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There’s hidden sweetness in the stomach’s emptiness. We are lutes, no more, no less. If the sound boxes stuffed full of anything, no music. If the brain and belly are burning clean with fasting, every moment a new song comes out of the fire. – Molana (Rumi), Ghazal No. 1739 from Divan-e Shams-e Tabriz This […]

To the pioneers of Minimalism, Agnes Martin’s grid paintings were an early source of inspiration. To the Abstract Expressionists, Martin was a peer, whose use of line to cover canvases from edge to edge was not a gesture of Minimal art, but an expression of the AbEx concept of “allover” painting. In her own words, […]

Good news for English instructors: We have four new Curriculum Guides–collections of images from the Artstor Digital Library based on syllabi for college courses–covering different aspects of English Literature, each created by experts in the field: British Romantic Poetry by Hugh Roberts, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Irvine Gender in Restoration and Early […]

Good news: You can now access all of Artstor’s Teaching Resources through the Artstor Digital Library’s Browse menu! All three of our AP® Teaching Resources–for Advanced Placement courses in Art History, European History, United States History–as well as our Curriculum Guides, Case Studies (from our Travel Award winners), and our popular surveys of selected images for […]

In addition to still images, you can find videos, audio files, 3D images, and panorama (QTVR) files within the Artstor Workspace. You can search by media type using the file extensions as keywords: Videos – search for mov. Clicking the movie icon will open your default video player. Audio – search for mp3. Clicking the […]

Artstor has named the 30 community members of the new Artstor Digital Library User Advisory Board. The members represent a variety of areas of our user community and will gather online three times a year to identify critical issues regarding new tools, features, and functionality of the Digital Library and provide recommendations for improvement.

He was only eighteen years old, yet William Turner’s watercolors were already praised in print as follows: “By dint of his superior art he has rolled such clouds over these landscapes as has given to a flat country an equal grandeur with mountain scenery, while they fully account for the striking and natural effects of […]

La Española, the island now divided into the Dominican Republic and the Republic of Haiti, existed first as a Spanish colony during the entire sixteenth century, when its population became the first one in the Americas with a majority of people of African descent. The Black ancestors of today’s Dominicans were the first to experience […]

Édouard Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass was the scandal of the year in France when it was exhibited in the 1863 Salon des Refusés, and Olympia was greeted with the same shock and indignation in the Paris Salon of 1865 (a journalist wrote, “If the canvas of the Olympia was not destroyed, it is only […]

I recently came across the BBC adaptation of Émile Zola’s The Ladies’ Paradise and, as a self-confessed Francophile, couldn’t wait to begin watching it. A few episodes in, though, my enthusiasm dimmed when it became clear that the series didn’t faithfully follow the book. Zola’s novel is, at heart, an acerbic commentary on consumer culture, […]