There is currently a spectacular exhibition at the Allentown Art Museum in Allentown, PA called At the Edge that combines some of the finest contemporary fantastic art with some superb examples of art from the 19th century that is part of the legacy on which the contemporary genre is based, and puts one in context with the other.

This show would be excellent were it simply one group of paintings, but the combination is ground breaking.

Almost 40 of the 160 pieces on display are from before 1940, with an emphasis on the Golden Age of Illustration. The museum’s website mentions some of them, but as is the incomprehensible usual for museum websites, does an appallingly bad job of giving you a sense of what’s actually in the exhibit.

I’ve listed some Lines and Colors posts in the links below for some of the artists included in the show, both historic and contemporary.

Unfortunately my hope of seeing the show and bringing you a first hand report is fading, as the end of the show is fast approaching on September 9, and my overloaded schedule has not abated.

I’m remiss in not telling you about this earlier, but as of this writing you still have week to catch the show.

In lieu of my hoped for personal report, I will recommend an excellent overview of the show by Mathew D. Innis on his always superb blog, Underpaintings.

The report by Innis is actually better and more extensive than an overview I could have provided in the limited space I allow for articles. It includes not only nice reproductions of some of the pieces in the show (click on them for larger versions), but photos of the galleries showing the works hanging in context. Museums should hire people like Innis to write their exhibition previews.

At the Edge is on display at the Allentown Art Museum to Sunday, September 9, 2012.

The Allentown Art Museum is a little over an hour from Philadelphia and less than two hours from New York (Google Map).

Get there if you can.

(Images above: N. C. Wyeth, James Gurney, Edmund Blair Lighton, J.C. Leyendecker, Justin Sweet, Tom Kidd)

The Brooklyn Museum, as I reported back in 2010, is a terrific and underrated museum of art and artifacts that exists in the shadow of larger and better known museums in Manhattan.

The museum’s collection contains superb examples of American and European painting, some of which you can now view online in glorious detail by way of the Google Art Project.

Among the paintings in the museum is one of my all time favorites, “Studio Interior” by William Merritt Chase. This wonderful painting of a figure in an interior also contains a beautiful still life, as my detail crops from the Google Art Project enlargement show (images above, top three).

This link will give you the Brooklyn Museum page on GAP in small thumbnail mode (you can choose larger preview images at lower left). You may want to additionally click the “Filter” button at upper right, click “Filter by Medium” in the range that appears and mouse over the squares to choose a medium, such as “Oil Painting”, to narrow down the results.

As I usually do when directing readers to the amazing Google Art Project, I’ll issue my customary Time Sink Warning.

(Images above: William Merritt Chase [top three], Samuel Coleman, Claude Monet, Martin Johnson Heade, John Singer Sargent, Gustav Courbet, Childe Hassam, John Linton Chapman, Theodore Robinson)

Pennsylvania Impressionism is a term rather loosely applied to a group of late 19th and early 20th century painters who lived and worked in and around the artist colony that existed at the time in New Hope, Pennsylvania and Lambertville, New Jersey, small towns that straddle either side of the Delaware River north of Philadelphia.

American Impressionism, an even more broadly applied term, refers to American painters who were influenced by the French Impressionists, but the range and variety of their styles is considerable.

New York, Boston and several spots in California were centers for these painters and their new and radical styles, Philadelphia, although a major art center at the time, was less welcoming to these styles, largely due to the strong influence of Thomas Eakins and his allies, who favored a more traditional academic approach.

So the painters in the Philadelphia area who were drawn to this new style of painting gravitated to the area of New Hope, to an art colony started by William Lathrop and drawn by the powerful influence of Edward Redfield and Daniel Garber.

Currently, the James Michener Museum, in nearby Doylestown, PA, houses one of the strongest collections of work by the Pennsylvania Impressionists. The museum recently hosted what I believe was the largest exhibition of works by these artists ever assembled.

