Blog

It’s October, which gives us a great excuse to feature a spooky post featuring skulls! Specifically, their appearance in the still lifes known as Vanitas. Vanitas depict objects that remind us of our mortality and the transience of earthly pleasures. Popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, particularly in Northern Europe and the Netherlands, the genre continues […]

Artstor works with more than 250 international museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists’ estates to share 1.4 million images in the Digital Library. To celebrate our local partners – and to provide an opportunity for like-minded professionals to discuss their objectives and challenges – we held a reception for New York […]

Since Artstor began its collaboration with the Colección Patricia Phelps de Cisneros (CPPC) in 2009, hundreds of images of Latin American art have been made available through the Digital Library, including most recently nearly 140 images of Spanish Colonial art and utilitarian objects. In celebration of Hispanic Heritage Month (September 15 – October 15), we […]

There are many ways to find the images you’re looking for in the Artstor Digital Library; a simple keyword search will often lead you to what you’re looking for, and an advanced search will help narrow the results. Wildcards can help when you don’t remember a precise name or title, or, conversely, when you are […]

We’ve gathered six examples that illustrate how the images in Artstor can be used to enhance the teaching and learning of architecture and architectural history, along with two case studies, one by a then-doctoral candidate and another by a fine art faculty member. In his four decades as an architect and urbanist, Rem Koolhaas has […]

Mrs. Michelle Apotsos Stanford University Doctoral candidate Art History/Architectural History As a graduate student at Tufts University, I was once given the opportunity to give a lecture to a class of architectural history students on West African architectural form for the purpose of unsettling some common notions that inform Western conceptions of the built environment. […]

Alex Katz, one of the most distinctive painters in America, turned 85 years old this week. His style is now immediately recognizable: flat, minimal, large, and—usually—bright. While Katz has tackled a variety of subjects and media in his long career, his work has retained many of the same qualities since his first solo exhibition in 1954, which is […]

The first manned mission to land on the Moon touched down on July 20, 1969. Upon arrival, Commander Neil A. Armstrong famously reported, “The Eagle has landed.” The next day he would be the first human to walk upon the Moon’s surface, the capstone of mankind’s fascination with the satellite. Enjoy this slide show featuring […]

Edgar Degas is primarily known for his painting, having exhibited only one sculpture during his lifetime: The Little Fourteen-Year-Old Dancer, shown in the sixth Impressionist exhibition in Paris in 1881. It was not until after his death in 1917 that more than 150 pieces of sculpture of dancers, horses, and nudes, mostly made of wax, clay, and plastiline (a type of […]

“It is told that at the age of four, when I was taken by the nurse to look at my newly arrived brother Hugo, I seriously remarked, ‘I’d like a little kitten better.’ I am fond of dogs, but cats have always meant more to me, and they have been the wise and sympathetic companions […]