Museum Day, a day each year on which hundreds of participating museums around the US offer free admission (for those who have gotten tickets in advance), is tomorrow, Saturday, September 24, 2011.

The event is sponsored and coordinated by Smithsonian magazine. From the website description:

In the spirit of Smithsonian Museums, who offer free admission everyday, Museum Day is an annual event hosted by Smithsonian magazine in which participating museums across the country open their doors to anyone presenting a Museum Day Ticket…for free.

You must order tickets in advance, which can easily be done online, for one of the participating museums, two tickets per household.

The venues page lets you search for nearby (or distant) participating museums by way of typing in an address, searching a Google Map, or using a drop-down menu to search by state.

For more (and information on the North American Reciprocal Museum Program), see my post on Museum Day 2010.

(Images above, some participating art museums in the NYC area: Morgan Library and Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Newark Museum)

I’m always delighted to bring news of sources for high-resolution art images, like The Google Art Project, my recent post on Hi-res images on Rijksmuseum website, and the full screen Zoomable images of auction items, past and present, from Sotheby’s.

The latest in this list of high resolution image resources is the Image Library of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA).

You can search the collections by various criteria. However, because the online collections of the categories of art I’m most interested in, American Art, European Painting and Sculpture and Prints & Drawings, are not extensive, (28, 300 and 40 entries, respectively, as of this writing) I find it more fruitful to browse the collections by category.

The default page comes up with a sampling of various items form the collection. The categories are accessed from links in the left sidebar.

Unfortunately the pages of preview images are listed by title and don’t list artist names, so it’s a little bit hit and miss (though that can lead to nice discoveries). Bringing up the page and information for a given thumbnail is quick enough.

The detail pages show the image in a Zoomable interface so you can zoom in on a section of the work and get an idea of the detail; then, for the images you like, click on the convenient “Download Image” link under the Zooming image.

Most of the files I downloaded varied from about 4mb to 20mb. Downloading can take time, click on a few and get a cup of tea.

Browsing may lead you to some unexpected delights, like this gem from Danish painter Martinus Rørbye (image above, bottom two).

(Images above, each with detail, Camille Pissarro, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Camille Corot, Ubaldo Gandolfi, Martinus Rørbye)

[Via BibliOdyssey on Twitter as @BibliOdyssey]

One thing I can never seem to get enough of is high resolution images of great art, and it seems like more and more are cropping up each day — one of the little gifts bestowed upon us by the globe spanning lattice of zooming bits we affectionately call the web.

Peacay, author of the amazing blog, BibliOdyssey (see my posts here and here), was kind enough to point out recently that the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, one of the world’s great museums, is now posting high resolution images of almost all of the works featured in their online collections. This practice extends right down to the posters and prints in their shop.

While not as stunningly high-resolution as the images on the Google Art Project (my post here), these can be viewed whole more easily and they go way beyond the selection offered there.

You can search the collections, or, as I prefer to do, browse through their lists of artists alphabetically; find someone you’re interested in, say, Vermeer (grin), and see a selection of the works available for viewing online.

Click on a thumbnail image to access the detail page for a given work, for example, The Little Street, and click on the plus sign or link for “Extra large view of the image” below the preview image to see the larger version (images above, top, with detail crop below it).

Some enlargements are higher in resolution and have more detail than others, but all I’ve encountered have been large enough to be worthwhile.

The collection includes artists who are quite famous, like Rembrandt (images above, 3rd and 4th down), a little less famous, like Pieter de Hooch (above, 7th and 8th down), and lesser known but wonderful artists like still life painter Floris van Dijck (above, 5th and 6th down).

The museum’s online collection also contains gems you might not expect, like one of Van Gogh’s beautifully textural ink drawings, or a stunning Monet.

It’s also worth coming back through the front of the site and exploring that way, though I find the artist listings the most rewarding in terms of high resolution images. You could spend a lot of rewarding time here just checking out artists with whom you’re not familiar.

If your taste for great northern European art (and others) is anything like mine, I’ll issue my standard Major Time Sink Warning.

[Thanks also to Valentino Radman and Lok Jansen for mentions of high res images at the Rijksmuseum.]

Wow.

