powerpoint there was the Kodak Carousel slide projector. Generations of art history students grew up on Kodak products.
  • Two deaths and a birthday (sort of): American Surrealist painter Dorothea Tanning (1910-2012) and artist Mike Kelley (1954-2012) both died last week. And January 28 would have been the 100th birthday of Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock (1912-1956).
  • And just when we thought the Dan Brown effect was finally on the wane, there’s a new revelation about Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa.

2011 Artists’ Obituaries

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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:

New Collections in ARTstor

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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):

WPA Photos in Wikimedia Commons

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Federal Art Project poster

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.

Art in the News

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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.

Art in the News

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A few more art-related items in the recent headlines:

  • An obituary for Cy Twombly, 1928-2011. The American artist, best known for making paintings that look like blackboard scribbles, died on July 5th at age 83.
  • An architectural review of Zaha Hadid’s Guangzhou Opera House in China.
  • An article on Samuel F. B. Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre. The painting, currently on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, is one subject in David McCullough’s new book, The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris.