The Steven Kasher Gallery in New York displays photograpic works by its artists online through its 'exhibitions' and 'artists' links. Although this sounds pretty straightforward, not all galleries do archiving and displaying of works this well. Steven Kasher does. There are a few broken or slow-to-load links here and there (took me a while to find a link to photos by Lou Reed) but, all in all, this is an excellent site.
I started out exploring the site by looking for works by Fred W. McDarrah after the New York Times did a short review of his 2006 show at the Gallery. Once upon a time the review was reproduced along with the exhibition pictures on the Press page for McDarrah. Alas, the Press page for this photographer is full of broken links to PDF files of the reviews. The NYT seems to be allowing free access to some articles from their archives, including the review and McDarrah's Obituary just a year after his show at Kasher.
Some of the exhibits are by current photographers, but the real joy of this site is in the many exhibitions of vintage photos. The first archived exhibit is from 2005, "Original Disfarmer Photographs", by Mike Disfarmer. The Wikipedia page for Disfarmer is very short but the links at the bottom of the page include a gallery/sales location and a wonderful video.
This is definitely a website where it's very easy to find yourself wandering down all sorts of photograph-lined distractions. Like all good webwise galleries, Kasher has a Facebook page, which could be updated more often but offers some very good photos from their exhibits.
November 21, 2012
Photography at the Steven Kasher Gallery
October 06, 2012
On not finding Louise Bourgeois at The Walters Art Museum
The Walters Art Museum has an extensive listing of resources for past exhibits. Unfortunately, many of the older links lead to an error page, and many (not quite all) of the newer ones have just a brief description of the exhibit. The earliest exhibit that I found with a good link and good resources was for Courbet and the Modern Landscape, held at the end of 2006. As for the other exhibits, you'll just have to click through the links to find one that works and leads to good resources, but that's part of the fun of the web. A word of warning: The error message on pages that don't work looks like some sort of server error but since it's been the same for months, I'm guessing that the pages just never existed, or have been taken down.
As for Courbet, I described two versions of the show back in June 2009, and this time around I discovered that the Museum does Works of Art quite well. They can be browsed by a variety of means. One word of warning, doing a search can lead to some odd results. After using the search term "Canada" and getting works that had nothing to do with Canada, I found that restricting my search terms was a wise choice, although, again, it was fun to browse through art objects that I wouldn't have found otherwise.
I was originally looking for the page for the exhibit 'Femme' by Louise Bourgeois, put on by this museum and the Contemporary Art Museum of Baltimore, which evidently suspended "operations at the end of May 2012". Most of that museum's webpages seem to still be active, including the one for past exhibitions, so there is a little information there about the Bourgeois exhibit.
The Walters link was broken, but I did find a New York Times review from 2006, which had a very good description, not always complimentary, of the exhibit. About.com's Art History page for the exhibit has a short description with eleven images, which can be very nicely magnified. MOMA's artist page for Louise Bourgeois has 1326 images of her works including this one. So About.com had the best set of images, and the whole experience left me feeling grumpy about the ability of some museum sites to provide useful information and very happy about those like MOMA which take the issue of providing access to artworks seriously.
April 17, 2012
Jasper Johns at the National Gallery of Art
Jasper Johns: An Allegory of Painting, 1955–1965 is another great example of a well-done online exhibit which accompanies a 'live' exhibition and which has been well-maintained since I first saw it in 2007. The 'Exhibition Feature' is an essay which describes the four 'motifs' which Johns used. I am not as enthused now as I was when I first saw the 'zoomed' images in this ten-page essay but some of then are so well done that you can see the depth of the paint; it's just too bad that there is only one level of zooming. The essay page, or any of the other linked pages, doesn't seem to have a link back to the home page noted above.
The links lead to images of Johns' works, or information about related material, although one at least, "States and Variations", goes nowhere useful. The Gemini G.E.L. Online Catalogue Raisonné works are especially well organized, although the link given no longer leads to Johns. It's easy to find his name in the search, though, and an added advantage is that the artist search is a dropdown list so that you can also look at work by other artists.
The page for the New York Times review is still available and has a good, if short, slideshow.
In 2012, PBS has put up Art21 videos for past seasons, from 2001 up to the current episode. Complete episodes are available (although they weren't loading correctly earlier), or you can watch separate sections.
March 24, 2012
One Hundred Famous Views of Edo at the Brooklyn Museum
The site for One Hundred Famous Views of Edo at the Brooklyn Museum is quite wonderful. It shows all 118 of the woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige. I know that the title says "One hundred famous views ..." but there are 118 prints on view.
The images can be browsed by season or by keyword, and also by leafing through all the prints. Once you select the method, each print has an accompanying text which explains the meaning of the objects in the image. Clicking on the smaller picture takes you to a larger version, which can then be examined under a magnifying rectangle - there is only one magnifying level.
The text that accompanies the online exhibition is quite good; I especially liked the section on the Woodblock Printmaking Process since facts are covered there that I wouldn't even have thought to be curious about.