There are times I just want to hug the internet, and say “I love you Internet!“.

Google, that monolithic giant of search, advertising, maps, stats and online software, whose offerings and initiatives have ranged from the amazing (search, maps) to the not-so wonderful (privacy issues), has spun off a new initiative for which I will forgive most of their transgressions.

Google on Monday unveiled a new feature called Google Art Project that is nothing short of wonderful and amazing, and, if Google’s history is any indication, stands to become even more wonderful and amazing as time goes on.

The project is an online archive of ultra-high-resolution images of great works of art.

Google has applied their “Street View” technology, familiar for providing zoomable street-level images within the context of Google Maps, to the display of both the works and the galleries in which they reside.

Google Street View has been put to unofficial art related use before, notably with the Virtual Paintout (my post here) in which artists virtually “visit” a specified location by way of Google Street View, and use the images as reference for “on location” paintings.

Here, the technology is being put to much different use by Google, allowing some of the best views of great paintings available online.

At the moment they are working with 17 museums, each of which has contributed one or more gigapixel level images to the project; and an impressive start it is:

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin – Germany
Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian, Washington DC – USA
The Frick Collection, NYC – USA
Gemäldegalerie, Berlin – Germany
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC – USA
MoMA, The Museum of Modern Art, NYC – USA
Museo Reina Sofia, Madrid – Spain
Museo Thyssen – Bornemisza, Madrid – Spain
Museum Kampa, Prague – Czech Republic
National Gallery, London – UK
Palace of Versailles – France
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands
The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg – Russia
State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow – Russia
Tate Britain, London – UK
Uffizi Gallery, Florence – Italy
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam – The Netherlands

Starting from a list that appears on the project’s home page when you mouse over the initial image, you can choose a museum, then browse the museum’s corridors, or go right to an artwork.

Unlike the stingy feeling so many museums project with tiny preview images and zooming images that have to be scrolled in frustratingly small little windows, the artworks here are available in a full screen zooming interface, and when I say “zoom” I mean it really zooms, down to an astonishing level of detail.

This is like the Haltadefinizione project that I wrote about here, but with a better interface and without the annoyance of watermarking.

In the images above, I’ve chosen to visit the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and zoom in to a nose-up-against-the-canvas view of Rembrandt’s The Shooting Company of Frans Banning Cocq, commonly known as The Night Watch.

Though the Flash drop-down for browsing museums and works is a bit glitchy, the interface’s provision for scrolling and zooming is wonderfully fluid, and the ability to get your eyeballs right up to Rembrandt’s textural brushwork is just delicious.

I’ve left the zooming control in my images just to demonstrate it, but it and other interface elements politely melt away when not in use. In the upper right is a Visitor Guide button, which provides a general introduction to the project (there is also a short introductory video here), and an info (“i”) button which gives access to an information panel with a menu of options for information about the painting, provided by the museum in which it hangs.

Of note in that menu are links to “More Works by this Artist” and “More Works in this Museum”, which can lead to a nice browsing experience.

There are some amazing images to be seen, including The Harvesters by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Van Gogh’s The Starry Night at the MoMA, Hans Holbein’s enigmatic The Ambassadors (my post here) in the National Gallery, London and (be still my beating heart) Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi!

Wow.

I’ll give my Major Time Sink Warning and bid you enjoy!

All art on the internet should be like this.

[Via MetaFilter]

I’ve never been to Indiana, let alone to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, so this is not a first person account. It is rather the happy result of one of my art browsing habits, using the Museum Listing feature of the Athenaeum online art resource to browse a skimming of various museums’ collections (see my post on The Athenaeum).

The Athenaeum’s page for the Indianapolis Museum of Art caught my attention with pieces by John Singer Sargent, Edmund Tarbell and William Merritt Chase.

On arriving at the museum’s site, I immediately clicked through to their collection of American Painting and Sculpture to 1945, and from there started browsing through the little interactive slide presentation for American Impressionism, one of my favorite schools of painting.

Though not the most convenient browsing arrangement (a simple page of thumbnails would be better, but museums seem to love these widgets), it is still a way into the collection, clicking on the thumbnails to particular piece, then clicking through to a page of works by that artist in the museum’s collection.

