The Art Institute of Chicago recently unveiled a new website design. As part of their first design upgrade in 6 years, they have placed more than 52,000 high-resolution images from their collection online, available to all comers without restriction.
Students, educators, and just regular art lovers might be interested to learn that we’ve released thousands of images in the public domain on the new website in an open-access format (52,438 to be exact, and growing regularly). Made available under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license, these images can be downloaded for free on the artwork pages.
We’ve also enhanced the image viewing capabilities on object pages, which means that you can see much greater detail on objects than before. Check out the paint strokes in Van Gogh’s The Bedroom, the charcoal details on Charles White’s Harvest Talk, or the synaesthetic richness of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Blue and Green Music.
I’ve included a few notable works from their collection above: The Great Wave by Katsushika Hokusai, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte by Georges Seurat (which you can zoom and pretend you’re Cameron in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off), Self-Portrait by Vincent van Gogh, Nighthawks by Edward Hopper, Mao by Andy Warhol, and Two Sisters (On the Terrace) by Pierre-Auguste Renoir. The resolution on the images is high enough to check out the brushstrokes on the paintings. Here’s some detail on the van Gogh:
I love seeing more museums doing this.
Tag: art history
In my opinion, I dont think the brooch that Princess Michael wore was rascist. I mean it was christmas, and who she wore was one of the three wise men. I think it got blown out of proportion, but then everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
I wasn’t aware of it being one of the three wise men. It was a blackamoor. Anyway, I did some research into blackamoor jewellery at the time and this article was great for helping me to understand how problematic it is: https://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2015/july/awam-amkpa-on-blackamoors-at-la-pietra.html
You also have to add in her half assed apology (I’m sorry if it caused offence rather than if she caused offence) and her repeated racist incidents in the past. There’s no reason to give her any slack given the fact this was the latest in a long line of examples of her being a racist.
Sorry, it wasn’t a blackamoor brooch. Kuriozgirl is correct.
Lainey made an assumption that it was a blackamoor brooch simply because the character was black/of African origin, and it took off like wildfire in the gossip press because Princess Pushy/Princess Michael has said racist things in the past. Lainey did no research – she just assumed. Blackamoor works show the African character in positions of servitude or ridicule (see the article cited above); however, the brooch Princess Michael wore did no such thing. It was simply of an African man dressed in gold and jewels: a king.
It’s simply ignorant of art and religious history and tradition to simply point fingers accusing Princess Michael of racism with the Balthazar brooch. (That doesn’t necessarily mean she isn’t racist; it just means the Balthazar brooch itself is not inherently racist as are blackamoor works.)
Balthazar, as one of the three Magi, has historically always been portrayed as an African – just as the other two Magi have been historically been portrayed as Arabian and Mediterranean. This is a representation of the historical Christian diaspora and the traditional regional powers of the early Christian era. Recall that this is a religion born of the eastern Mediterranean, with connections to the surrounding areas.
A better representation of historical racism in European Christianity would surely be portraying Jesus as a blond or fair-skinned European. Or the fact that in Spain they still portray Balthazar using blackface instead of actors of African descent.
House of Brat 