SCAD Visual Resources Center

Robert Fontaine and the HW Gallery of Naples, Florida is being sued by Rauschenberg for misrepresenting and selling pieces with fake letters of authenticity for work that was pulled from his trash. The story brings to light many interesting questions about copyright, artist’s rights, and authenticity. The results may have repercussions on how artist dispose of their work and who may be skulking around the trash bin.

Artist Rauschenberg sues over ‘art’ taken from his trash by Mary Wozniak, from USA Today.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibition blog.mode: addressing fashion currently on view through April 13, 2008; is the “first in a series of shows designed to promote critical and creative dialogues about fashion.” Visitors of the museum will be allowed to comment in the museum at computer terminals or online at home.

The reason for using a blog is expressed in Notes on the exhibition:

Inspired by both the immediacy and the democracy of the blog format, this exhibition is intended to provide a platform for the opinions of our visitors—both in the galleries and online. Although a number of the pieces, selected from examples acquired since 2000, have been exhibited before, many are displayed for the first time. The selection is a sampling of the range of forms and periods covered by the Museum’s encyclopedic collection, but it is weighted more heavily in twentieth-century and contemporary works.

If you can’t get to New York in time to see the show, check out the blog, blog.mode: addressing fashion.

Did you know that you can search the SCAD DID for images from a specific book and/or author? Just enter a portion of the book title and/or author’s last name in the “Book Source” field, highlight a relevant Category or Period, or enter a search term in any of the other fields, and hit “Search”. If the book is in the SCAD library collections you are provided with a link to the book in the library catalog.

ARTstor recently announced a new collaborative agreement with the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College to contribute approximately 60 images of American and European prints and paintings, The Phillips Art Museum will be contributing 1200 images of Modern and Contemporary art from around the world, and the final images have been added to the Modern Latin American Art Collection, a collaborative project with the Art and Art History Department at the University of Texas, Austin to digitize and distribute approximately 4,700 teaching slides from Professor Jacqueline Barnitz’s collection.

To read more about these acquisitions, check out the ARTstor Blog.

As part of Black History Month, we have added new images from the Benny Andrews Collection in the Jen Library Archives and Special Collections. Benny Andrews was born in Madison, Georgia in 1930. He is known for his elongated figures and use of collage in his paintings. His work includes images of spirituality and depictions of Southern and African American life.

Benny Andrews was also the co-founder of the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (B.E.C.C.), which was originally formed to protest against the the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition, “Harlem on My Mind,” in 1969. The B.E.C.C. also contacted the Whitney to do survey of black artists. To read more about this event, read Time Magazine’s article In a Black Bind, Monday, April 12, 1971.

(more…)

Lori Nix, photographer of miniatures and models, is featured in a video interview by m ss ng p ece as part of the Cool Hunting. To see more artist interviews visit the Cool Hunting Video Archive.

Watch the video

Festival of Empire, Crystal Palace, 1911; Candian Parliament House

The Commons, the new Library of Congress’ Flickr account, which allows users access to some of their most popular images and promotes social tagging and commenting by the community.

A permanent link to this site is hosted on the VRC website under Web Resources.

A suitcase full of Robert Capa negatives taken during the Spanish Civil War were presumed lost when he fled to America in 1939. The negatives have been found in Mexico City in the care of the family of a Mexican filmmaker. The negatives are not only by Capa, but also include those by his partner Gerard Taro and by David Seymour, known as Chim. The find may also help clear up the controversy over one of Capa’s most famous image “The Falling Soldier.”

The Capa Cache by Randy Kennedy from the New York Times, January 27, 2008

The discovery has sent shock waves through the photography world, not least because it is hoped that the negatives could settle once and for all a question that has dogged Capa’s legacy: whether what may be his most famous picture — and one of the most famous war photographs of all time — was staged. Known as “The Falling Soldier,” it shows a Spanish Republican militiaman reeling backward at what appears to be the instant a bullet strikes his chest or head on a hillside near Córdoba in 1936. When the picture was first published in the French magazine Vu, it created a sensation and helped crystallize support for the Republican cause.

Though the Capa biographer Richard Whelan made a persuasive case that the photograph was not faked, doubts have persisted. In part this is because Capa and Taro made no pretense of journalistic detachment during the war — they were Communist partisans of the loyalist cause — and were known to photograph staged maneuvers, a common practice at the time. A negative of the shot has never been found (it has long been reproduced from a vintage print), and the discovery of one, especially in the original sequence showing all the images taken before and after the shot, could end the debate.

The negatives are now a part of the International Center of Photography in New York. Read the whole article at New York Times, The Capa Cache.

Tate Gallery is posting images on Flickr from excerpts from their TateShots online video shorts, behind the scenes images of working at the gallery, and candid views of exhibitions.

The British Museum has launched their a new searchable database that allows for unrestricted access and download of their images. Perfect for academic researchers and students of art.

Rembrandt reaches the web, James Fenton taps into an online treasure trove, Saturday November 10, 2007, The Guardian

The website is unrestricted and you can print off any image. A battle was won before this was allowed to happen, and the result is that anyone – student, teacher or amateur – can get hold of a decent A4 reproduction of the drawing or print they are interested in, for personal use. For scholarly use, there will shortly be an automatic downloading option that gives a free image (for use in a scholarly article or book) of a suitable quality for reproduction. This is going to make an amazing difference in academic life, and it is part of a general trend (begun by Mark Jones at the V&A) of public institutions not charging for educational use of copyright material.

Visit the The Victoria and Albert Museum database also.