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Leonardo da Vinci; Mona Lisa; 1503-1506, Musée du Louvre. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com

Unknown artist (Gravettian culture), Palaeolithic; Venus of Willendorf; circa 30,000-25,000 BCE; Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com

Edouard Manet; Olympia; 1863-1865; Musée d’Orsay. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com

In in the vast, global virtual museum of the Artstor Digital Library, women are rising to the top. Our recent use statistics reveal that portraits and likenesses of the fairer sex (your interpretation…) dominate. The subject of women prevailed among the top 20 hits, with, you guessed it, Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, c. 1505, his serene queen, as number one (more than 12,000 views), followed closely by the Venus of Willendorf, c. 30,000-25,000 B.C.E., and Manet’s Olympia, 1863, each a distinctive icon of a particular era.

Among our fine and plentiful selections from the Berlin State Museums (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin), Warhol’s silkscreens of Marilyn, 1967, arguably the modern Mona Lisa, topped the charts, prevailing over favorites by Pieter Bruegel I, Caspar David Friedrich, Jan van Eyck and Hans Holbein the Younger. At MoMA, another version, the Gold Marilyn Monroe, 1962, figured among the top ten, and its shimmering ground recalls so many Byzantine and early Italian Madonnas, like Giotto’s Ognissanti Madonna, c. 1310, one of the most frequented images across all of our collections.

Editor’s note: this post has been updated to reflect changes to Artstor’s platform.

Constantine Manos, Watching the dance, Olympos, Karpathos, 1960s. Thomas L. Adams, Jr. Photographic Collection, Teti Library, New Hampshire Institute of Art

This fall, the New Hampshire Institute of Art published a first selection of 22 images from its Thom Adams Photograph Collection in Artstor’s public collections. The collection, a gift from 2011, includes around 300 original photographic prints by world class photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries belonging to collector, photographer, and New Hampshire resident Thomas L. Adams. The collection is being released in batches as it gets digitized, cataloged, and cleared for publication.

The Thom Adams Photograph Collection is made up largely of works that explore lifestyles, customs, and human relationships through portraiture, figurative studies, documentary photography, and street photography. Photographers represented in the collection include Annie Leibovitz, Todd Webb, George Platt Lynes, and Steve McCurry, as well as many lesser known artists.

Bruce Nauman; World Peace (Projected); 1996; Exhibited at Sperone Westwater Gallery, Fall 1996. Image and original data provided by Larry Qualls; © 2009 Bruce Nauman / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

The Larry Qualls Archive of Contemporary Art surveys almost three decades of work exhibited in the New York area from 1988-2012. In this post, we consider the personalities and forces that dominated the art world in the 2000s. See also the 1980s and the 1990s.

The beginning of the 21st century was an especially auspicious time for the global arts community. While New York retained its place as a cultural capital, its standing in the world seemed buffeted by larger forces.

Damien Hirst; This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed at home; 1996; Exhibited at Gagosian Gallery, Spring 1996. Image and original data provided by Larry Qualls; © 2008 Damien Hirst. All rights reserved / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London

Marina Abramovic; Cleaning the Mirror II; 1995. Image and original data provided by Larry Qualls; © 2007 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VGBK, Bonn

The Larry Qualls Archive of Contemporary Art surveys almost three decades of work exhibited in the New York area from 1988-2012. In this post, we consider the personalities and forces that dominated the art world in the 1990s. See also the 1980s and the 2000s.

As curator Gary Carrion-Murayari pointed out, the 1990s had a large influence on how we see art today.  “Some of the artists who were doing things that were shocking then, we take for granted now.”[1]

It was a turbulent time, as major institutions were upended. The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union. A stock market crash set off a recession keenly felt in the art market. New York gallery owner Mary Boone, named “The New Queen of the Art Scene” in the eighties, reflected on the downturn in 1992. “Value in everything is being questioned,” she said. “The psychology in the 80’s was excess; in the 90’s, it’s about conservation.”[2]

Jean-Michel Basquiat; Gastruck; 1984; Exhibited at Pace Gallery, Spring 2010. Image and original data provided by Larry Qualls; © 2014 The Estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat / ADAGP, Paris / Artists Rights Society, New York

The Larry Qualls Archive of Contemporary Art surveys almost three decades of work exhibited in the New York area from 1988-2012. In this post, we consider the personalities and forces that dominated the art world in the 1980s. See also the 1990s and the 2000s. 

Quall’s collection opens during the hurly-burly of the 1980s, the era of Reaganomics and Wall Street’s “greed is good,” and the rise of AIDS. It was also a time when the booming stock market transformed street artists into superstars.  

Diego Velázquez, Las Meninas, or the Family of Philip IV, 1656. Image and original data provided by Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives/ART RESOURCE, N.Y. www.artres.com

According to a 1985 Illustrated London News poll of artists and critics, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas was voted the world’s greatest painting.

Let’s take a close look at the painting, its history, and the emotions it elicits to pinpoint why.

Anish Kapoor; Untitled; 2012; Exhibited at Gladstone Gallery, Spring 2012. © 2014 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS, London.

Artstor and Larry Qualls have released approximately 32,000 images of contemporary art exhibited in the New York area in the past three decades. This release joins the more than 100,000 images already available in the Larry Qualls Archive, making it our largest survey of contemporary art, and completes the collection in the Digital Library.

Victor Hugo, Vianden Seen through a Spider Web, 1871. Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

This month’s recommended reading, divided into three semi-useful categories:

Inspiring

• It’s heart-wrenching, but we loved this essay on looking for the hidden black female figures of western art.
• After stepping down as director of the Dallas Museum of Art due to an incurable lung ailment, Bonnie Pittman has become a leader in promoting the influence of fine art on the practice of medicine. (You might also be interested in our blog post about enhancing visual acuity in medical education through the arts.)

Roger Fenton, Hardships in the Camp, 1855. Image courtesy of George Eastman House www.eastmanhouse.org

When it comes to modern warfare, we’ve seen so much through photographs: mass graves, explosions, the faces of soldiers the instant they’re shot. And we’ve also seen the aftermath of war–devastated landscapes, soldiers carrying their dead, and returning home to their families. We’ve become accustomed to a depth of visual coverage that has brought deep familiarity with the realities of war from start to finish, a stark contrast to the experience of civilian audiences prior to the advent of photography.

Tristan Tzara, Dada 3, 1918; Data from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Max Ernst, Little Machine Constructed by Minimax Dadamax in Person, 1919-1920; Image and original data provided by The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris

Kurt Schwitters, Mz 316 ische Yellow, 1921; Image and original data provided by Yale University; © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Our friends at JSTOR Daily remind us that this year marks the centennial of the cacophonous beginnings of the Dada movement in Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire.

An anarchic response to the ravages of World War I, the movement is notoriously difficult to pin down. Matthew Wills writes, “Dada combined absurdity and nonsense, radical politics and anti-politics, outrage and outrageousness in the mediums of spoken (more often shouted) word, theatre, collage, photomontage, cut-ups, assemblages, and readymades…”