Displaying items by tag: Google Art Project

The National Academy Museum & School has added 150 high-resolution artworks to the Google Art Project, enabling individuals across America to access and explore a sample of its rich collection of paintings, sculptures, new media and architectural drawings and models. The works available through the Google Art Project are representative of the wide-ranging collection of the National Academy. Among the works included are paintings by Samuel F. B. Morse and Asher B. Durand - the artists who founded the Academy in 1825 - as well as works by many of the iconic names in American art and architecture, all of whom have been members of the Academy and who contributed to its legacy: Cecelia Beaux, Thomas Eakins, Frank Gehry, Winslow Homer, Jacob Lawrence, Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, Wayne Thiebaud and Frank Lloyd Wright, among many others.

If you've ever wanted to wallpaper your living room with the work of the old masters, now's your chance. The Metropolitan Museum of Art this month released an astounding 394,000 high-resolution images to the public. Visitors to the Met’s website can sort images by artist, medium, location, and era, and freely download images that are generally at least 10 megapixels in size.

The Met’s collection is one of the most extensive in the world, with more than 500 Picassos available for download, along with dozens of paintings from Monet, Van Gogh, and Degas. Aside from European painters, the collection also includes photographs of Aztec stonework, Greek sculpture, and Chinese calligraphy. Looking for an image of a 200-year old spittoon from India? It's yours.

Three Texas museums -- the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas -- are adding more than a combined 1,700 high-resolution works of art to the Google Art Project. The Art Project, which is part of the Google Cultural Institute, allows users to virtually explore works of art from international museums, institutions, and archives. Currently, there more than 57,000 high-resolution images of works ranging from oil on canvas paintings to sculpture and furniture.

The Amon Carter Museum has submitted 1,200 images to the Google Art Project, showcasing works by American artists such as Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, and James McNeill Whistler. The museum also contributed 200 photographs from its collection. The Dallas Museum of Art submitted around 500 works from its collection including “Sheaves of Wheat” by Vincent van Gogh. The Nasher Sculpture Center, which houses a collection of modern and contemporary sculpture, submitted images of works by Auguste Rodin and Mark di Suvero.

The exceptional quality of the images coupled with the Google Art Project’s custom-built zoom view, allows users to explore the finest details of  each object. Visitors can browse works by artist, title, medium, museum, country, time period, or collection. Virtual guided tours by experts are available on the site so that users can learn more about a particular work or topic.

To view works from the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Nasher Sculpture Center, visit the Google Art Project.

Last week, Google unveiled a Street View-esque project that brings viewers face to face with some of the greatest art on earth.

Known as Google Art Project, the initiative will give users remote access to the priceless paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts from 17 of the world's most famous museums, including New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art, London's National Gallery and Tate Britain, the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and others.

In a blog post announcing the effort, Amit Sood, head of the Google Art Project, explained that users will have initial access to at least 1,000 works from the 17 museums, including one from each institution that will be presented in high-resolution using "'gigapixel' photo-capturing technology."

The project is based, in part, Sood said, on Google's Street View technology.

But Google didn't do this project on its own. Rather, it partnered with a company called Schematic, which helped integrate many of the technologies that together form Google Art Project, and which took on a lot of the heavy lifting in dealing with the various museums. Yesterday, Jason Brush, the executive vice president for user experience at Schematic, sat down for a 45 Minutes on IM interview about the effort, and talked about working with some of the greatest art collections ever put together, about collaborating with Googlers trying to do exciting things with their "20 percent" time, and about the challenges of building a powerful experience around what could be some people's first-ever interaction with some of the most important paintings in history.