Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002). Black Venus, 1965-67. Painted polyester. Image and data from © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, NY. Saint Phalle, Niki de (1930-2002) © ARS, NY; © 2022 Estate of Niki De Saint Phalle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / ADAGP, Paris.

We’ve added a vibrant new collection of Art Resource images to Artstor. With more than 750 artworks from some of the most prolific—as well as less studied—artists working in the United States, from 1910 to 2004, this selection includes important works by a diverse array of artists, including Shigeko Kubota, Lee Krasner, Marisol Escobar, Jacob Lawrence, Suzan Frecon, Faith Ringgold, Lynda Benglis, Jenny Holzer, and Mickalene Thomas. Sizable additions from Georgia O’Keeffe, Alex Katz, and Marc Chagall round out the selection. 

These new high-resolution images come to us from Art Resource, the world’s largest stock photo archive of fine art, as well as a licensor for museums across the world.¹

Wayne Thiebaud. Pie Counter, 1963. Oil on canvas. © Whitney Museum of American Art / Licensed by Scala / Art Resource, NY

While this collection features many of the most iconic works of American art from the past century, keep an eye out for some of the less celebrated artists, and lesser-known works from well-known artists, deserving of study and research. Works on paper in the form of Edward Hopper’s serene, unassuming homage to his and his wife’s cat,Youngboy Dos Passos and Marisol Escobar’s surrealist-tinged Shoe and Hand offer a view into the deeper well of what constitutes “American art.”

 

Underscoring this collection’s diversity of genre and cultural influence, early-to-mid-century busts by Isamu Noguchi, Elizabeth Catlett, and Jose de Creeft form a contrasting triad of portraiture in bronze, terracotta, and lead. These works are conversant here despite their differing mediums, not to mention their makers’ divergent artistic traditions, cultural heritage, and time periods.

This collection also provides critical new additions to the Artstor corpus from women artists and artists of color. Works from challenging series by Jacob Lawrence (War Series) and Ana Mendieta (Silueta Series) explore notions of American identity and displacement. 

Jacob Lawrence. War Series Casualty – The Secretary of War Regrets, 1947. Tempera on composition board. Lawrence, Jacob (1917-2000) © ARS, NY; © 2022 The Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Foundation, Seattle / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Go beyond the canon and take a deep dive into this collection’s full diversity by searching with keywords “golden,” “polymer,” “metal,” “tarpaulin,” and “horse” for some contrasting results. We invite you to survey this sampling of twentieth-century and contemporary American art in all its eclectic glory. 

View the entire collection on JSTOR.

—Lisa Gavell, Collections Editor

¹Artstor also includes other collections provided by Art Resource that are highly valued by our community, including Global Arts and Culture from Art Resource, Erich Lessing Culture and Fine Arts Archives and Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN).