Five Fabulous Women Artists of the 1800's - a slide lecture by Marlene Aron

On Tuesday, June 28th, local artist Marlene Aron will present slides of the beautiful and inspiring art of five women artists: Mary Cassatt, Berthe Morisot, Marie Bracquemond, Eva Gonzales, and Camille Claudel.

These artists exhibited their work in the Salon and the World Exposition in Paris, three of them showing their paintings alongside Pissarro, Degas, Renoir, and Monet in the very first Impressionist exhibitions in the early 1870's. They painted their family, children, friends, and lovers, along with scenes of gardens, forests, and landscapes. Take a journey through the artistry and lives of some of the movers and shakers of the Impressionist movement.

Tuesday, June 28th
6pm - 7:30pm 
Main Library
Latino/Hispanic Room (lower level)

Richard Diebenkorn and Ingleside

Source: 1938 Aerial view of San Francisco, from the David Rumsey Map Collection

An earlier blog entry, "Richard Diebenkorn's San Francisco Childhood," noted that Richard Diebenkorn lived at two addresses in the Ingleside Terraces neighborhood of San Francisco.  First from around the ages of 9 to 11 he and his family lived on Cedro Way (the red X) and later from around the ages of 12 to 15 they lived on Moncada Way (the green X).

By the time that Diebenkorn embarked on a career as an artist in his twenties, he and his family had moved out of San Francisco.  During the late 1940s he continued living in Northern California in Sausalito and Oakland.  He returned to the Bay Area during the years 1953-1966 -- the time period of the current exhibit at the DeYoung Museum documenting Diebenkorn's Berkeley Years.

While he painted many California landscapes and many of his abstract works evoke the California landscape, he did very little San Francisco-themed work.  Hilton Kramer writes of Diebenkorn's style, calling it a "style that evoked, without explicitly depicting, an imagery drawn from the broad, sunny, open, uncluttered landscape of Northern California as it was ... in the late forties and early fifties."  Much of the San Francisco landscape might have been too crowded and cluttered for that aesthetic, with one exception it turns out, Diebenkorn's Ingleside (properly speaking Ingleside Terraces).


Richard Diebenkorn, Ingleside (source: Wikipaintings)

Diebenkorn painted Ingleside in 1963 while living in Berkeley.  In choosing a location to paint, Diebenkorn once said that "clarity of light, space, spareness, expansiveness, contrast" mattered to him the most.  And he certainly found those qualities in his Ingleside landscape. 

Gerald Nordland writes that this painting is:

... a skillful projection of that residential subdivision in deep space, following a suburban street across three intersections and up a hill, with rows of houses on either side, reflecting strong mid-day light.  There are surprising incidents of color and telling touches of impasto white in the buildings which are set off by acres of steel-gray macadam.

Roads and sidewalks meander in unexpected ways forming both curves and straight lines.  Sidewalks frame blacktop, hills in the background contrast the flat land of the foreground.  Grass and trees trim the edges.  There are individual homes in toward the front and rows of less distinct houses on the distant hillside.

The 200 block of Moncada Way ca. 1920, from the Willard E. Worden Glass Plate Negative Collection, in the San Francisco Historical Photograph Collection

This historic photograph shows Moncada Way about 15 years before the Diebenkorns moved there (their house was later built in the open space at the lower-middle left side of the image).  This photo shows the potential space, spareness and contrast of an earlier time.

The sfog.us website speculates that the scene shown in the Ingleside painting above would be from "Mercedes Way looking south from Paloma Avenue, with Merced Heights in the background."

It's not really possible to pinpoint a location that Diebenkorn was trying to depict, and in actuality it may have not been a distinct location at all.  In the book A Sense of Place: The Artist and The American Land Diebenkorn told about revisiting his old neighborhood to work on this artwork:

Visiting there thirty years later provided me with a peculiarly concentrated subject matter, one which represented much that I had rejected in intervening years but which at the same time referred largely to what I am. A sense of place was built into my use of this material. I made on-the-spot sketches that were very brief, finding that when I painted from them in my Berkeley studio the relevant detail filled in easily. The pictures that came out of this don't refer to specific streets and houses but I believe are very much about the place, Ingleside. 

Diebenkorn sought an ideal landscape from a setting familiar to him from his youth.  It is also worth noting what he chose to take from that landscape.  As the 1920s photograph shows, most of the houses in the neighborhood, particular in the vicinity of the Diebenkorn residences were in an ornate, wooden, craftsman style.  The foregrounded house in his painting are much sparer, white with orange-red adobe roofs.

