Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century

The Guggenheim and Whitney Libraries have collaborated to digitize selections from the personal libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana, the inaugural directors of the museums, respectively. The digital library—Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century: Digitized Highlights from the Libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana Force—is available publicly via the Internet Archive. They describe how the collections were developed by Rebay and Force, female museum directors whose institutions were both founded in the 1930s:

Each woman acquired a considerable library during her tenure, collecting materials ranging from the uncommon (gallery announcements from New York and beyond, as well as rare and unusual periodicals and books) to the required reading of the day (exhibition catalogs and major monographs on contemporary artists). These important resources influenced the two women, who in turn influenced the vision and development of their respective institutions, which remain integral to the city’s cultural life today.

The museum libraries digitized selected volumes from each collection to display the materials together online, which helps highlight the similarities and differences between each collection. The Internet Archive, which hosts the collection, offers robust functionality including cataloging data, and the ability to view the fully digitized materials online in a book reader software or to download as a PDF of e-book reader file, including EPUB and Kindle.

To visit the project collection page for Art Resources from the Mid-20th Century: Digitized Highlights from the Libraries of Hilla Rebay and Juliana Force, click here. For more information, please also explore project summaries from the Guggenheim and the Whitney.

MoMA’s “Inventing Abstraction” Website and Exhibition

MoMA recently opened a new exhibition, Inventing Abstraction, 1910–1925, and this ground-breaking survey is accompanied by an equally ground-breaking website. The exhibition takes a multidisciplinary look at the development of abstraction and as such:

The exhibition brings together many of the most influential works in abstraction’s early history and covers a wide range of artistic production, including paintings, drawings, books, sculptures, films, photographs, sound poems, atonal music, and non-narrative dance, to draw a cross-media portrait of these watershed years.

In the October, ARTnews reported that the Leah Dickerman, curator of the exhibition, was collaborating with Paul Ingram of Columbia University’s business school because he specializes in social network analysis. Dickerman wanted to visually display connections and friendships among the artists and creators involved in the genesis of abstraction, and she and her team, along with their business school partners, began mapping connections in an Excel spreadsheet. The project then turned into a dynamic network of artists and other creative types connected by vectors. They liken the project to a Facebook or LinkedIn network for the abstract vanguard.

In the ARTnews article, Paul Ingram “explains that the quality of ‘between-ness’ in the network—being on multiple paths between others—is associated with creativity. According to this measure, he says, Kandinsky is the most central figure in MoMA’s history of abstraction.” The interactive chart highlights key players in red, and for each artist represented on the chart, more information about their role, interests, and works is provided.

And as an aside, the ARTnews article mentions several other charts or family trees that had been created to document relationships (either sincerely or snarkily) in modern art movements—be sure to check out the very famous Barr’s Chart! These genealogical charts differ greatly from the social vectors described in the new MoMA chart, but provided the initial inspiration for the website’s diagram. Another “genealogical” example comes from the Irving Penn Archives, housed at the Art Institute of Chicago: Penn drew an a family tree, titled “An Immodest Claim to Artistic Roots,” in which he lists several of the artists included in MoMA’s Inventing Abstraction exhibition including Fernand Léger, El Lissitzky, and Man Ray. You can view his tree here.

The VRC will be adding images from the exhibition to our LUNA collection soon!

Via ARTnews

Book Signing at After Words Bookstore for Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows

Vivian Maier (1926–2009) moved to Chicago in 1956 and though she worked as a nanny to support herself, she spent her spare time taking photographs and making films. Her work was largely unknown during her lifetime, as the more than 10,000 negatives she made were kept hid:

Maier’s massive body of work would come to light when in 2007 her work was discovered at a local thrift auction house on Chicago’s Northwest Side. From there, it would eventually impact the world over and change the life of the man who championed her work and brought it to the public eye, John Maloof.

While Maloof and his team were cataloging her work, they maintained an image-heavy website dedicated to her life and work, and the Chicago Cultural Center mounted an exhibition “Finding Vivian Maier: Chicago Street Photographer” (7 January–3 April 2011), which garnered a lot of public interest in Chicago’s “nanny photographer”.

Authors Richard Cahan and Michael Williams released a new book of Vivian Maier’s photographs last month called Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows. In addition to providing context for the artist’s life, the book publishes 275 of her photographs. To celebrate, After-Words New and Used Books in downtown Chicago is hosting a book signing party on Thursday, November 29 at 6:30.

Via Chicagoist

Rijksmuseum’s Collection Available Online Through RijksStudio

Today, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdamn is launching RijksStudio, a digital collection of 125,000 works in the collection. We posted about the first installment about a year ago, and now they’ve fully unveiled their impressive new image platform.

All works in the RijksStudio are available for users to download for personal use as a high-quality jpeg image file. (Using images for professional and commercial uses is possible, but requires filling out a form to obtain permission from the museum). Depending on the type of use, print, and format, images can be downloaded either free or charge or for a fee.

 

In addition to browsing and searching the collection, you can create image groups or explore the image groups of other users. In depth content such as context about art movements, artists’ biographies, and other historical events is available when browsing through facets or when viewing an individual work. Images can be shared on various public media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Pintrest. You can also easily order reproductions of the images.

The image records for objects in the collection contain an absolute wealth of information, including basic object data, exhibition histories, provenance, related artworks, copyright status, and a section called “Documentation,” which serves as a bibliography of the object with links to published references of the work including scholarly articles, monographs, and exhibition catalogs. When online content is available, the object data includes links—for example, links to JSTOR articles.

You can create an account using your email address or log in through your Facebook account. For more information or to start exploring, click here.

