Blog Category: Highlights

Bergdorf Goodman | Umbrella; 1974 | Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © Metropolitan Museum of Art | Original data from the Brooklyn Museum

Lately in New York (and plenty of other places too), it seems to rain more often than not, and we would be lost without our umbrellas and our rain boots. On June 7, the first tropical storm of this season—whose lilting name Andrea belied her punch—dumped four inches of rain on the city, doubling the record for that day in 1918. Mayor Bloomberg is calling for billions of dollars to shore us up against future events like Andrea, or worse, Sandy.

While we acknowledge the hard truth of climate change, we invite you to pause, take shelter, and consider the upside of rain.

Anthony van Dyck | Portrait of a father with his son, also called Portrait of Guillaume Richardot and his son; 1618-1619 | Musée du Louvre | Image and original data provided by Réunion des Musées Nationaux / Art Resource, N.Y.; artres.com

Happy Father’s Day! Every year on the third Sunday of June we celebrate our dads – whether or not they’re as stylish as the one in this portrait by Anthony van Dyke in the Musée du Louvre, courtesy of the Réunion des Musées Nationaux.

Left: Jeanne Lanvin | Ensemble, Evening; Summer 1923. Right: Jeanne Lanvin | Suit, Evening (Tuxedo); 1927. Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

“I noticed that she wore her evening dress, all her dresses, like sports clothes—there was a jauntiness about her movements as if she had first learned to walk upon a golf course on clean, crisp, mornings.”

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

The recent movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby has turned the spotlight on the fashion and styles of the Roaring Twenties. So what made the twenties roar?

The economic boom was decisive. Soldiers came home from World War I to jobs in manufacturing plants ready to turn from war production to consumer goods; with the flourishing economy, many commodities became affordable for the first time. Another key engine for progress was the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, which granted women the right to vote. It was signed into law in 1920, heralding unprecedented liberation. The twenties were also a pivotal time for mass communication: radio, cinema, and the automobile sped up the distribution of information—and trends.

Alfred Jacob Miller | Roasting The Hump Rib, 1858-1860 | The Walters Art Museum

May is National Barbecue Month, allegedly. Why the hedging? Because the closest to an official citation we could find was this post on the USDA blog from 2012. But we’ll go with it because a) it gives us the excuse to post this mid-19th century watercolor from The Walters Art Museum, b) we like barbecue, and c) it’s close to lunchtime.

View this image in the Artstor Digital Library to read the metadata, which includes the artist’s mouthwatering description of how the ribs are cooked.

Papilionidae; swallowtail butterfly | Collected: 8/1975, Madagascar, Africa | Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History; peabody.yale.edu

Spring time is here and butterflies are already making their annual appearance, according to butterfliesandmoths.org. To celebrate, we’ve compiled a slideshow of selections from a wide variety of eras, regions, and fields of study, from science to art to costume design.

Search the Artstor Digital Library for butterfl* to find more than 1,000 images with the keywords “butterfly” or “butterflies.”

Butterfly Collector | ca. 1850 | George Eastman House; eastmanhouse.org

Papilionidae; swallowtail butterfly | Papua New Guinea, Australia | Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History; peabody.yale.edu

Papilionidae; swallowtail butterfly | Collected: 9/1913, Assam State, India | Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History; peabody.yale.edu

Ypthima sesara; nymphalid butterfly | Collected: 12/19/1963, Vita Levu., Fiji Islands | Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History; peabody.yale.edu

Morpho Hecuba, nymphalid butterfly | Collected: 9/1952, Para State, Brazil | Yale University: Peabody Museum of Natural History; peabody.yale.edu

Jean Jacques Bachelier | White angora cat chasing a butterfly, 2nd half 18th Century | Musée Lambinet | Réunion des Musées Nationaux

Strobridge Lithograph. Forepaugh-Sells Enormous Shows United: The Ty-Bell Sisters, Aerial Butterflies, 1910. The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art: Circus Collection; ringling.org/CircusMuseums

Alexander Bening. Hours of Queen Isabella the Catholic, Queen of Spain: fol. 25 (recto). C. 1495-1500. The Cleveland Museum of Art

French Worth | Evening Dress, 1898 | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

German | Bonnet | second half 19th century | Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Click on any image to view the slideshow and to read the full captions.

