New York Art Resources Consortium

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The New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) consists of the research libraries of three leading art museums in New York City: The Brooklyn Museum, The Frick Collection, and The Museum of Modern Art. With funding from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, NYARC was formed in 2006 to facilitate collaboration that results in enhanced resources for research communities. Called a groundbreaking partnership, [1] NYARC also provides a framework for collaboration among art research libraries.

Contents

History

The NYARC libraries have a long history of collaborating on projects, dating back to the 1980s and the establishment of the Art Museum Library Consortium. The collaborative efforts of the Art Museum Library Consortium resulted in the retrospective conversion of the Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston card catalogs into an online format.

In 2004 the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum, The Frick Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art were awarded a planning grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to conduct an environmental scan and identify potential areas for collaboration. This grant resulted in a comprehensive planning document for NYARC, which serves as the consortium's roadmap. [2]

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a founding member of NYARC, withdrew from the consortium in 2011; however, the NYARC libraries and the libraries of The Metropolitan Museum of Art continue to work together on collaborative projects on an ad hoc basis.

Projects

Since NYARC was formed in 2006 the members have been involved in a number of initiatives. Past and current initiatives are listed alphabetically below.

In 2011, records documenting over 125,000 cataloged works of art from the Frick's Photoarchive were added to Arcade, creating the first publicly accessible interface for this rich collection. The Photoarchive contains an estimated 1.2 million images and the cataloging of the collection is ongoing. [4]

Related Research Articles

Artstor is a nonprofit organization that builds and distributes the Digital Library, an online resource of more than 2.5 million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and sciences, and Shared Shelf, a Web-based cataloging and image management software service that allows institutions to catalog, edit, store, and share local collections.

Louisine Havemeyer American art collector

Louisine Waldron Elder Havemeyer was an art collector, feminist, and philanthropist. In addition to being a patron of impressionist art, she was one of the more prominent contributors to the suffrage movement in the United States. The impressionist painter Edgar Degas and feminist Alice Paul were among the renowned recipients of the benefactor's support.

Frick Art Reference Library Research library for Western art history

The Frick Art Reference Library is the research arm of The Frick Collection. Its reference services have temporarily relocated to the Breuer building at 945 Madison Avenue, called Frick Madison, during the renovation of the Frick's historic buildings at 10 East 71st Street in New York City. The library was founded in 1920 and it offers public access to materials on the study of art and art history in the Western tradition from the fourth to the mid-twentieth century. It is open to visitors 16 years of age or older and serves the greater art and art history research community through its membership in the New York Art Resources Consortium.

Project MUSE Online database of journals and ebooks

Project MUSE, a non-profit collaboration between libraries and publishers, is an online database of peer-reviewed academic journals and electronic books. Project MUSE contains digital humanities and social science content from over 250 university presses and scholarly societies around the world. It is an aggregator of digital versions of academic journals, all of which are free of digital rights management (DRM). It operates as a third-party acquisition service like EBSCO, JSTOR, OverDrive, and ProQuest.

Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings

The Soviet sale of Hermitage paintings in 1930 and 1931 resulted in the departure of some of the most valuable paintings from the collection of the State Hermitage Museum in Leningrad to Western museums. Several of the paintings had been in the Hermitage Collection since its creation by Empress Catherine the Great. About 250 paintings were sold, including masterpieces by Jan van Eyck, Titian, Rembrandt, Rubens, Raphael, and other important artists. Andrew Mellon donated the twenty-one paintings he purchased from the Hermitage to the United States government in 1937, which became the nucleus of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Franklin Furnace Archive

Franklin Furnace Archive, Inc. is an arts organization based in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, New York that serves to preserve and encourage the production of avant-garde art, particularly forms such as performance art that are under-represented by arts institutions due to their ephemeral nature or politically unpopular content.

Art historical photo archives are collections of reproductions of works of art that document paintings, drawings, prints, sculpture, architecture and sometimes installation photos. They are essential resource tools for the study of art history. Image collections deepen understanding of specific objects of art and the careers of individual artists as they also provide the means for a comparative approach to the study of artists’ works, national schools and period styles. The documentation that accompanies the images can also reveal patterns of art collecting, art market fluctuations and the changeable nature of public opinion. Photo archives build their collections and gather documentation for the works of art they record through purchases, gifts and photography campaigns. Information about ownership, condition, attribution, and subject identification is recorded at the time of acquisition and is frequently updated.

