PENTA: Hauser & Wirth Institute’s Mission to Make Artist Archives Freely Available. “Hauser & Wirth Institute is a nonprofit, private foundation fully supported by the mega gallery Hauser & Wirth to fund and make available artist archives and catalog raisonnés, and to provide grants to support archival projects.”
Google Blog: A Queer Eye on Art History with Google Arts & Culture. “In honor of Pride Month and beyond, and in collaboration with over 60 cultural institutions, Google Arts & Culture presents the “A Queer Eye on Art History” hub. It’s a place where you can explore archives and collections to celebrate LGBTQIA+ lives and art and dive into more than 20 newly curated stories, new collections from partners, and much more.”
Washington Post: Artificial intelligence is restoring lost works by Klimt, Picasso and Rembrandt. Not everyone is happy about it.. “Gustav Klimt’s 1900 painting ‘Philosophy’ might have been remembered as a pivotal artwork. Made at a turning point in the artist’s career, it was vividly colored, dramatically composed — even provocative in its blatant nudity and unflinching emotion. But in 1945, the work was destroyed in a fire and essentially lost to history. For decades, only black-and-white photographs of ‘Philosophy’ existed. Now, thanks to artificial intelligence, we can see the work in full color. But does the re-creation really look like the original? Does it even look like a Klimt?”
Penn State: University Libraries publishes ‘Art History Dissertations’ online bibliography. “The bibliography represents more than a year of collecting, collating, amending and researching art history Ph.D. dissertations submitted to CAA [College Art Association] since 1980. With more than 6,000 dissertations from more than 80 North American institutions, the data set presents a rich area of study for the ways in which the art history field has evolved over the last 40 years.”
Panorama: Toward a More Inclusive Digital Art History. “The use of digital technologies in the humanistic disciplines—including art history—has largely lagged behind the rest of academia. This slow uptake of digital and quantitative approaches has limited the range of methods available to art historians, cutting off many potentially productive avenues of research. ‘Toward a More Inclusive Digital Art History,’ a joint project funded through a generous grant by the Terra Foundation for American Art and administered by Panorama: The Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art, seeks to fill this theoretical and methodological lacuna.”
University of Arkansas: Tyson Family Foundation Gift to Create Digital Library and Art Publication Funds . “Mike Bieker, director of the U of A Press and assistant vice chancellor and director of operations and finance, said, ‘As the University of Arkansas Press celebrates its 40th anniversary, we are grateful for this tremendous gift from the Tyson Family Foundation. These funds will be used for two purposes: to digitize our entire collection of books, making them more widely available and accessible than ever before, and to advance our potential in the field of art publishing by supporting scholarship that explores the history and meaning of art and its effect on our lives. These fantastic initiatives would not be possible without the continued support and generosity of the Tyson family.’”
National Gallery of Art: National Gallery of Art Announces Launch of Kress Collection Digital Archive. “The National Gallery of Art today announces the launch of the Kress Collection Digital Archive, an online resource documenting the history and development of an important collection of nearly 3,500 works of art. The Kress Collection was divided and donated years ago to almost 100 institutions throughout the United States, including the National Gallery of Art.”
Smithsonian: Smithsonian Associates Streaming Offers World Art History Certificate Program. “Smithsonian Associates—the world’s largest museum-based education program—offers its popular World Art History Certificate Program online for the first time. Under the guidance of expert teachers, participants can expand their knowledge and appreciation of art through programs presented on Zoom year-round that examine the major creators, movements and historical periods that shaped art across civilizations and centuries.”
EurekAlert: Drawing the line to answer art’s big questions. “Algorithms have shown that the compositional structure of Western landscape paintings changed ‘suspiciously’ smoothly between 1500 and 2000 AD, potentially indicating a selection bias by art curators or in art historical literature, physicists from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and colleagues report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).”
Financial Times: Old Masters meet new methods. (Not paywalled for some reason, at least not for me.) “Of all works of art to sell digitally, the most challenging are those where condition is critical and not necessarily apparent in an image. As a result, dealers in older art — and especially in Old Master paintings, drawings and sculpture — are having to develop new strategies for engaging with their clients online and through social media, as well as harnessing technology to bolster old-fashioned salesmanship.”
Smithsonian Magazine: A Hudson River School Legacy: The Weir Family Papers Now Fully Digitized. “‘It was a great pleasure for us to have your entire family under our roof. I delighted to talk of old times and of old fellows-comparing the Past and the Present and weighing in the scales of experience. New schools, old schools and No schools.’ These words were penned by Frederic Edwin Church in a letter to John Ferguson Weir on October 12, 1888. Written from Olana, Church’s beloved home and arguably his masterpiece on the Hudson River, the letter forms part of the Weir family papers (1809–circa 1861) which are now fully digitized and available on the Archives of American Art’s website. The collection, although small at 0.8 linear feet, houses a surprising number of detailed and enlightening letters from a host of prominent artists and scholars of the nineteenth century.”
CNN: What did our food look like hundreds of years ago? Art history may have the answers. “For a few decades, plant geneticists have studied the historical genetic composition of modern foods in several ways, highlighting certain genetic mutations that were responsible for transformations in appearance. These approaches haven’t offered many answers for what some plant-based foods actually looked like, according to an article published Tuesday in the journal Trends in Plant Science. So worldwide art collections, the old-time equivalents of the modern-day photograph, might serve as a massive historical database of how modern plant foods have fluctuated in their looks. And they’re asking the public to send in what they find.”
The Nation: ‘Archives tell us different stories about how things were’: Inside the journey to document Modern Arab art. “On a most basic level, archives help establish what happened, when. For Arab art history, the problems facing a precise or exhaustive chronicle are double: existing archives are often incomplete, damaged or inaccessible, because of conflict in the region. And the analysis made by canonical art history of what was happening in the Middle East and Turkey – written primarily by US academics – views art of the region through the prism of its engagement with western art.”
The Art Newspaper: Secret papers on famous artists including Gauguin, Renoir and Monet to be revealed. “The non-profit WPI, founded in 2017, is throwing open the legendary Wildenstein archives accumulated since Georges Wildenstein published the firm’s first catalogue raisonné in 1922…. So, 100 years of annotated sale catalogues, letters and notes are being digitised to be made available to the public for free on the WPI’s platform.”
The Getty Iris: Inside a New Online Exhibition Featuring the Getty’s Bauhaus Archives. “Launching today on getty.edu is the online exhibition Bauhaus: Building the New Artist, which has been more than a year in the making. The exhibition explores the Bauhaus school’s unique approach to teaching and learning through rare materials from the Getty’s archives. It also offers interactive features that invite you to try your hand at student exercises developed by Bauhaus luminaries Vassily Kandinsky and Josef Albers, as well as a customized animation of Oskar Schlemmer’s iconic theater production The Triadic Ballet.”
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