Artstor on JSTOR
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Dr. Martha Hollander Professor Hofstra University My research and teaching in art history has always focused on the ways in which a single work of art can open up an entire world of knowledge, making vivid and real the otherwise rather bland term “historical context.” For the past few years I have been working on…
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Susan Dodge-Peters Daiss McPherson Director of Education Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester The idea of bringing works of art to the bedside of patients in the hospital emerged from two interwoven aspects of my professional life: for over 25 years, I have worked as a museum educator at the Memorial Art Gallery…
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The competition for the bronze doors of the Florence Baptistery at the turn of the fifteenth century was the city’s most prestigious public commission. Seven artists competed by submitting a bronze plaque on the “Sacrifice of Isaac,” to be judged by a committee of thirty-four native-born citizens of Florence. The competition quickly narrowed down to…
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Happy Mother’s Day! The holiday is celebrated in May in dozens of countries around the world. In honor of mothers everywhere, we have assembled our favorite mother and child images from the Digital Library spanning a wide variety of cultures and eras.
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May is the month to celebrate the heritage of Asians and Pacific Islanders in the United States. The cultures, history, religion, architecture, and art of the continent of Asia are well represented in the Artstor Digital Library, and you can find a full guide in our Artstor Is… Asian Studies post; resources for Asian-Pacific content…
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From those fabulous poems by Roman bad-boy Catullus (84-54 BC) to today’s contemporary poet rock-stars like Billy Collins, poetry might not enjoy the same mass popularity as it did in ancient times, but when you dive in, poetry is its own universe of aural, oral, and cerebral pleasures. Poetry and art are intertwined—two art forms…
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Happy Jazz Appreciation Month! While the attributes of jazz are difficult to describe without getting technical, the key element that ties together its many sub-genres, from swing to bebop to avant-garde, is improvisation—or as Louis Armstrong put it, “Jazz is music that’s never played the same way once.”
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The Artstor water cooler is abuzz with excitement about the premiere of The Hunger Games this weekend. The books by Suzanne Collins have made their way around the offices over the past couple of years, and the movie was a good excuse to do some “research” in Artstor for somewhat-relevant imagery.
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While the 1950s are popularly remembered as a decade of “button down” conformity, the postwar era saw the rise of two groups of American writers and artists who broke with tradition and social norms in an exaltation of unfettered personal expression. The Beat Generation scandalized the country with their licentious lives and confessional writings. Allen…
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By Lera Boroditsky, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Stanford University How do artists decide whether time, death, or liberty should be personified as male or female? One suggestion comes from linguistics. For example, Roman Jakobson (1959) reports: “The Russian painter Repin was baffled as to why Sin had been depicted as a woman by German artists:…
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Black History Month is observed every February in the United States and Canada. What better time to remind our readers of the many excellent resources on the topic available in the Artstor Digital Library? Black history: Image of the Black in Western Art A systematic investigation of how people of African descent have been perceived…
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Two things have been tearing through the Artstor staff recently – a nagging cold that seems to be felling us department by department, and a fascination with the British television show Downton Abbey. The series follows the lives of an aristocratic family and their servants in a fictional Yorkshire country estate. The first season is…
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The Horrible and Terrifying Deeds and Words of the Very Renowned Pantagruel King of the Dipsodes, Son of the Great Giant Gargantua (better known as simply Pantagruel) was the first in a series of five satirical books by the Franciscan monk and physician François Rabelais chronicling the outrageous adventures of the giants Gargantua and Pantagruel…
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In The Elementary Structures of Kinship, French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss noted that we often reserve rich foods for celebrations: “These are some of the delicacies which one would not buy and consume alone without a vague feeling of guilt.” And guilty we would feel if we were to celebrate the passing of another year without…
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“I’m trying to capture the architecture, the play of light on stone, and the beauty of the church. I try to find a way to express the spirit of the church. Sometimes I’m just moved by the shapes and the patterns.” PJ McKey “I’m trying to find hints of what moved the people who built…
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The Artstor staff is hurrying to wrap up projects before the long Thanksgiving weekend that starts this Thursday. The holiday is officially celebrated in the United States every year on the fourth Thursday of November.
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Continuing our spooky Day of the Dead/Halloween theme, we now present you with a slide show of the Danse Macabre. The Dance of Death was an allegory that began in the Middle Ages (possibly in response to the ravages of the black plague) in which death dances with people from all walks of life; it…
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Some blocks in my neighborhood are getting downright spooky – front yards are filling with spider webs and tombstones, and ghosts peek through the bushes. Along with the piles of pumpkins and inevitable candy corn appearing in the supermarket, they are a reminder that Halloween is just around the corner. Americans celebrate Halloween on October…
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This installment of our Focus series presents an account of the Great Depression illustrated with selections from the numerous collections in the Artstor Digital Library that center on history. The Great Depression was the longest lasting and most severe period of low general economic activity and unemployment of the 20th century. Lasting approximately a decade,…
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The initial entry of our new Focus series presents a chronicle of the telephone using some of the numerous collections in the Artstor Digital Library that center on history.
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Autumn has arrived in New York City and there are signs of it everywhere. The leaves are turning shades of red, orange, and gold, and when I stroll under the trees I look out for acorns falling. Outside of the city the changes are more striking. Before long the leaves will be piling up. When…
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Bonnie Burnham, President of the World Monuments Fund (WMF), the leading independent organization dedicated to saving the world’s most treasured places, talks to Christine Kuan about the history and future projects of WMF. The Artstor Digital Library recently launched WMF’s images of architecture, sites, and monuments from around the world. CK: What is the mission…
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It’s been several years since the attacks on 9/11, but the events refuse to be confined to history. They continue to shape life and discourse in New York City, the United States, and the world, and the subject touches on disciplines as varied as social studies, journalism, political science, international relations, religious studies, economics, and civics.…
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Franklin Furnace was founded in 1976 by artist Martha Wilson to champion ephemeral art forms neglected by mainstream arts institutions. The organization provided a much-needed forum for artists’ books, temporary installation art, and performance art, and launched the careers of artists whose work has greatly influenced art and cultural discourse in this country. After 35…
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Keri Cronin Department of Visual Arts faculty, Brock University In January 2011 I launched a new senior-level undergraduate course called “Picturing Animals.” This is a research-intensive course that explores the history of visual culture through a thematic focus on representations of nonhuman animals. From Albrecht Dürer to Damien Hirst, we take a critical look at…
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Elizabeth Perkins Columbia University graduate student While reading through conservation records at the National Gallery in Washington, I found many references to Giovanni Bellini’s fingerprints all over the faces in his portraits. I squinted and stared in the gallery, but despite my best efforts and the indulgence of a lenient security guard, I could not…
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Julia Reinhard Lupton Professor of English and Comparative Literature, The University of California, Irvine With its extraordinary image collection and sensitive search functions, Artstor has changed the way I teach Shakespeare. Images of the Globe Theater and panoramic maps of Elizabethan London set the stage for our engagement with the plays. When teaching The Merchant…
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An art historian teaching one of the few online surveys of Islamic art at the community college level shares how uses architectural examples to help students understand how design across the Islamic world responds to climate.
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In the Old Testament’s Book of Judith, the beautiful widow saved the besieged city of Bethulia by charming her way into the tent of Assyrian general Holofernes and beheading him, enabling the Israelites to defeat the invading army. The Artstor Digital Library features more than 600 images depicting the story of Judith and Holofernes, attesting…
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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. A rallying economy led the United Arab Emirates cities of Abu Dhabi…
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