frick

The Digital Image Archive allows visitors to browse and download images of 15,000 works of art captured during the Frick’s photography expeditions throughout the United States from 1922 to 1967.  Researchers can retrieve images by keyword or field searching, display large preview images, download small jpeg image files, and link to the matching Arcade records.

Jesse Sadia, Cataloging Associate for Auction Sales Catalogs, established the staff exhibition program at The Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library in 1999 as a means for artists on staff to get to know one another and to create a display of works that their colleagues could enjoy. The first exhibition, Small Works, occupied two bookshelves. It invited artists in the Library to create pieces no larger than 2 x 2 inches. The next year the exhibition was expanded to include all employees of the Frick and became part of the institution’s annual Staff Education Day activities. Twelve years later the program is still going strong.

Attention, logophiles!  We invite you to visit the Frick Art Reference Library and The Museum of Modern Art Library to acquaint yourself with the Oxford English Dictionary Online (OED).  Logophiles, or lovers of words, will be pleased to know that the OED is replete with more than 600,000 entries that include contemporary meanings of words as well as their corresponding chronological history and evolution.  The OED includes great ways to learn how to get the most out of this online dictionary, including quizzes for those who are up for the challenge.

The Archives Department of The Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library is pleased to announce the addition of six new online finding aids to our web site. These join the twenty-four finding aids already online, which made their debut in the spring of 2010. Encompassing institutional records, Frick family papers, and manuscript collections, highlights from these finding aids include records of Henry Clay Frick’s art collecting, Henry Clay Frick’s correspondence, early records of The Frick Collection, and art research files and gallery records.

"Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.” Mark Twain (c.1910)
 

Dogs have held a special place in the lives of humankind for centuries. How long has Fido been man’s best friend? Surely before Mark Twain’s time (quoted above)! The art historical record is no exception and rich with canine imagery, as evidenced in the 2008 publication The Dog: 5,000 Years of the Dog in Art by Tamsin Pickeral available to all dog lovers at the Frick Art Reference Library. According to the detailed timeline located in the back of the book, the earliest evidence of the domestic dog was found in Germany and dates from 14,000 years ago. Since then, they have been depicted in the fine and decorative arts in a variety of ways. The author provides readers with splendidly illustrated, thematic chapters such as “The Romantic Dog” and “The Mythical Dog” to begin or further their knowledge of this animal in art.

In the Gilded Age, exhibitions at small galleries, society clubs, and associations played a significant role in the art world and are avidly studied by art historians now. The libraries of the Frick and Brooklyn Museum have been awarded a Metropolitan New York Library Council grant to digitize ephemeral exhibition checklists, pamphlets, and catalogs from eleven historically significant galleries, society clubs, and arts associations operating from the late 19th to early 20th century.

The Frick Art Reference Library’s Photoarchive consists of more than 1,000,000 reproductions of works of art of the Western tradition dating from the 4th to the mid-20th century. Although photoarchives were the foundation of art historical study in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, these extraordinary resources, which allow researchers to review comprehensive holdings of individual artists and regional schools, have become increasingly rare during the past decade. Because of limitations of space, staff, or funds, many photoarchives have been dismantled. Several historic research collections, however, including those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, have been preserved in part or in their entirety at the Frick Art Reference Library. Scholars, students, dealers, and artists active in New York City now have access to a diverse collection of study photographs in one location.

One of this summer’s most amusing and charming acquisitions at the Frick Art Reference Library and the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a book devoted to Campari, the apéritif favored by the Italian Futurists. Yes, all those manifesti were fueled by the bitter red drink whose recipe has remained secret since its appearance in 1860. In Italy, Campari mixed with soda water has been sold as Camparisoda (alcohol content 10%), in a distinctive bottle designed in 1932 by Futurist member Fortunato Depero (1892–1960).