Ellen Prokop

The 2020–21 symposium “Technological Revolutions and Art History” explores current topics in digital art history. For a deeper dive into the major themes of access and bias, Ellen Prokop, former Digital Art History Lead, interviews Luciano Johnson, Associate Chief Librarian for Preservation, Imaging, and Creative Services, and Dr. Stephen Bury, Andrew W. Mellon Chief Librarian.

To enhance the discoverability of Photoarchive materials, the library launched a collaboration with the Center for Advanced Research of Spatial Information at Hunter College, City University of New York in 2014 to develop an interactive digital map that traces the movement of library staff and photographers as they traveled across the United States and recorded paintings and sculptures in private homes and little-known public collections.

Co-sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art and the Frick Art Reference Library, this upcoming four-part symposium examines the connections between science, technology, and art history. Read more for a preview of the important topics under consideration, including what technological advances might benefit the study of art in the near future.

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.

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.”

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 photo archives for providing access to little-known works of art housed in private collections or in circulation on the art market. A feature of photo archives such as the Frick’s that is less often appreciated, however, is how comprehensively they document famous works of art on public view.

One of the most popular series completed by the American illustrator Vernon Howe Bailey was his "Intimate Sketches of New York," which records the city during a period of dramatic growth — and change.

Lost or destroyed paintings are perhaps the most painful reminder of the importance of photoarchives and similar repositories of images and accompanying metadata. An unfortunate example is this portrait of a young bride.

The third and final entry in a series of three blog posts focusing on conservation "interventions" as recorded in the holdings of the Frick Art Reference Library Photoarchive is this mysterious devotional image in the church of San Martino in Velletri, Italy.