Touring the Los Angeles Getty Museum collection (videos)

In this series of videos you will have an introduction to the Los Angeles Getty Museum collection, and an overview of the kind of artworks the museums display and their meaning and importance.

Should art museums admission be free?

This article by Roberta Smith on The New York Times, take the chance from 2006 increase in New York Metropolitan Museum suggested admission fee to get a wider look at museums admission fees policies.

Daily featured work of art on the New York Metropolitan Museum website

On the home page of the website of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, every day you can find a featured work of art from the museum permanent collection.
A picture of the work, a brief description and some data on the object and its origin are displayed on the home page, and then with a click you are taken to a page with more information and a zoomable picture that often gives the chance to have a detailed look to the work.

Sculptures from Louvre Museum in Paris

This overview of the sculpture department of the Louvre Musuem in Paris shows 79 works from middle age to 19th century coming from France, Italy and Northern Europe.
For every listed work you can read a description and a comment, with multiple views of the work itself.
In the "Overview of Departments" section, works from other departments are accessible as well.

Washington National Gallery of Art collection tours

Of course you can search the Washington National Gallery of Art collection by artist, title and other criteria, but you can also take one of the tours that has been set up to explore specific issues.
Just check the collection page and follow your inspiration.
Tours are grouped by general area of interest in the field of paintings, sculpture, works on paper, photographs, decorative arts and architecture.
Among the general areas: "american paintings", "british paintings", "northern european 15th-16th centuries paintings", "modern and contemporary painting and sculpture" and "european 14th-19th centuries sculpture", just to name some of them.
They focus on more specific subjects with a brief introduction and a group of works related to the topic. "Dutch still lifes and landscapes of the 1600s", "Francisco de Goya", "Mark Rothko", "Constable and Turner: british landscapes of the Early 1800s", and "18th and 19th century france: neoclassicism", are some of the tours u can take.

Peggy Guggenheim collection online

Peggy Guggenheim collection, in Venice, Italy, is also on display online.
Focusing on first half of the 20th century, it exhibits mostly works from cubism, futurism, metaphysical painting, european abstract art, surrealism and american abstract expressionism.
Among the artists in the collection: Picasso, Leger, Brancusi, Mondrian, Kandinsky, Mirò, Klee, Magrit, Pollock, Rothko, Calder and Moore.
The collection can be browsed by artist or by room. Beside the work a comment and a brief biography of the artist are provided.
Unfortunately some pages text in the english section of the site are in italian. The problem has already been communicated to webmaster and it will be hopefully fixed soon. Anyway it wont prevent you from watching the works and reading comments and bios in english.

Paris Musée d'Orsay overview video

In this video, Paris Musée d'Orsay director M. Serge Lemoine guides us in an overview visit to the museum.
Musée d'Orsay exhibits western world art between 1848 and 1914, showing its evolution and diversity through the museum collections: painting, schulpture, art objects, photography, graphic art and artchitecture.
(flash player required to watch the video)

How do museums present and preserve installation art?

From "Learn Online" section, on London Tate Gallery website, this interesting "e-learning mini-website" enlightens us about production, presentation and conservation of one of contemporary art main medium: installation art.
Focusing on Bruce Nauman's work MAPPING THE STUDIO II with color shift, flip, flop, & flip/flop (Fat Chance John Cage) (2001) this mini-website explores the work and some of the ideas behind it by means of interviews with the artist and the gallery curators, showing also original video footage from the work. It then gives a deeper look to technology involved in this work creation and presentation, introducing the issues related to installation art preservation, eventually examining some more general issues regarding installation art museum ownership and some responsibilities in relation to its management and care.
Further notes and links to other useful sites and texts are provided.

New York MoMA online collection

1807 artists, 6260 objects from the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) departments of Architecture and Design, Drawings, Painting and Sculpture, Photography, Prints and Illustrated Books, Film, and Media.
These are the numbers of the museum online collection, a selection of objects from MoMA permanent collection that you can browse by artist, title, department, classification, place of origin, or year made, curatorial department, decade, or acquisition.

A Beginner's Guide to Impressionism

On the National Gallery (London, UK) website you can find a brief "Beginner's Guide to Impressionism". It will give you a quick look at Impresionism, its artists, its themes and the time this art school arose. On the guide six pages you will have the chance to see some impressionist paintings from the National Gallery collection, and if you click on them you will be taken to a page dedicated to that painting with a brief comment and the ability to zoom on the work image for a better view.

Vincent Van Gogh works on display online

A good selection of works from the permanent collection of Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, NL, is visible on the museum website. You can browse through the works by period or by subject.
Each work is commented and related supplementary informations and related topics are provvided as well. An interesting feature is the possibility to view the works zooming in to a size where it is possible to appreciate Van Gogh technique and brush signs.
Beside you can see works by other artists from the museum collection, among which: Millet, Courbet, Manet, Monet, Pizarro, Signac, Seraut, Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec and Rodin.