Unfortunately the exhibition ended April 1. I have to apologize to those in the area who missed the show for my late coverage (and I regret that I only could find time for a single visit myself), but the museum continues to maintain their online exhibit for the exhibition: The Painterly Voice: Buck’s County’s Fertile Ground.

The online feature is accessed from a drop down menu in sections for artists or groups of artists. Within those sections, navigation between images is handled with arrows that are confusingly outside the apparent limits of the page, against the background on either side.

When you discover an artist you like, note the links at right of each entry to even more images by that artist to be found in the Michener Museum’s Collection Database and Bucks County Artist Database.

For those who would like to follow up with books, there are two excellent volumes that cover a broad range of these artists and their works: Pennsylvania Impressionism by Brian H. Peterson is the most scholarly and definitive and has beautiful reproductions; A New Hope for American Art by Jim Alterman (also here) is huge, stuffed with 1,000 color plates, and covers many of the less well known artists in more detail.

You can also find additional titles on individual artists in the Michener Museum’s online shop.

(Images above: William L. Lathrop, Edward Redfield, Daniel Garber, Rae Sloan Bredin, Arthur Meltzer, Charles Rosen, M. Elizabeth Price, Kenneth Nunamaker, Walter Elmer Schofield, Roy C. Nuse, Fern I. Coppedge, Robert Spencer, Roy Francis Taylor, George Sotter)

Wow, am I ever enjoying the recently updated Google Art Project (as I reported recently).

Despite my own Time Sink Warning, I’ve been pulled back here way too often. I found this morning that among the cornucopia of art from the newly added museums is the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts.

The museum houses not only a broad collection of work from its namesake (which can be surprisingly diverse) but an excellent collection of work by other American illustrators. There is an article about the museum joining the project on New England Public Radio.

Though the number of pieces available on the GAP’s section for the museum is not extensive (presumably the number will grow), it’s a delight to be able to zoom in on classic illustrations like these. (Bear in mind that my screen captures have been greatly reduced in the images above, I’m just trying to give an idea of zooming scale.)

Now if only the Brandywine River Museum would follow suit.

(Artists above, with details: Norman Rockwell, Howard Pyle, William Smedley, Norman Rockwell, Charles Dana Gibson, Howard Pyle)

Google has recently expanded and improved their already amazing Google Art Project, in which they use their Google Maps “Street View” tech to offer virtual tours of museum spaces, and, more importantly, offer beautiful, zoomable high resolution images of great works of art from world class museums.

Their recent expansion adds 150 museums and galleries to their list of participating institutions, including the National Gallery in London.

When I first reported about the Google Art Project in early 2011, they had roughly 1000 images available on the site, there are now over 30,000 (though not all in highest resolution).

They have also dramatically improved the interface, which was the weak point of the original implementation and sorely in need of revision.

Instead of dealing with that horrible little scrolling list (that never displayed right in browsers other than Chrome), you can now view actual list pages and look up Collections from museums and galleries, or browse by Artists or Artworks.

If you take the trouble to create a free account (you can probably sign in with a current Google account), you can keep personal galleries of favorites, not just bookmarked, but saved with a chosen zoom level and focus selection.

You can also browse a selection of User Galleries that have been made public (sort of like an art gallery specific Pinterest).

If you view the Details page for a given work there are often videos, audio commentary, maps and a range of text information about the work and the artist.

The interface can still be a bit slow and demanding of your computer and browser (and probably still works best in Chrome), but you may just need to be patient.

The Google Art Project was already an amazing resource and is now even better and more extensive by an order of magnitude.

It also gets my highest Major Timesink Warning.

Enjoy!

(Images above: In the Conservatory, Edouard Manet from collection of Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

[Via The Guardian]

Unlike some museum directors who still seem to feel being miserly with images of their public domain artworks is somehow in their interest (perhaps under the assumption that allowing even a few high-res images onto the web will steal the museum’s soul and capture it inside the magic picture making box), savvy museum directors are increasingly demonstrating that providing beautiful hi-res image images on the web of the public domain artwork in their collections is not only good public policy, it’s good museum policy, increasing interest and attention to the museum and its collections.