Our slideshow includes an image of a very serious-looking butterfly collector from George Eastman House; several examples from the nearly 70 specimens of butterflies in Yale University’s Peabody Museum of Natural History; an 18^th-century painting of a mischievous cat chasing a butterfly from Réunion des Musées Nationaux; a 1910 lithograph of the Ty-Bell Sisters, Aerial Butterflies from The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art Circus Collection; a colorful illumination from the Book of Hours of Queen Isabella I, ca. 1495-1500, from The Cleveland Museum of Art Collection; and an evening dress and a bonnet from more than two dozen butterfly-themed dresses and accessories in The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Brooklyn Museum Costumes.

For over twenty years, Panos Pictures has been using photography to communicate critical social issues and stories beyond the mainstream media landscape to new and diverse audiences. More than 30,000 of their images of contemporary global affairs are currently available in the Artstor Digital Library.

In this Panos-produced video, Ami Vitale shares the story behind a photograph she took when she lived in Guinea-Bissau in West Africa.

Search the Digital Library for Ami Vitale and Alio to see this and other photographs she took of the Fulani child, or just for her name to find more than 1,000 of her poignant photographs.

You may also be interested in these other videos from Panos:

Stephan Vanfleteren speaks about his work

Carolyn Drake speaks about her work

Sandro Botticelli | Primavera; Allegory of Spring | c. 1478 | Galleria degli Uffizi | Image and original data provided by SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.; artres.com; scalarchives.com | (c) 2006, SCALA, Florence/ART RESOURCE, N.Y.

Spring is here! The return of sunshine inspired us to look at Botticelli’s Primavera, a masterpiece of the early Renaissance and arguably the most popular artistic representation of the season, even if – as we shall see – its interpretation remains inconclusive.

Botticelli painted Primavera sometime between 1477 and 1482, probably for the marriage of Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco, cousin of the powerful Italian statesman (and important patron of the arts) Lorenzo Medici. The date is just one of the many facts surrounding the painting that remain unclear. For starters, its original title is unknown; it was first called La Primavera by the artist/art historian Giorgio Vasari, who only saw it some 70 years after it was painted. While it’s generally agreed that on one level Primavera depicts themes of love and marriage, sensuality and fertility, the work’s precise meaning continues to be debated (a search in JSTOR led us to almost 700 results, with nearly as many differing opinions). Here’s what we think we know:

Milton Rogovin | Family of Miners series; Woman in field harvesting tobacco | 1983 | Milton Rogovin: Social Documentary Photographs; miltonrogovin.com

As a feminist, I often wonder how to approach events like Women’s History Month. Is it a celebration? A time for reflection? This year, I thought I’d meditate on an issue that has been popping up everywhere, from The Atlantic to the Academy Awards. 2012 saw a series of publications on women’s shifting role in the workplace, including Anne Marie Slaughter’s much-discussed essay, “Why Women Can’t Have It All.” Not to mention that, according to a recent article in The Huffington Post, the American workplace continues to be “really, really sexist.” In more specific terms, women still only earn $.77 to every dollar a man makes, and we make up only 4% of the S&P 500’s CEOs. 2013 also marks the 50^th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s monumental book, The Feminine Mystique, which challenged notions of women’s work in the 1960s. What better time to think about how we define a woman’s work, across generations and cultures?

Karen Finley | A Woman’s Life Isn’t Worth Much | 5/18/1990 | Originally at Franklin Furnace, New York, NY

March is Women’s History Month, the perfect time to highlight the work of Karen Finley, a world-renowned performance artist, author, and playwright whose work has addressed issues such as sexuality, abuse, and American politics from an uncompromising feminist perspective.

Finley came to national attention when her 1990 grant application to the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) was vetoed, along those of three other artists, because the content of her work was considered inappropriate. The artists sued and ultimately lost a Supreme Court appeal, but Finley was not deterred. As her struggles with the NEA were already in full swing in 1990, Franklin Furnace—in a bold move, as the organization itself was partly funded by the NEA—presented her installation, A Woman’s Life Isn’t Worth Much.

For over twenty years, Panos Pictures has been using photography to communicate critical social issues and stories beyond the mainstream media landscape to new and diverse audiences. More than 30,000 of their images of contemporary global affairs are currently available in the ARTstor Digital Library.

In this Panos-produced video, Stephan Vanfleteren talks about capturing a moment that he didn’t believe happened until he developed his own photograph.

Profile Voices: Stephan Van Fleteren from panos pictures on Vimeo.

Search the Digital Library for Stephan Vanfleteren and man taking a picture of his wife to see the image, or just for the photographer’s name to find more than 500 of his stunning photographs.

You may also be interested in: Documentary photographer Carolyn Drake speaks about her work