The view of the neighborhood below from the corner of Corona Street and Urbano Drive includes some houses that are a little closer in style to those of the painting.  (Specifically, look at the houses on the left side of Corona Street - the street heading into the distance from left to right). 

Corner of Corona Street and Urbano Drive from Google Streetview

The view of Merced Heights in the distance is also clear here.  This ridge features a small dip similar to that of the painting between the Lakeview and Ashton Mini-Park at the left and Brooks Park at the right (behind the pole).  The houses in the background, lined up in a row going up the hillside only began to be constructed in the mid-1940s.  There could still have been bare, grassy spots into the 1960s.

Diebenkorn painted a second landscape in the neighborhood entitled Ingleside II.

Ingleside II (source: Christie's - the painting sold at auction on May 15, 2013)

Hilton Kramer has described this work as one of Diebenkorn's "most successful attempts at designing in deep, illusionistic space.  The pictorial reconstitution of the scene on the flat surface of the canvas is given priority over the painterly inflection of the surface itself."  This painting, like Ingleside, also features streets, sidewalks, lawns and a relative sparsity of dwellings.  The scene itself is reminiscent of the portion of the Ingleside Terraces neighborhood near Holloway Avenue shown below.

 Corner of Monticello Street and Holloway Avenue from Google Streetview

Diebenkorn discussed how the environment he worked from affected him approach to art:

My sense of place is involved with particular pictures and subjects whereas my present environment has to do in a more general way with light, coloring, and configuration.  I painted the Ingleside series in a very different environment (although it was at most fifteen miles distant) from Berkeley's.  Could I have painted Ingleside while working in Albuquerque or Los Angeles?  We can probably agree that the sources for painting are incredibly tangled and we had better hope they stay that way.

The Ingleside paintings reflect this "tangled" perspective on a place that would have been familiar and likely endowed with unique meaning to Diebenkorn.  The streets, houses and terrain of Ingleside Terraces under his brush retain recognizable features of the neighborhood, however he presents a sparer, purer vision than a fully developed and populated space would allow.  The Ingleside of his eye and his mind's eye provides a rich painterly space, and for those of us who know the neighborhood and gain a new outlook on this place.


Bibliography:

Alan Gusow, A Sense of Place: The Artist and The American Land (Friends of the Earth, 1972).

Hilton Kramer, "Pure and Impure Diebenkorn," Arts Magazine (December 1963), 46-53.

RichardDiebenkorn: Paintings and Drawings, 1943-1976, with essays by Robert T. Buck, Jr., Gerald Nordland ... (Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1976).

Jay DeFeo and The Rose

Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective will leave the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on Feb 3, 2013 to move on to the Whitney Museum of American Art - the institution central to reviving the name of local artist, Jay DeFeo. This not-to-be-missed exhibit is the most comprehensive gathering of DeFeo’s work to date, and includes examples of her repertoire in several media displayed together for the first time in over fifteen years. Painting, drawing, sculpture, jewelry, photography and photo-collage are featured, as well as the work that has been referred to as "a marriage between painting and sculpture", her career-defining piece, The Rose.

So much has been written about The Rose, it is steeped in such lore, that one expects to be disappointed upon seeing it for the first time. Worry not however, the work is as powerful and mammoth as its background story:  DeFeo began the painting in 1958 in her apartment at 2322 Fillmore and worked on it almost exclusively for eight years until, when evicted, she was forced to "finish" it. The painting has been called her Frankenstein, for as she obsessively painted it grew to weigh one ton and measure 11ft x8ft and 11 inches deep. The painting blocked all sunlight from her bay windows except that flooding in from sides, leaving the rest of the studio in near darkness. To remove the painting from the apartment required a crew of eight professional movers and the removal of a section of the building's wall--as famously documented in Bruce Conner's film The White Rose. The gargantuan work was then taken to The Pasadena Museum of Art (DeFeo followed it for some additional touch-ups) where it showed, then to the San Francisco Museum of Art, both in 1969, the only year in DeFeo's lifetime that the piece was exhibited.


image source:Whitney Museum of American Art

Across eight years, the artist declined several offers to purchase or exhibit what she considered to be an "unfinished" piece. The Museum of Modern Art hoped to exhibit the work in 1959 and during the same year a private collector offered $10,000 for it. At one time, The Rose had a waiting list of thirteen individuals and institutions interested in its purchase upon completion. In the painting’s infancy DeFeo gained a national reputation, through articles in national magazines and photographs taken by her contemporary art peers, but by the time the work was finished potential buyers had vanished as interest in the Beat Scene waned and, moreover, it became evident that The Rose was in need of a difficult, costly, and imperative conservation.