Of course, providing high resolution images of lots of artwork in a systematic way on a museum’s website takes more than a policy change, and in large museums in particular, takes lots of work and considerable expense.

Such an effort has recently been conducted by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Rather than incorporating it into the museum’s regular website, they have created a separate website called NGA Images to allow access to their databased collection.

Access is, in government fashion, a bit round about and not as convenient as, for example, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s wonderful new website (see my post here), but the NGA Images website and its database of extraordinary artworks are a welcome addition nonetheless, and the museum and its staff are to be thanked and congratulated for a terrific resource.

The “round about” part is the condition that, though you can search the database and see reasonably large preview images without it, you have to register and log in to access the higher resolution images (this is free and simple to do).

The images may be reused by the public under their “Open Access” policy (as well they should be, since everything in the National Gallery belongs to the American public by law — see my recent rant about “public domain“).

To search the collections you can use the simple search box on all pages or the advanced search page, or you can browse through one of the themed collections that the staff has begun to provide to introduce some areas of the collection, like French Galleries, Self-Portraits, Music and Frequently Requested.

In all cases be aware that your search or collection returns are initially limited to the number of images par page chosen in the controls at the top of the page. You can also choose thumbnail size, background color and zooming and caption options.

Once in a search or collection, you can use controls under the thumbnails to view more information, add to a lightbox, download the medium-resolution version and, if logged in, download the high resolution version.

Unfortunately, I found the process less than intuitive and unnecessarily complex (my tax dollars at work). When signed in you should see your name at the top right of the page and not “Sign In”. Under the image thumbnails, look for the download icon with two lines, mouse over to see a tool tip that this is the link for the hi-res image. This should open a pop up with the image download options (the “Project Title” and “Usage” fields are optional. Choose a size and click to download.

The National Gallery is a world-class museum with superb treasures in its collection. In spite of issues with the process of getting to the high resolution images, the museum has added a new treasure in providing us access to them by way of this site.

(Images above, with detail crops: Rembrandt van Rijn, William Merritt Chase, Johannes Vermeer, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Leonardo da Vinci, Claude Monet)

[Via BibliOdyssey]

The American Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which has been undergoing extensive renovations, reopened this week, with a revitalized showcase for one of the best and most extensive collections of American art in the country.

For those who can’t visit in person, I’ll take the opportunity to point out again the terrific resource that is the Met’s recently redone website.

I know I just did an article on their extensive collection of John Singer Sargent on the recent anniversary of his birth, but I can’t resist the opportunity to point out more terrific images, and mention that most are available on the site in high-resolution versions, as my detail crop of the John White Alexander painting, above, bottom, shows.

There is a sampling of images from the collection on this page, from which the above examples were drawn.

(Images above: Matthew Pratt, Kenyon Cox, Albert Bierstadt, William Merritt Chase, Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, John White Alexander)

Today is John Singer Sargent’s birthday.

A search for his work on the wonderful, recently redesigned website of the Metropolitan Museum of Art brings up over 600 images.

Yes, the iconic and astonishingly accomplished society portraits are well represented, and if you want to focus on those, you can limit your search to show only artworks on display, which sharply reduces it to 18 finished and beautiful works.

Part of the fascination for me, however, is exploring the less finished, less often seen works by Sargent in the museum’s collection, including watercolors, drawings and sketchbooks.

Sargent was prolific, and sketched and painted in watercolor for his own pleasure in addition to his more finished commissioned portraits.

The wonderful thing about browsing the Met’s website, aside from the amazing quantity and quality of their collection of Sargent, is that almost all of the images are viewable in large, sometimes wonderfully large, versions.

On each image’s detail page, click on the image or the “View fullscreen” link below it, and then zoom, or even better, use the download image arrow at bottom right to view the image larger.

This gets my Major Timesink Warning.

Enjoy.