Colleagues,
We hope this announcement of an ambitious new ARTstor project focused on
old master drawings - a project that will complement our digital version of
the 55,000 old master prints from "The Illustrated Bartsch" - will be of
interest.
Best,
Max Marmor
ARTstor
Collaborative Agreement Reached Between the Gernsheim Photographic Corpus
of Drawings and ARTstor
The Gernsheim Photographic Corpus of Drawings and ARTstor are pleased to
announce that they have formed an ongoing collaboration with a goal of
creating a digital version of the Gernsheim Photographic Corpus of
Drawings, the renowned photographic archive of more than 184,000 old master
drawings.
For more than half a century, the Gernsheim Photographic Corpus of Drawings
has been documenting old master drawings in scores of archives, libraries
and museums around the world. An ongoing effort of Dr. Walter and Dr.
Jutta Gernsheim, the Corpus embodies an unsurpassed commitment to serving
the scholarly needs of the international community of art historians. The
Corpus presently embodies more than 184,000 extraordinary black-and-white
photographs of European old master drawings from the 15th to the early 20th
century. As a subscription service, the Gernsheim Corpus is available in
its entirety at only a very small number of scholarly photo archives in
Europe, Britain and America. Incomplete copies of the Corpus may be found
in a few other locations. But this remarkable resource has never been
readily accessible to the majority of scholars, teachers and curators who
would benefit from consulting its riches.
ARTstor has now developed an ongoing partnership with the Gernsheim Corpus,
the goal of which is to progressively digitize and distribute through
ARTstor a comprehensive online version of this invaluable art historical
resource. As the project proceeds, the two partners will seek to engage
the participation of the many museums whose drawings collections are
represented in the Corpus, and ARTstor accordingly anticipates making
digital versions of the images available to ARTstor participants in
phases.
The British Museum has already expressed its enthusiasm for the
distribution through ARTstor of the nearly 17,000 old master drawings from
its collections that have been photographed over the decades by the
Gernsheim Corpus. These will be the first fruits of this exciting
collaboration. The British Museum will also share with ARTstor its online
cataloging data for these drawings. Antony Griffiths, Keeper of Prints and
Drawings at the British Museum, voiced the museum’s strong support for
ARTstor’s effort to both preserve the Gernsheim Corpus and help it enter a
new era as a key resource for the art historian – something that has been
high on the agenda of the larger community of drawings curators. “The
British Museum has been associated with the Gernsheim Photographic Corpus
since its beginning, and has seen it grow into the greatest archive of
photos of Old Master drawings in the world. We are now delighted that it
will be made more widely available through ARTstor.” ARTstor is now
inviting further museums to participate in this important project. The
Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and the Philadelphia Museum of
Art have recently added their support to that of the British Museum.
In reaching this agreement, James Shulman, Executive Director of ARTstor,
expressed ARTstor’s enthusiasm in collaborating to use digital technologies
to make this unique resource more broadly available for noncommercial
educational and scholarly purposes. “The Gernsheim Corpus is truly a
unique labor of love,” says Shulman. “We at ARTstor are privileged and
excited to be playing a role in making this unrivaled reference resource
more widely available to the community of scholars and curators in a new
medium.”
ARTstor anticipates inviting a team of collaborators, including both
collaborating museums and such key photo archives as the Biblioteca
Hertziana (Rome), The Frick Art Reference Library (New York), and the Getty
Research Institute (a program of the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles),
to join in a coordinated effort to normalize, enhance and convert to
electronic form the cataloging data associated with the Gernsheim Corpus.
ARTstor also welcomes the collaboration of the Cleveland Museum of Art in
this project. The museum’s copy of the Gernsheim Corpus is both
comprehensive and well-preserved, and using this copy as a scanning source
will allow ARTstor to take full advantage of the enormous care with which
the photographic prints have been developed by the Gernsheims.
ARTstor (www.artstor.org) was created in 2001 as a nonprofit initiative of
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is now an independent non-profit
organization dedicated to serving education and scholarship in the arts and
the humanities. Currently, more than 530 non-profit institutions in the
U.S. and Canada are participating in ARTstor. A pilot distribution is
underway in the UK and Australia/New Zealand, and further international
availability is being actively explored.
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