prokop's blog

In February 2021, the Frick Art Reference Library announced the completion of a massive, three-year project to digitize the library’s historic Photoarchive collection. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this initiative has made records and images for more than 175,000 works of art available in the Frick Digital Collections, NYARC Discovery, and the library’s online catalog.

As part of the preparations for its centennial celebrations in 2022, the Frick Art Reference Library is partnering with Global Art Access to digitize 100 paintings in private collections that were first captured by photographers hired by the Frick from the 1920s to the 1960s.

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.

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.”