Raising funds for such conservation became a new preoccupation for DeFeo, and a concern for conservators. Local papers ran articles on the subject in the early 1970s, but funds were elusive. In the meantime, The San Francisco Art Institute offered their McMillan Conference room to house The Rose, but what began as display turned into long term storage. To protect the piece from already evident structural degradation, Tony Rockwell, conservator at the San Francisco Museum of Art, proposed an unconventional treatment— enshrining the painting within a layer of protective wax, mulberry tissue, chicken wire and white-plaster stabilizer. This left the work unrecognizable but safe until a future date when conservation could be undertaken. The Rose waited in this mummified state, eventually becoming even further entombed by a wall erected in front of it for classroom purposes. Twenty-plus years would pass with DeFeo's hidden masterpiece going all but unnoticed.

DeFeo passed away in 1989. In the last years of her life, her attention again returned to conserving The Rose. Several art institutions also contemplated the expense and feasibility of restoring the piece, but unfortunately none were capable of committing. It was a high stakes gamble--putting a hundred thousand dollars on an unconventional painting, preserved by unconventional methods for a work that had been unviewable for over twenty years. The Whitney was the institution to make the gamble. When planning their 1995 exhibition Beat Culture and the New America, 1950 -1965, their Director learned of The Rose's suspended state and leapt at the opportunity to rescue what he considered to be one of the great post-war American artworks. The treatment cost over $250,000 and the painting gained an additional half ton in weight, but as the San Francisco Examiner art critic David Bonetti stated in a 1995 article, “The salvage of The Rose and the Whitney exhibition are two events in DeFeo’s slow rehabilitation. Like so many Bay Area phenomena, hers is a legend that fades east of Sacramento and south of San Jose. But unlike most of them, she deserves greater fame.”

The current exhibition Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective ensures the artist's legacy beyond the Bay Area.  

Select Bibliography:

San Francisco Public Library Artists Vertical File and Scrapbook - DeFeo's vertical file  chronicles the painting’s history through newspaper articles from the 1970s to present.

Sixteen Americans, edited by Dorothy C. Miller, with statements by the artists and others (Doubleday, Garden City, N.Y., 1959) - Jay DeFeo’s inclusion in this landmark 1959 Museum of Modern Art exhibit, curated by Dorothy Canning Miller, launched the artist’s national reputation. DeFeo was one of only two women included, the other being the older and more established Louise Nevelson, among a set of male soon-to-be art luminaries such as Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Miller tried to persuade DeFeo to show The Rose, but had to settle for including an image of the work in the exhibition catalog. Interestingly, DeFeo's work would not show again in New York for another thirty years.

Jay DeFeo: Selected Works, Past and Present; text by David S. Rubin (San Francisco Art Institute, c1984) - An exhibition catalog is for DeFeo's 1984 retrospective at SFAI. The show was her largest to date and included, 44 paintings, drawings and mixed media pieces, including a companion piece to The Rose, The Jewel, which had not been displayed up until this time.

Jay DeFeo: Works on Paper by Sidra Stich (University Art Museum, University of California at Berkeley, 1989) - A retrospective exhibit of drawings, photo collages and paintings on paper.

Greatest Works of Art of Western civilization, selected by Thomas Hoving (Artisan, 1997) - the former director of Metropolitan Museum of Art, choose The Rose as one of his greatest works of art of Western civilization. Of the selected artworks, The Rose is both the most contemporary and only one by a woman.

Jay Defeo and the Rose, edited by Jane Green and Leah Levy (University of California Press; Whitney Museum of American Art, 2003) - the most complete collection of essays on the painting, including an account of its restoration.

Secret Exhibition: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era by Rebecca Solnit (City Lights Books, 1990) - a study of six artists of the Northern California avant-garde that places DeFeo in a broader artistic community.