Via ArtDaily

Chapbook: Mobile App for Humanities Division News

Humanities Computing staff members have developed an application for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad called Chapbook. This “app” provides free access to all news, events, blogs, and podcasts currently available from the Division of the Humanities website (including our very own All Things Visual, as seen above). The program allows you to search the campus directory and view campus maps, as well as access articles from Tableau, the Humanities Division magazine.

To download the application from iTunes, click here.

The Voice of CWAC

Please consider adding the new Art History Department blog, The Voice of CWAC, to your RSS subscriptions. News and announcements of interest to the Cochrane-Woods Art Center community will be posted regularly.

Top 20 (or so) Art Blogs

This list of the best art blogs for exhibition reviews and other art news was compiled by Joy Garnett, Associate Library Manager, Robert Goldwater Library, Metropolitan Museum of Art (let me know your favorites, and I’ll add them to this site):

  • Wooster Collective

    The Wooster Collective was founded in 2001. This site is dedicated to showcasing and celebrating ephemeral art placed on streets in cities around the world.

  • Two Coats of Paint

    Two Coats of Paint posts reviews, commentary, and background information about painting and related subjects on one easily accessible site. TCOP is maintained by Sharon L. Butler.

  • PaintersNYC

  • Newsgrist

    NEWSgrist was started in March 2000 as an e-zine devoted to the politics of art and culture in the digital age. For four years it was distributed entirely by email subscription. In April 2004 it morphed into a blog.

  • Modern Art Notes

    Tyler Green’s blog about modern and contemporary art. This is my chronicle of my thoughts of and passions for modern and contemporary art. It’s updated pretty much every weekday, and occasionally on weekends when something particularly irks or emboldens m

  • Modern Art Obsession

    A NYC Modern Art Obsessed Collector – The Rants of a Completely Obsessed NYC Modern Art Collector

  • jameswagner.com

    James Wagner lives in New York and writes about art and politics on jameswagner.com. He is the editor, along with Barry Hoggard, of the arts calendar ArtCal.

  • Happy Famous Artists

    happy famous artists are an artistic collective combining ideas of intelligensius anarchus and jeff blind

  • greg.org: the making of, the making of: movies, art, &c., by greg allen

    On greg.org, I document my filmmaking and writing projects, which currently include a series of documentary-style shorts, an animated musical, and a couple of feature film scripts. I also expand on ideas and inspirations related to my work. So I publish i

  • Grammar.police

    Kriston Capps writes G.p from the District, where he lives with his dog and roommates. He was born in Texas, raised on brisket, and lives for Longhorns football.

  • Gallery Hopper

    Your guide to the best of fine art photography, galleries and events in New York City and beyond.

  • Eyebeam reBlog

    The Eyebeam reBlog is a community site focused on art, technology, and culture. The guest reBlogger is filtering feeds provided by artists, curators, bloggers, and news sites. With the touch of a button the reBlogger selects material to share with the Eye

  • Bureaux. The Editors’ Blog at petiteMort.org

    Bureaux is a place where the editors and the readers of petiteMort can share thier thoughts with other readers of petiteMort.

  • bloggy

    Barry Hoggard lives in New York and writes about art and politics on bloggy.com. He is the editor, along with James Wagner, of the arts calendar ArtCal. He also operates a platform for hosting artist and gallery website

  • Bad at Sports

    Contemporary Art Talk. Bad at Sports online is powered by Canadian Willpower 2.3.1 and Chicagoian Knowhow by Duncan Richard and Christopher

  • Art Fag City

    As relevant as Eric Fischl. New York art news, reviews and gossip. Art Fag City is Paddy Johnson.

  • Art21 Blog

  • artreview.com

    artreview.com is a unique blend of editorial and community content, combining the insight and critical weight of some of today’s most important artworld voices with the input and opinions of everyday enthusiasts from around the world.

  • artblog

    by roberta fallon and libby rosof

  • ArtCal – The opinionated guide to New York art galleries

Welcome Back!

We’ve made many improvements over the summer in the classrooms and our digital image collections. Our new digital image delivery system offers over thirty thousand images created at the VRC as well as the AMICA digital image collection of 108,000+ high quality images from American art museums.

If you have questions about using these images in classroom presentations, please contact the VRC. We can show you how to use digital image collections (Luna Insight, AMICA, ArtStor, Saskia), presentation software (Powerpoint, Keynote, ArtStor OIV), classroom and scanning equipment.

Edmonia Lewis Sculpture Discovered in Public Library

From the Paris-Bourbon County Public Library:

Sometimes hidden treasure turns up in unexpected places – such as your own front door, or the public library of a small town in Kentucky. The Paris-Bourbon County Public Library is proud to announce the discovery – right on its own doorstep – of a “lost” fine art work entitled The Bride of Spring, a sculpture created by Edmonia Lewis in the late 1870s.

For more than 30 years, visitors to the Paris-Bourbon County Public Library in Paris, Kentucky, routinely passed through a small, bright entry foyer – rarely giving a thought to the graceful white statue tucked into a corner by the door. Dressed in flowing veils decorated with floral garlands, this “pretty lady” guarded the library entrance in relative obscurity, drawing occasional glances of admiration and sometimes serving as a prop for seasonal decorations or children’s games.

In late 2006, Estill Curtis Pennington, an internationally-known fine arts historian and consultant, returned to Bourbon County from abroad and visited the library. Though he had passed by the statue many times in the past, something on this visit piqued Pennington’s curiosity and he decided to make a closer inspection; an inscription on its base led to positive identification. The Bride of Spring – also known as The Veiled Bride of Spring – is of carved marble, and stands 48” tall including the attached platform base. It is in overall good condition and is now protected by a custom-made glass display box.

read more…