To my delight, I found that not only does the museum have a terrific collection of American Impressionism, which is deep for some artists, like William Merritt Chase, they also have a nice method of presentation for works in the collection.

Thumbnails are linked to a decently sized image that opens in a pop-up, instead of the tiny cramped Zooming windows favored by many museums, letting you get a much better feeling for the work as a whole.

In addition they often have several photos of the same work, some of which have color and value reference cards in the photos, making it possible to get an accurate take on the color of the image. What a great feature! So many images of artworks on the web are off-color, even those posted by the most prestigious museums.

My exploration of the site has been brief so far, and the images I’ve chosen to highlight are more representative of my own preferences than the museum’s collections, but I was also impressed with their holdings in European Painting and Sculpture.

One might wish for a list based browsing feature, allowing an easier grasp of the holdings in a particular area, but you can search the collections for specific artist, or using broader terms like, oh, say… “American Impressionism“.

The collection online looks well worth investigating in depth, and of course, for those who live close enough to travel to the museum in person, a treat to visit.

(Images above: Edmund Tarbell, Richard B. Gruelle, Frank W. Benson, William Merritt Chase, John Sharman, John Cotman Sell, Rembrandt, Jan Brueghel the Elder.)

The Frick Collection is a relatively small museum in New York, housed in the former mansion of Henry Clay Frick, and displaying the artworks collected by him and his daughter, Helen Clay Frick.

The collection, though not as extensive as those of larger museums, has the density of an expensive fruitcake, with so many yummy masterpieces in such a small space that it’s mind-boggling. It includes major works by Vermeer, Rembrandt, Holbein, Whistler, Constable, Corot, David, Goya, Hals, Ingres, Renoir, Titian, Turner, Velázquez, Whistler and Van Eyck, among others.

For those who can’t get to the collection physically, the museum has databased much of the collection online, with Zoomable images of most works.

Their collections database search feature, though poorly organized and something of a drag to wade through, is usable once you understand how it works.

Choose Browse the Collections, then focus on a subject, like Paintings, focus on a region, say, Dutch, Flemish, German and Swiss, narrow down further, let’s say to Dutch, and then you’ll finally see some thumbnails of works.

In the initial display of a limited number of works, it’s easy to miss the tiny “next” button at the top of the interface (and not at the bottom of the list where you might expect it), but you may find it easier to select a particular work from the drop down menu.

If you click on an artist’s name instead of a specific work, you’re dropped on a page with a description of the artist, but no thumbnails of works. Just when you’re tempted to think that your search has returned no visible results, look for the linked (though not underlined) text saying “View objects by this artist”.

Then you will see thumbnails of viewable works. Click on the thumbnail or title of the work to view the main image, and then look for the link to the Zoomable image (and sometimes a selection of detail images).

The Zoomable image, like those of so many museums, is restrained in a box and partially obscured by the zooming thumbnail (wouldn’t want you to get away with a high res image, you naughty image thief, you), but the box is large enough to see detail in enough of an area to make the effort worthwhile.

Upkeep on the site has apparently been a low priority, as some items are missing or unviewable. (Hans Holbein’s portrait of Sir Thomas Moore is among them, alas. See my post on Hans Holbein the Younger.)

What is there, however, reflects the Frick’s superb collection. Many of the works are among the finest examples by the artists represented.

That includes three (count ‘em three) Vermeers, not far from the five in the nearby Metropolitan Museum (see my most recent post on Vermeer, with links to others).

For those who can get to the the collection in person, it’s worth noting that the usual $18 entry fee will be waived tomorrow, Thursday, December 17, 2010, in celebration of the 75th anniversary of the day the collection first opened its doors to the public.

In addition to the usual gems, there is currently an exhibition of 17th and 18th Century drawings, The Spanish Manner: Drawings from Ribera to Goya, on display until January 9, 2011.

Museum admission, in case you hadn’t noticed, has kept pace with the rising cost of everything, if not outpacing it significantly in recent years.

It can be daunting for some, and can discourage people from investigating museums they don’t already patronize.

Smithsonian magazine, an offshoot of the venerable group of cultural institutions in the U.S. capital that are always open free to the public, sponsors an annual Museum Day, in which participating museums waive their normal entry fee for visitors who arrange online for a free ticket.

