Blogs

The Frick Art Reference Library contains materials beyond the scope of the Frick’s permanent collection, including extensive holdings on modernism. In this post, Interlibrary Loan Assistant Cori Edmonds-Hutchinson, inspired by the documentary Beyond the Visible: Hilma af Klint, explores the library’s titles on the pioneering and enigmatic Swedish artist.

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.

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.

The Frick Art Reference Library offers its first Reading List in celebration of Black History Month. Explore eight free e-book titles dedicated to the life, work, and legacy of Black American artists.

The Frick expanded its digital encounters with art and art history throughout 2020. Explore how online visitors most enjoyed connecting with the Collection over the past year.

Henry Clay Frick and Adelaide Howard Childs were married one hundred and forty years ago this year, in December 1881. Recent research into portraits of the newly married couple sheds light on the early days of the Fricks' married life.

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.

This [painting] annihilates time as far as poor mortals may. —William Carlos Williams on Titian’s Portrait of a Man in a Red Hat

Christopher Snow Hopkins, Assistant Editor, looks closely at the barefoot cave dweller in Bellini’s St. Francis in the Desert: “The forest was his chapel, the birds his parishioners.”