Nicola Willis

Great Art online

When the major art collections came online a few years back they offered a minimum of images, lots of visitor information, and the inevitable sales

shops. Within the past year most museum sites have made an amazingly conscientious effort to digitize their collections providing high resolution images which can be studied in detail, online educational materials and exhibits, and access to rarely exhibited treasures (too fragile to be exposed to light or the public).

The name of the game is exploring on your own. That’s what art on the net is all about. With these sites you can find yourself gazing lovingly at a painting by an artist nobody ever told you about or immersing yourself in the unfamiliar work by a much loved artist.

Here are some of the serious and exciting sites which I enjoy surfing at least once a week.

1. Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Metropolitan is the Queen of North American art museums. With over 20 permanent departments beginning with Ancient Egypt through all stages of European art to the present, as well as covering Islam, Asia, and the Americas, the Met is much more than a collection of European paintings. In fact, the Met is one of the shining examples of an institution based on principles of high multiculturalism.

The permanent departments are represented by 3,500 reproductions of works of art. And The Met calls this is the first installment of what is expected to be a comprehensive visual catalog.

There is a director’s tour of 25 objects representing highlights from the key departments. Or you can begin with any of the 21 collections choosing up to 50 items to view per collection. European painting, all 2,000 pieces, is completely accessible.

The images appear as thumbnails which can be enlarged, and the fine details studied with zoom capacity for most pieces. The image quality is good (though not up to the high definition standards of IBM’s work for Hermitage or National Gallery in Washington). The notes accompanying the work are said to be newly written for the site. Through one of its special features the Met provides storage space for saving images you like.

Educational materials are extensive and located in four separate departments and libraries. Explore and Learn is the place to begin for online adult and family educational needs as it tends to be drawn from current or past exhibits.

There is a site wide search function but it isn’t the easiest one I’ve seen. You may find it easier to use Artcyclopedia to search for paintings. (Note that there are quite a few black and white photos of the earlier paintings and Artcyclopedia does not index these.) Surprisingly for an institution that prides itself on its great traditions, there is no history of the museum to be found online. All in all a splendid example of the seriousness and vitality of the history of art on the net.

If, as Thomas Hoving says, the best way to see the Met is to nibble on it for twenty minutes a day every day of the year taking in two or three sublime objects, then this web site seems designed for just such a regimen.

2. National Gallery of Canada

Cybermuse, a fancy site within the site which requires registration and takes its time to download, may seem like a pain to work with but it is worth the effort. Cybermuse moves the National into the 21st century with high resolution images of many of the works of art in this first rate collection. It can be searched by artist, theme or gallery. I recommend you use broad categories like “Italian painting” to flush out what is there.

Be sure to check out the Cybermuse favorites section where works by Monet, Pissarro and van Gogh are found. It also includes clever and informative Quick Time movies on these painters.

The Jack Pine, Tom Thomson

Tom Thomson

The Jack Pine, 1916-17

purchased 1918

©National Gallery of

Canada, Ottawa, 2000

3. The Prado Museum

For those who love the Spanish masters Goya and Velázquez, or the Flemish giants Bosch, Bruegel and Rubens, or the great Italians like Titian, the Prado is the museum. Yet it is at the same time one of the greatest art museums (containing over 20,000 works of sculpture, painting and drawing) and one of the least satisfactory (only 1,200 paintings are on view in the real site). This website is a potential solution but has a long way to go getting these objects online.

Nevertheless, what is online is first rate. Two features worth exploring: Looking at Art is a monthly discussion of one painting from the collection, with an analytical diagram and short commentary. Visits includes another group of 35 masterpieces (there is a good deal of overlapping here). No zoom function. Detailed Search engine available for paintings only. Good history of the museum. A few free virtual postcards are now available including some favorites.

4. National Gallery of Art in London

This extraordinary collection which represents the whole history of European painting is now virtually completely online. But there are a number of bugs which they need to fix. Don’t be discouraged by results of simple searches that seem twisted.

There are a number of tricks which will assist you searching this site. One is to use some broad search themes like altarpieces, landscape, still life, religious paintings, angels, etc. These will work and will produce the results you are looking for.

Also hidden from view are the equivalent of three CD’s produced in previous years by the Gallery of three of their greatest treasures: Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, Renoir’s The Umbrellas and Botticelli’s Mystical Nativity. To access these exhibits, go to the Exploring Paintings section.

There is also a Eurosearch function which allows you to search the Louvre, Hermitage, Van Gogh Museum, Mauritshuis and a few other web sites.

And you can download the whole catalog of their latest exhibit, Encounters: New Art from Old, which presents us with the reflections of contemporary masters such as Balthus, Bill Viola, Francesco Clemente, Lucian Freud, David Hockney among others as in the process of creating works inspired by paintings in the permanent collection. Truly an event in the world of art.

Be patient with this site it will eventually be a wonderful source of pleasure and enlightenment.

5. The Tate Galleries

North Americans used to be the masters of the blockbuster: now watch the British beat us at our own game. The Tate Britain is the greatest collection of British art in the world and the Tate Modern is England’s greatest collection of modern art. The online images have reached a fantastic 8,000 with 500 being added each week out of a total of 25,000.

This means all of Turner’s work will be online by next year including the rarely exhibited drawings and watercolors. There is more art here than on any of the other sites — much more than you would ever see if you went in person to the Tate for a year.

The basics of abstract art

LightboxOne of the most common reactions to abstract art is along the lines of “My six-year-old could’ve done that”. And the usual response by artist is to say the person lacks the mental ability to appreciate abstract art.

But if a piece of abstract art is to have significance for anyone other than the artist, it needs to have something that’ll retain the viewer’s attention, draw them in, keep them looking, and generate an emotional response.

As a viewer of abstract paintings, ask yourself the following questions:

• Am I trying to figure out what it looks like or represents rather than allowing something to emerge from what I see in front of me?
• What are the elements, colors, and textures of the painting?
• How do these interact with each other?
• What emotions do the painting evoke?
• What is the title of the painting and how is this influencing what I see?
• Have I allowed enough time to make a connection with painting?

As an artist creating abstract paintings, ask yourself the following questions:

• Do I simply want my abstract painting to be beautiful?
• Do I intend this abstract painting to convey something specific to the viewer?
• Do I want people to extract their own meaning from it?
• What in the abstract painting is going to do this?
• How do the elements interact?
• Do I want to guide the viewer’s interpretation with my choice of title?
• Do I want to write a statement to accompany the painting explaining how I created it, what my thoughts were while I made it, or what I see it conveying?
• Does it matter to me if they don’t “get it”?