This Saturday, September 25, 2010, is the sixth annual event.

Over 1,000 museums of various kinds are participating across the country. You may find some disappointing hold-outs, of course, but there are also some terrific museums participating that are normally not open for free.

There is a mini-site for the event with an interactive Google-style map that allows you to zoom in on a geographic area and look for museums of interest. You can also narrow the search with a state selection drop-down below the map.

You need to get your free ticket ahead of time. For this you have to cough up your physical and email address, and the ticket (admission for 2) is emailed to you. There is a limit of one two-person ticket per household.

The drop-down choice for “Which Museum Day location do you plan on visiting” in the ticket request form also serves as a quick list of participating museums, arranged by state.

The motto for the event is “Take your brain on a field trip.”

[Via the New York Times]

(Images above, some participating museums in my area: The Delaware Art Museum, The Museum of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Brandywine River Museum)

For those who wish for more free museum days, check the websites of your local museums in their “hours and admission” sections. You may be surprised at how many have sporadic or regular periods of free or reduced admission, sometimes courtesy of corporate sponsors. (If you’re a Bank of America customer, check out their “Museums on Us” program.)

Also, if you visit museums enough to make a membership a good investment, see my post on the North American Reciprocal Museum Program. This grants you membership privileges to over 350 museums for a higher than usual membership level at one of the participating museums (in places, as little as $100.00).

It has often been pointed out that the borough of Brooklyn, if it were not part of New York City, would stand on its own as one of the largest metropolitan areas in the U.S., perhaps 4th or 5th largest.

Like most American cities of that size, Brooklyn has a world class art museum. Unlike most of those museums, however, the Brooklyn Museum has a unique problem in terms of its identity and public perception, in that it exists in the very large and imposing shadow of the more famous museums of nearby Manhattan. This leaves it unfairly relegated to a public perception of second class status, when in fact, The Brooklyn Museum is terrific and should be prominent on the list of major American art museums.

There was an article on the New York Times site a few days ago, Sketching a Future for the Brooklyn Museum, in which several members of the arts community give their take on the museum’s rather unique position and public relations dilemma.

I had the pleasure of visiting the Brooklyn Museum for the first time last summer, drawn by an exhibition of the works of French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte (more here), and was surprised and delighted with how much I enjoyed the museum and the works then on display from the permanent collection.

I say “then on display” because, like every major museum, only a small portion of the museum’s holdings can be on display at any one time, and works are rotated into view periodically.

The Brooklyn Museum has a wonderful feature to make even more of its collection available, in that some of its extensive archives are open to the public in the “Visible Storage” center on the museum’s 5th floor (image above, bottom). Here you can get a behind the scenes glimpse of how museums catalog and store their collections, with great class cases on rolling tracks that are frequently rotated to display more of the works in the collections.

The collections are housed in the museum’s impressive Beaux-Arts building, one that would stand out as a prominent cultural center in any city — except New York. Like many major museums, non-flash personal photography is permitted in the permanent collections.

For those who can take the ride out to Brooklyn, the museum is right next to the beautiful Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. The combination is just right for a day’s outing.

For those who can’t get to the museum physically, the Brooklyn Museum website is arranged to encourage browsing through the collections, though it helps to have a starting point. I was personally impressed with the museum’s holdings of Claude Monet (image above, top) and other proponents of Impressionism, as well as American Impressionists, including one of my favorite paintings by William Merritt Chase, his Studio Interior (image above, third down and detail below; also see my post on William Merritt Chase.)

You can spin off of your search by clicking on tags for related topics, like Landscape or Venice, museum sections like the Beaux-Arts Court, or search for artists like John Singer Sargent (image above, second down). Note that the search box in the right column of the collections pages returns different results than the general search box at the top of the pages.

Unfortunately, the website’s pop-up code for the enlargements is a bit awkward, but the images are large enough to enjoy and the interesting mix of the collections can lead you off in search of fascinating artists and subjects.

As you browse through the collections, you’ll cross paths with a number major works that will whet your appetite for a visit, putting the Brooklyn Museum on your map the next time you’re in New York City.