New York Art Resources Consortium

One of this summer’s most amusing and charming acquisitions at the Frick Art Reference Library and the Thomas J. Watson Library at The Metropolitan Museum of Art is a book devoted to Campari, the apéritif favored by the Italian Futurists. Yes, all those manifesti were fueled by the bitter red drink whose recipe has remained secret since its appearance in 1860. In Italy, Campari mixed with soda water has been sold as Camparisoda (alcohol content 10%), in a distinctive bottle designed in 1932 by Futurist member Fortunato Depero (1892–1960).

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Anyone who has slaved over a book exhibition for months has probably had that experience when a friend, who is not a "book person," comes to see the show. You can tell from their reaction that the experience is something similar to seeing an art exhibition with the paintings displayed still nailed shut inside their wooden shipping crates. When you go to European museums, you realize how lucky we are in the United States that artworks are not usually displayed behind glass. But books—interactive books, which require someone to handle them in order to make them "work," in order to be able to see and read them—invariably are.

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It is important for the staff of the Frick Art Reference Library and the other New York Art Resources Consortium (NYARC) libraries to work collaboratively and with other institutions. With this mandate in mind, the reference staff of the Frick recently visited their colleagues at Yale University to learn about the collections held at the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library and the Yale Center for British Art Reference Library and Photograph Archive.

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In case you were wondering, searching a card catalog is officially an obsolete skill.  As most librarians and researchers know, this is not exactly the truth as there still remain pockets of very valuable cards out there that have yet to be converted to an online format and provide the only access into historically important collections, but I digress … Most card catalogs are obsolete and stand as artifacts to our pre-Internet past, but we (i.e., librarians) love card catalogs and are always excited to see the cards that our predecessors painstakingly crafted take on a new life as a work of art.

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TEN TONS OF ART ARRIVE AT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. MUSEUMS ANNOUNCE PROJECT FOR FIRST COMPUTERIZED ARCHIVE OF ART. FIRST MORTGAGE LOANS OBTAINABLE ON HOUSE IN THE MUSEUM GARDEN. SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON ARTISTS’ RELATIONS FORMED. LECTURE ON ART UNDER THE DICTATORSHIPS. CHILD JURY SELECTS PRIZE-WINNING PICTURES AT MUSEUM OF MODERN ART.

Recent Tweets? No—these are MoMA press releases from the past half-century.

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One hundred years ago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art opened the doors of its library's new home to art historians, students, and the general public. The Museum's founders understood the essential role of a library in fulfilling the institution's mission. In fact, the original 1870 New York State charter specifically committed the new institution to "establishing and maintaining . . . a Museum and library of art." (See the Now at the Met blog post, "Today in Met History: April 13" for more about the Museum's charter.) The library was formally established in 1880, and today it shares the Museum's distinction of being among the world’s greatest treasuries for the study of the arts of many cultures.

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A number of notable individuals began their relationship with MoMA not as noteworthy artists and established personalities, but as conventional Museum employees. Curious? Read on ...

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Walking though the galleries of your favorite museum can generate many questions about the lives of the artists whose works are on view. Artist biographical dictionaries can help answer these questions. Researchers visiting the Reading Room of the Frick Art Reference Library find cabinets dedicated to the lives of American and European artists, including such gems as The Dictionary of 19th Century British Book Illustrators and Caricaturists (1996) and An Encyclopedia of Women Artists of the American West (1998).

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The sequel is a notoriously dicey—though sometimes brilliant—film enterprise, be it Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The Empire Strikes Back, or my personal favorite at the age of twelve, The Karate Kid, Part II. After the first round of 30 Seconds videos, in which MoMA staff and members created short videos with filmmaker Thilo Hoffmann, we invited Thilo back late last year. The results are in, and you can now see selected videos by staff and members.

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If you're like me and on a computer all day long, you look for searching short-cuts whenever possible. Now you can save yourself a click by installing NYARC catalog search plugins for Firefox and Internet Explorer. These plugins allow you to search the NYARC catalogs using the search box on the top right  of your browser. They'll save you a click and speed up your searching.

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Since its conscious decision in 1970 to begin actively collecting artists’ books, the Brooklyn Museum Library has amassed a varied and substantial collection comprised of over 2,500 titles, and further supported by numerous artists’ files, and related exhibition catalogues and relevant publications.  Now, with the recently acquired Smoller Gift, generously donated to the Brooklyn Museum from Arnold Smoller, the collection has been further enriched and expanded by the inclusion of over 40 artists’ books and livres d’artiste.

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On Thursday, April 22, the MoMA Library and Esopus Foundation Ltd. co-hosted an evening celebrating the life and work of physicist-artist Bern Porter (1911–2004). I organized the event to breathe life into the books and other ephemera on display in the exhibition Lost and Found: The Work of Bern Porter from the Collection of The Museum of Modern Art Library and to call more attention to this fascinating and under-recognized artist.

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The Frick Art Reference Library has released Spanish Artists from the Fourth to the Twentieth Century: A Critical Dictionary online. The database contains bibliographies, alternative names, and basic biographical information for more than 5,000 Spanish artists. Entries cross-reference materials from the Frick’s internationally-known photoarchive collection. The Dictionary links to other resources, such as Arcade and WorldCat, allowing researchers to easily locate items held at institutions worldwide related to a particular artist.

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