Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University The National Gallery, London: Western European painting 1250–1900 Collection Online : Guggenheim New York Featuring nearly 1600 artworks by more than 575 artists, the Collection Online presents a searchable database of selected artworks from the Guggenheim’s permanent collection of over 7,000 artworks. The selected works reflect the breadth, diversity, and tenor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation’s extensive holdings from the late 19th century through the present day, and are continually expanded to include a larger representation of the museum’s core holdings as well as recent acquisitions. In addition to highlights from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Collection Online includes works from the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice, and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Visitors may browse by artist, date, artwork type, movement, or by several of the major groups of acquisitions that have entered the holdings of the foundation since its inception in 1937. Learn More about the Collection
1.8 Million Free Works of Art from World-Class Museums: A Meta List of Great Art Available Online Since the first stirrings of the internet, artists and curators have puzzled over what the fluidity of online space would do to the experience of viewing works of art. At a conference on the subject in 2001, Susan Hazan of the Israel Museum wondered whether there is “space for enchantment in a technological world?” She referred to Walter Benjamin’s ruminations on the “potentially liberating phenomenon” of technologically reproduced art, yet also noted that “what was forfeited in this process were the ‘aura’ and the authority of the object containing within it the values of cultural heritage and tradition.” Fifteen years after her essay, the number of museums that have made their collections available online whole, or in part, has grown exponentially and shows no signs of slowing. Even more so than when Hazan wrote those words, the online world offers possibilities for “the emergence of new cultural phenomena, the virtual aura.” Art Images from Museums & Libraries Art Books
How to Make Your Own Stretcher Bars for a Stretched Canvas Painting Today I’m going to take you through the process that I use to make my canvases. As I’ve mentioned in an earlier article on improving compositions, choosing the correct size and crop of your artwork is extremely important. If you’re a painter, the only way to really do that is to stretch your own canvas to the shape and size you want. I use materials and tools that anyone can find at their local hardware store, and often make large canvases for a tiny fraction of the price that it would cost me to buy them already made. The inner frame, or structure, of every canvas I create is made out of 1×2 wood, and quarter-round trim. Once I’ve decided on the size that I want my canvas to be, I cut four pieces of 1x2s (one for each side of the canvas), with a forty-five degree angle at each end. You can use a miter box and hand saw, or power tools—either way works just fine. One cut of the saw actually creates an entire corner, as you can see in the picture to the left.
Architectural Teaching Slide Collection The Block and Koenig slides are two of the smaller unique collections in the possession of the USC Libraries. They document examples of 20th century California architecture that developed stylistically from the foundations of the International Style as established by the 1932 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, titled Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, and of European pre-World War II Modernism. The collection consists of about 1300 slides from the Fritz Block collection that document Modern architecture of Southern California (although there are some slides that pertain to Modern architecture of Northern California), and 100 slides from the collection of Pierre Koenig. Fritz Block (1889-1955) was a German-trained architect, who moved to Los Angeles in 1938. He started his own color slide company in Hollywood. His papers are at UC Santa Barbara; his slides came to USC.
Books: Lichtenstein In the late 50s and 60s, American painter Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997) became one of the most important exponents of Pop Art - that movement which transformed products of mass consumption and the entertainment industry into subjects for art. This apotheosis of banal, everyday objects simultaneously constituted a criticism of the traditional elitist understanding of art. Almost alone among artists, Lichtenstein pursued the question of how an image becomes a work of art. Wholly in keeping with the spirit of the Classical Modern, he held that it was not the "rank" of the picture’s subject that lends the picture its artistic character, but rather the artist’s formal treatment of it. Developed in the early 60s, Lichtenstein’s grid technique, with its allusion to the mass-production of graphic art, allowed the painter to give vent to his own artistic scepticism. The author:Janis Hendrickson studied art history at Smith College and gained her doctorate in Hamburg under Martin Warncke.
The Golden Ratio and the Fibonacci Sequence The Golden ratio is a special ratio. Phi (lowercase) is used to refer to this ratio, and the value is , which is approximately 1.618. The uppercase phi ( ) is used for the reciprocal of the golden ratio, which is 1/ Phi can be expressed using a line segment. Many designs – used in buildings, sculptures and paintings use the Golden Ratio for their dimensions. For example, the Parthenon uses the golden ratio for its construction. Another example is the Mona Lisa painting. The golden ratio also determines how attractive a person is. For example, the American pop singer and actress Jessica Simpson is attractive because the proportion of her face fits geometrically on the human face mask which conforms to some aspect of the Golden Ratio. Golden Rectangle This rectangle is a special rectangle where the ratio of the length to the width is the Golden Ratio, which is When a square is cut off from the golden rectangle, the new rectangle is still similar to the original rectangle. Below is an illustration: