prokop's blog

Helen Sanger (1923–2020), the Frick Art Reference Library’s first Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian, passed away in July at the age of 96. Her forty-seven-year career at the library shaped the institution profoundly, and her legacy lives on in many areas of its initiatives.

Web archiving is the process of collecting web-based content with a web crawler and preserving the content in an archival format. The Frick Art Reference Library is currently involved in a project to capture and preserve the online-only content of New York City galleries.

The Digital Art History Lab is proud to present ARIES, an innovative and intuitive web-based platform that allows art historians to work with digital images easily and effectively.

Among the many images reproduced in the collection of the Frick Art Reference Library's Photoarchive is a stunning likeness of a vivacious young woman in a feathered hat. Thanks to the Library's photographic campaigns, the true identity of the sitter as well as the correct attribution of the portrait are part of the art-historical record.

Since its founding in 2014, the Digital Art History Lab (DAHL) has served the public with workshops and symposia to introduce the possibilities that the digital world holds for art historians. During these events, DAHL staff have encountered a wealth of enthusiasm but a lack of workable art datasets. Thus, we are excited to announce the release of two datasets, the Montias database and a Vermeer dataset on GitHub, an online repository and hosting service built for collaboration.

From 1931 to 1935, Alfred Cook, a footman to the Frick family, documented the transformation of the Frick’s Gilded Age mansion into a public art gallery and research center in a series of evocative “progress photographs.”

The Artificial Intelligence revolution is underway and how we as a society are interacting with images is changing drastically in response. Computer vision technology is increasingly becoming the standard vehicle through which we navigate the visual world on our devices.

Photoarchive staff was involved in the publication of a special issue of The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy: “Re-viewing Digital Technologies and Art History."

Scholars celebrate photoarchives for providing access to little-known works of art housed in private collections or in circulation on the art market. A feature of photoarchives that is less often appreciated, however, is how comprehensively they document famous works of art on public view.

The story of the "overzealous" restoration of a family portrait as related by the painting's current owner illustrates how crucial this type of personal information is to the documentation of the Photoarchive.