The Robert Frank Collection Online at the National Gallery of Art

The Robert Frank Collection at the National Gallery of Art is the largest repository of materials related to renowned photographer and filmmaker Robert Frank. Spanning Frank’s career from 1937 to 2005, the collection includes vintage and later prints, contact sheets, work prints, negatives, three bound books of original photographs, technical material, and various papers, books, and recordings.

For a complete account of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection, see Robert Frank photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection. The spreadsheet lists subjects photographed by Frank, in chronological order, along with the corresponding number of photographs, contact sheets, and work prints in the collection and the accession number of each object.

New Zealand Museum Releases 30,000 Images

The Te Papa Museum of New Zeland has released more than 30,000 high resolution images for download and re-use! To find images that can be reused, the search box is equipped with a radio button to allow users to select “with downloadable images.”

The Te Papa museum collection contains “artworks, objects, and specimens,” from “dinosaur teeth to contemporary art,” and as such presents two advanced search options for object and specimen to allow users to query different metadata fields.

For more information about the Creative Commons license governing the re-use of Te Papa’s images, check out their recent blog post about the initiative. Click here to explore the collection!

Met Releases 400,000 Digital Images for Use

On May 16, the Metropolitan Museum announced a new initiative called the Open Access for Scholarly Content (OASC) and released more than 400,000 images of public domain works on their website. Users can download the high-resolution files directly from the website for any non-commercial use, including scholarly publications. Users do not need to pay a fee and will not need to seek permission from the museum. Per the Met’s press release, “the number of available images will increase as new digital files are added on a regular basis.”

The Met joins several other institutions in making high-resolution digital image files of collection objects free available on the web, including Rijksmuseum, LACMA, and the Getty. The Met was one of the first participants in ARTstor’s Images for Academic Publishing initiative, but in order to use those images, the user needed to be affiliated with an institution that had an ARTstor subscription or request a temporary password. The new OASC program makes the images available directly to the public from the museum’s collections website.

For more information, visit the Met’s FAQ about the OASC initiative or explore their collections website. Images included in the initiative will be indicated

Via the Metropolitan Museum Press Room.

e-Museum of Japan

Looking for images of works of art in the National Museums of Japan? This e-Museum collection of “National Treasures & Important Cultural Properties” contains hundreds of high quality reproductions, robust metadata, and descriptive content. Users can zoom and and pan through images, browse by categories including painting, calligraphy, sculpture, architecture, textiles, ceramics, and more. The site features a keyword and an advanced search.

In addition, iPhone and Android apps exist for the e-Museum collection.

For more information, explore the e-Museum of Japan!

Delaware Art Museum Launches Collections Website

The Delaware Art Museum recently launched a collections website via eMuseum which currently features more than 1,000 works of art. By 2018, the museum’s entire collection will be online, “including the largest collection of British Pre-Raphaelite art outside of the United Kingdom …”

Users can interact with the Collections tab by browsing curated collections, searching for individual object records and related artist biographies. Creating an account will allow users to select favorite records and save image groups and research notes.

For more information, visit the link to the Delaware Art Museum’s eMuseum collection or their Collections page.

Via ArtDaily.

Dumbarton Oaks Launches New Online Inventory

Dumbarton Oaks’ Image Collections and Fieldwork Archives has launched a new online inventory called AtoM@DO, which brings together the holdings from the ICFA as well as a selection from teh Dumbarton Oaks Archives for users to search for related materials across the institution.

The ICFA contains materials pertaining to Byzantine and Medieval art, architecture and archaeology; Pre-Columbian cultural heritage, and the Garden & Landscape collections.

For more information, search AtoM@DO or visit the ICFA.

Getty Launches Free Virtual Library with 250 Titles

The Getty just launched its Virtual Library, the newest project in their Open Content Program. The Virtual Library makes more than 250 publications freely available to read online or to download a PDF in its entirety. The books are from the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Research Institute, and the J. Paul Getty Museum, and include exhibition catalogs, translations, and journals among others.

Users can browse the site by publishing program, type, subject, or series, and there are also title, author, and keyword searches. The record for each title in the Virtual Library also includes a WorldCat link so users may find the title in a local library or request it through ILL.

For more information or to explore the collection, check out the Getty’s Virtual Library!

Via The Getty Iris and ArtDaily.

Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Makes Gift of Shunk and Kender Archives

The Roy Lichtenstein Foundation recently announced that it is donating nearly 200,000 items from the Harry Shunk and Shunk-Kender Archives to five international institutions. The archival materials include black-and-white prints, color prints, negatives, contact sheets, and color transparencies, and will be distributed to the Getty Research Institute, the Museum of the Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Tate. The Foundation’s gift marks the first time an artist’s foundation has devoted its resources to the work of other artists.

Harry Shunk (1924–2006, born in Germany) and János [Jean] Kender (1937–2009, born in Hungary) made the bulk of their images from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, documenting more than 400 artists in their studios, at openings, and during performances, making this collection an important documentary collection of the modern art and art history. Artists depicted include Roy Lichtenstein, Vito Acconci, Joseph Beuys, Alexander Calder, Eva Hesse, Jasper Johns, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Man Ray, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol among many others.

After Shunk died in 2006, the Foundation began acquiring the archive by purchase between 2008 and 2012. After acquiring the images, the Foundation “preserved, cataloged, and digitized the images” and made them available in an online collection on their website. You can view the archive’s list of artists to view PDFs of thumbnails that depict that specific artist. For information about using the images in scholarly publications, contact Shunk-Copyright@lichtensteinfoundation.org.

For more information or to check out the collection, visit the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation Photography Archives.

Via ArtDaily.

South Side Community Art Center Now Publicly Available in LUNA

Over the summer, the VRC announced that images of artworks held by the South Side Community Art Center were newly added to our LUNA database. We’re now thrilled to announce that the collection has been made publicly available in LUNA, so anyone can access the more than 350 images!

To view the collection, click here. For more information, see our previous post about the SSCAC’s collection.

 

Images from the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, MO provides images (up to 1536 pixels) of objects in their collections to users free of charge for educational purposes only. Images can be found on their website under Search the Collection. To place an order for digital images of collection images for teaching and research, request them via email at nebersole@nelson-atkins.org or via their Library’s Contact Us form (be sure to select Visual Resources Library in the Subject/Department drop-down list). The library will send you the requested images via email.

The Nelson-Atkins also contributed 15 scrolling paintings to our Digital Scrolling Paintings website—you can view them here.