Rose Art Museum and Brandeis University: The Conclusion

Over the years here at The Red Dot we’ve followed the economic tug-of-war between Brandeis University and its Rose Art Museum. It appears that the war is now over and thankfully the Rose emerges the victor. Brandeis University has posted on its website that the suit between four museum supporters and the university — who wanted to close the museum and sell off its permanent collection to raise funds — has been settled. The settlement states that the Rose “will remain a university art museum open to the public and that Brandeis has no plan to sell artwork.”

For previous posts, click here, here, here, and here.

Latest images and agreements from ARTstor

ARTstor’s Digital Library now has these collections available:

• Shangri La, Honolulu, Hawaii (Doris Duke Foundation for Islamic Art): 400 images of Islamic and South Asian art from the collection at Shangri La, the former home of Doris Duke (1912-1993) [1/2 of the projected 800]
• Yao Ceremonial Artifacts Collection (Ohio University): 3,714 art works and objects created by the Yao people, an ethnic minority from northern Vietnam
• Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South (Library of Congress): 6,884 documentary photographs taken between 1933 and1940 by Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) of buildings and gardens throughout nine Southern states
• Contemporary Art (Franklin Furnace): 3,345 images and documentation of ephemera and events presented and produced by this renowned venue [2/3 of the 5,000 expected total]
• The Warburg Institute: 10,157 images of Renaissance and Baroque book illustrations from the Warburg Institute Library

ARTstor also anticipates additional images from these contributors:

• Columbia University: Architectural photography from Chicago and more than 150 QTVRs of architecture in Chicago and Peru
• Pre-Columbian Artifacts (Justin Kerr and Barbara Kerr): Still and rollout photographs of objects from the various cultures of Mesoamerica
• Via Lucis: High-resolution images of medieval Christian churches in France and Spain

BBC hosts Your Paintings website

The BBC, in partnership with the Public Catalogue Foundation and public museums and collections, has launched the website Your Paintings, which “aims to show the entire UK national collection of oil paintings, the stories behind the paintings, and where to see them for real.” The site is searchable by artist last name and subject matter. So far they’ve posted roughly 63,000 paintings and hope to complete the project by the end of 2012.

Firefox 5 users with no access to ARTstor, updated

UPDATE (28 June): After searching, saving and downloading tests in ARTstor, it appears that they have fixed the compatibility issue with Firefox 5.

If you are a PC user with Firefox as your default browser, you may be prompted (sometimes rather urgently) to upgrade to Firefox 5. Unfortunately, at this time ARTstor is not compatible with the latest Firefox browser. ARTstor is aware of the problem and is working on a solution, but in the meantime either postpone the upgrade (do not check for updates) or use a different browser (click here for information on supported browsers). Thanks for your patience and we’ll keep you posted on ARTstor’s progress.

Update on Picasso trove, part 2: Charges are filed

We reported in December here and here that a dispute had developed over a collection of works by Pablo Picasso that had been discovered with the artist’s former electrician. The latest news is that seventy-one-year-old Pierre Le Guennec and his wife have been formally charged with stashing the 271 “stolen” Picasso artworks at their home.

via Agence France-Presse

New Geotagging application: Zeitag

A terrific new iPhone/iPad app called Zeitag marries Geotagging, Google Maps and Toronto City Archives to show sites and buildings as they have looked like in the past.   The creator has included archival info in the captions, and images from several eras of given sites when available.   This app is the first in a series for various cities around the world.

Read more here in NOW.

British Library launches new book app

For those of you with an iPad, check out the British Library‘s new 19th Century Historical Collection app with access to classic novels, works of philosophy, history and science in the library’s collection. Currently the free app features over a thousand titles, but by summer it will have more than 60,000 works, all in the public domain (and cost a yet-to-be-determined fee).