Blog

Throughout the months of lockdown our beloved felines have enhanced the quality of our diminished lives, and we, in turn, have come to know them a little better. A tribute to our cats is overdue (recently, we acknowledged our canine companions). My colleagues have generously shared portraits of their best feline friends and we have taken the liberty of juxtaposing them to works represented in Artstor.

Stephanie Orphan. Lizzie gains a new perspective. Photograph.

Alexandre Cabanel. The Birth of Venus. 1875. Oil on canvas. Image and data from The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Black History Month is observed every February in the United States and Canada, and we’re celebrating by gathering a number of Artstor’s Public Collections about the history and culture of African Americans. These collections are freely available to everyone everywhere, no log-in required!

Shirley Chisholm. Not dated. Copyright: Tuskegee University Archives, 2016.

Tuskegee University’s Civil Rights audio collections
Recordings and photographs of speeches from prominent leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. We also interviewed archivist Dana Chandler, who digitized the original reel-to-reel tapes.

Albert-Ernest Carrier-Belleuse. Father Time on a Globe; design for a clock. 19th century. Image and data provided by The Metropolitan Museum of Art. CC0 1.0

Needless to say, 2020 has been a year like no other, and it’s marked everything we did at Artstor. We tried to help institutions and students meet the challenges of remote teaching, released new content — with a strong emphasis on freely accessible Open Artstor collections — and tried to brighten things up on our blog. Here are some of our highlights from a very difficult year and one thing we look forward to next year.

Hans Holbein the Younger. Henry VIII of England. 1536. Oil on oak. Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Image and data from Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Hans Holbein the Younger. Thomas Cromwell. c. 1532-1533. Oil on oak. Image and data from The Frick Collection.

The Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel presents the Tudor court in arresting, vivid prose¹. Nonetheless, the temptation to illustrate Mantel’s account is irresistible given her invocation of the painter “Hans” (the actual historical figure of Hans Holbein the Younger, 1497/8-1543). He appears frequently in her narrative and is her acknowledged muse: Simply put, in the author’s own words: “He [Holbein] peoples the early Tudor court for us.”² Since Holbein the Younger was so prolific and precise as a portraitist,³ his likenesses provide a visual Who’s Who to Mantel’s narrative. Below, we have coupled some of Holbein’s most penetrating portrayals of the key players with the descriptions of the author.

Giorgio Morandi. Still Life. 1953. Oil on canvas. Image and data from The Phillips Collection. © 2020 Giorgio Morandi / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / SIAE, Rome.

Collection:
The Phillips Collection

“Someone struggled for your right to vote. Use it.”

— Susan B. Anthony

Sven Torfinn. People wait in line to cast their votes. 2011. On 9th January 2011 Southern Sudan’s people began voting in a referendum on whether to become independent from the North, part of a peace agreement which was signed in 2005. Image and data from Panos Pictures. © Sven Torfinn / Panos Pictures.

As the United States holds its 2020 presidential elections, we rounded up a selection of images that reflect the importance of voting–throughout history and around the world. We encourage you to cast a vote and make your voice heard.

Jerome Sessini. MEXICO. Mexicali. December 17, 2016. The separation wall between USA and Mexico… Photograph. Image and data from Magnum Photos. © 2020 Jerome Sessini / Magnum Photos.

Collection:
Magnum Photos

University of Virginia Hospital Operating Amphitheater. 1914. Photoprint. Image and data from Images from the History of Medicine (National Library of Medicine). Public Domain Mark 1.0.

Artstor has published nearly 42,000 images from the U. S. National Library of Medicine’s Images from the History of Medicine, freely available to all for reuse under the Creative Commons Public Domain mark. Open Artstor: Images from the History of Medicine (National Library of Medicine) is part of an initiative to aggregate open museum, library, and archive collections across disciplines on the Artstor platform.

September 15 to October 15 is Hispanic Heritage Month in the U.S. While the name might currently be the focus of some debate, we welcome the reminder to explore and celebrate the vibrant cultures of Mexico, Central and South America, and the Hispanic Caribbean. The Artstor Digital Library offers many collections that specialize in or are substantially devoted to Latin American topics; here is a selection to get you started.

Art

Tabernacle. Mexico, second half of the 18th century. Image and original data provided Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros.

Not surprisingly, Artstor is strong in collections concentrating on the arts of Latin America, such as Jacqueline Barnitz: Modern Latin American Art (University of Texas at Austin), which features modern art from Mexico and ten other Caribbean, Central, and South American countries; and Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, including colonial, modern, and contemporary Latin American art.

By now you know that Artstor’s Public Collections provide approximately 1.3 million freely accessible images and other materials from library special collections, faculty research, and institutional history materials. The collections are constantly growing, and as we browsed for Latin American content in preparation for Hispanic Heritage Month, we were delighted by what we found. Here are some notable highlights:

Clary. Conferencia Latinoamericana Sobre la Integracion de la Mujer en el Desarollo Economico y Social. 1977. Image and data from Wofford College: The Lindsay Webster Collection of Cuban Posters.

Wofford College: The Lindsay Webster Collection of Cuban Posters
The collection features approximately 350 works created in Cuba from the revolution through the 2000s. Many of the posters focus on Cuba’s efforts to spread messages of the revolution worldwide and to inspire others in the fight against oppression stemming from the legacies of imperialism and colonialism, as well as posters focused on promoting Cuban national pride, conservation, production, and culture.

Dartmouth: Ediciones Vigia Collection
In 1985, a Cuban poet Alfredo Zaldivar and an artist Rolando Estevez established a literary forum for a group of Cuban artists in Matanzas, Cuba and called it Ediciones Vigía. For over twenty years now the goal for these artists has been to create beautiful handmade books. Through all of the social and political shifts, and even a severe paper shortage, the artists have found ways to create works of enormous artistry, imagination, and creativity by using found and recycled materials.