Frick Art Reference Library Photoarchive

The Frick Art Reference Library Photoarchive is a study collection of more than one million photographic reproductions of works of art from the fourth to the mid-twentieth century by over 40,000 artists trained in the Western tradition located in the Frick Art Reference Library on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It was founded in 1920 by Helen Clay Frick, the daughter of industrialist Henry Clay Frick, to facilitate object-oriented research. The documentation it offers records the essential elements of the biography of the work of art: the artist, title, present owner, as well as historical information such as changes of attribution, ownership and condition, all of which are essential for the study of the history of art.

Knoedler Defunct New York City art dealership

M. Knoedler & Co. was an art dealership in New York City founded in 1846. When it closed in 2011, amid lawsuits for fraud, it was one of the oldest commercial art galleries in the US, having been in operation for 165 years.

Metropolitan New York Library Council Consortium of libraries in the New York Metropolitan area

The Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO) is a non-profit organization that specializes in providing research, programming, and organizational tools for New York City libraries, archives, and museums. The council was founded in 1964 under the Education Law of the State of New York.

Thomas J. Watson Library Research library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Thomas J. Watson Library is the main research library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA), and supports the research activities of the museum staff, as well as outside researchers.

American Art Association Art Gallery and Auction House in New York City, New York

The American Art Association was an art gallery and auction house with sales galleries, established in 1883.

Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives

The Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives holds approximately 300,000 volumes and over 3,000 linear feet of archives related to the history of the museum and its collections. The library collections comprise books, periodicals, auction catalogs, artist and institutional files as well as special collections containing photographs, sketches, artists' books, rare books and trade catalogues. The museum archives contains institutional records, curatorial correspondence, expedition reports, and other related textual and visual records dating to the founding of the institution.

Ethelwyn Manning American librarian

Ethelwyn Manning was the second Chief Librarian of the Frick Art Reference Library. During World War II, she assisted the Committee of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) on Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas, later known as the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program (MFAA).

Virginia P. Bacon

Virginia Purdy Bacon was an American heiress and art dealer.

Helen Sanger served as the fifth Chief Librarian of the Frick Art Reference Library and the institution's first Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian, a position inaugurated in 1990.

Patricia J. Barnett served as the sixth Chief Librarian and second Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian of the Frick Art Reference Library.

<i>Valley of the Yosemite</i> 1864 oil painting by Albert Bierstadt

Valley of the Yosemite is a painting by Albert Bierstadt that was completed in 1864. Initially associated with the Hudson River School, Bierstadt rose to prominence for his paintings of the Rocky Mountains, which established him as one of the best painters of the western American landscape. His later paintings of Yosemite were also received with critical acclaim and public praise.

Louis R. Ehrich was an American businessman, art dealer, and politician. He was active in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century politics, with ties to the Anti-Imperialist movement and the Gold Democrats. In addition to his presence in the political and commercial circles of his day, he is notable for having established the Ehrich Galleries, an institution that provided Old Masters to Gilded Age art collectors, including the industrialists Henry Clay Frick and Henry E. Huntington.

De Wild Family

The De Wild family was a Dutch family of art professionals, including conservator-restorers, art dealers, painters, and connoisseurs. Prominent internationally in the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth century, they were especially known for their advances in art restoration.

References

  1. Pogrebin, R (2010-03-14). "Groundbreaking Partnership Unites Decades of Research", The New York Times. Retrieved 2010-06-15.
  2. Lawrence, D (2009). "New York Art Resources Consortium: A Model for Collaboration", Art Documentation 28(2). Retrieved 2010-06-15.
  3. "Arcade, A New Shared Catalog, Positions Three Major New York City Art Museum Libraries for the Future of Art Research" (PDF). Retrieved 11 October 2011.
  4. "Frick Art Reference Library Photoarchive Records Now Online" (PDF). Retrieved 11 October 2011.

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