CAMIO - Catalog of Art Museum Images Online

The Art, Music and Recreation Center of the San Francisco Public Library is pleased to be able to offer CAMIO to our patrons.  CAMIO, which stands for Catalog of Art Museum Images Online, is a product of OCLC (Online Computer Library Center) which also provides the popular WorldCat international database of library catalogs.

CAMIO is a digital collection of about 95,000 art images from 25 institutions.  These are primarily American and include some of the most important museums in the United States.  Two San Francisco collections are very prominently featured in CAMIO: the database includes 17,511 images from the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the combined De Young and Legion of Honor collections) and 2,345 images from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Many of these museums include digital images on their own websites.  As those of you who consult and use reproductions in your work and research, the character and quality of reproductions can vary from source to source.

For example, the website for the Legion of Honor includes a reproduction of the Claude Monet painting Water Lilies.  This online reproduction allows one to see a thumbnail of the entire painting and additionally allows one to view portions of the painting at various magnifications within a relatively small frame.

The image of Water Lilies in CAMIO is also available to magnify or shrink within a larger frame.  Additionally it is possible to open a new window with a higher-resolution image, and to download that image.  CAMIO allows its images to be used for personal and educational non-commercial purposes.

In this instance the Legion of Honor website has one important feature lacking in CAMIO - a biography of Monet that may help one's understanding of the painting.  It is also evident that the two databases show the painting with differing color levels.  Of course, this often depends upon the lighting used when the image was photographed.  It's not always possible to say which reproduction is truest to an original that is probably impossible to capture in its full richness and beauty.

CAMIO has four search methods.  There is a simple keyword search box in the upper left hand corner of the homepage.  This search often gives a long list of results (in the case of Monet there are 115 works).  The left hand column of the results screen in this search mode also provides an opportunity for the user to further refine their search by the categories of format, creator, date and subject.

This homepage also provides a link for "collections of prominent museums" that allows one to browse by institution.  At the bottom of the homepage there are also links to a number of the art mediums that are represented in the database.  Finally there is the advanced search where it is possible to search by keyword strings in a variety of ways and also to limit the search by museum collection.

One final access point to CAMIO is through OCLC's WorldCat database.  All of the images in the database include a bibliographic record and provide a live link to the image for database users in the Library.
   

Articles and Databases at San Francisco Public Library

The Rediscovery of Artist Fang Rending [方人定]

Returning from a Hunt, 1932 by Fang Rending

Internationally known in his lifetime, Chinese-born artist Fang Rending (方人定 - 1901-1975, sometimes know as Fan Jen-Ting or Fong Yan-Ting) contributed to the modernization of Chinese painting through published writings, teachings and international art shows beginning in the mid-1920s.

Throughout the Twenties and Thirties, his painting met acclaim as he exhibited in China, Japan, France, Brussels, Germany, Britain, the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia. Living in the United States from 1939-1941, Fang added solo exhibitions in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco to his growing list of international shows, and participated in both the Golden Gate International Exhibition and the New York World’s Fair. Most significant to local art historians, in 1939 Fang was the first Chinese artist to receive a one-man exhibit at SFMOMA. (At the time both he and the museum were working under different names; he, Fong Yan-Ting, while the museum was named the San Francisco Museum of Art).

Stepping on Snow, 1931 by Fang Rending

Today few people in the United States are familiar with the name Fang Rending. While auction prices for his work are in the thousands, collectors in Hong Kong and China remain his primary audience.

Join us on January 15th, for the rare opportunity to learn about the life of the artist, directly from his granddaughter, Tanya Fang. In addition to showing a selection of his finest paintings, she will discuss his beginnings as a law student, his artistic development and philosophies, and the effect of his ‘re-education’ during China’s Cultural Revolution.

The Rediscovery of Fang Rending will be presented Saturday, January 15, 2011 from 3:30-4:30 PM at the Latino/Hispanic Community Meeting Room at the Main Library's Lower Level. This program is co-presented by the Chinese Center and is free and open to the public.

On a Leisure Day, 1931 by Fang Rending

There are two-length books in the Library's collections written in Chinese:

方人定评传 [Fang Rending ping zhuan] = Biography and appraisal of Fang Rending by Li Rulun 李汝伦 (花城出版社 [Hua cheng chu ban she], 2001.

方人定 [Fang Rending] by 郎绍君 [Lang Shaojun] and [云雪梅] Yun Xuemei (河北敎育出版社 [Hebei jiao yu chu ban she], 2003).

The Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, volume 34 (K.G. Saur) provides a single-column German language overview of his life and works as well as a short bibliography.

Modern Chinese Artists: A Biographical Dictionary by Michael Sullivan (University of California Press, 2006) provides a short biography. The Benezit Dictionary of artists (Gründ, 2006) includes a short biography and some auction information.

Fang Rending is also listed in An Index-Dictionary of Chinese Artists, Collectors, and Connoisseurs with Character Identification by Modified Stroke Count by Nancy N. Seymour (Scarecrow Press, 1988). An Index to Reproductions of Paintings by Twentieth Century Chinese Artists by Ellen Johnston Laing (University of Oregon, 1984) provides citation to reproductions of Fang's work in Chinese language sources.

Art and Revolution in Modern China: The Lingnan (Cantonese) School of Painting, 1906-1951 by Ralph Croizier (University of California Press, c1988) includes a couple of black and white reproductions of Fang Rending's work as well as a discussion of his important to the Lingnan School of Painting [嶺南畫派的繪畫藝術].

The Museum of the Missing

By now the world is well aware of the May 20, 2010 art heist in which five paintings (by Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani, Leger and Braque) valued at over 100€ million were stolen from the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris. The method of the heist appears to have been quick and unsophisticated. In less than 15 minutes a thief, clad in black, entered the museum by breaking windows, smashing a padlock, and then cut the canvases free from their frames. Despite the apparent simplicity of the robbery, within hours Interpol, the world’s largest international police organization, had alerted its 188 member countries of the theft, indicating the potential speed and sophistication with which stolen works can be moved throughout the world.

This disconnect between a thuggish-style theft and the complex worldwide network of stolen art begs with the question, what type of criminal steals paintings and what becomes of the stolen artwork? Simon Houpt’s book, Museum of the Missing: A History of Art Theft, explores this question through chapters devoted to topics such as the commodity of art, art theft during wartime, profiles of art criminals, and the business of museum security and theft investigation.

Houpt speculates: “There may be as many different sorts of art ‘nappers’ as there are schools of painting. Inside jobs are pulled off by resentful security guards trying to humiliate their bosses, poorly paid servants looking for a retirement nest egg, attention seeking children of rich collectors, and museum staff who fall for a thing of beauty tucked away in storage and decide to take full advantage of deficient record keeping. The ‘perp’ may be a mere street thug with a bad back who realizes that a couple of canvasses are easier to lift than a truckload of electronics. Insurance adjusters and authorities increasingly believe that underworld crime figures use art as collateral for drugs and other illicit goods.”

Houpt interviews Robert K. Wittman, a special agent with the art crime team of the FBI (and author of Priceless: How I Went Undercover To Rescue The World's Stolen Treasures), who says that when it comes to profiling art thieves, "we haven't found a common thread at this point.”

Beyond chapters exploring facets of the underground world of stolen art, the concept of the "museum of the missing" is a compelling metaphor to visualize. The book’s introduction describes the Dutch Room of Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where within, resting atop an easel is a canvas-less gilded frame covered over a heavy brown cloth. Until its theft in 1990, the frame contained Vermeer’s The Concert, one of only 36 known works by the master painter. In addition to this painting, a museum of the missing would contain over one hundred and fifty Rembrandts, five hundred Picassos, and innumerable works by Raphael, Titian, Degas, Monet, etc.

Johannes Vermeer, Musicerend Trio [The Concert] (from the Wikimedia Commons)

Presently, there are over 200,000 art objects listed through the Art Loss Register. Houpt’s appendix offers a selected tour of missing works and the fascinating stories of their theft, such as the inconceivable heist of Reclining Figure LH608, a bronze, two-tonne Henry Moore sculpture thought to have been melted down for scrap metal.

Further library reading on this topic can be found both in Library's General Collections & Humanities Center on the 3rd floor and the Art, Music & Recreation Center on the 4th floor.

Rogues in The Gallery: The Modern Plague of Art Thefts, published before the infamous Gardner theft of 1990, highlights equally large robberies beginning with the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa. While the outcome of many cases has changed since its publication, the work documents several forgotten heists.

Sotheby's: The Inside Story is an expose of the questionable, if not outright illegal, practices of one of the world’s most famous art and antiquities auction houses. Archival documents supplied by a former Sotheby’s antiquities administrator substantiate the author’s claims.

Loot: The Battle Over The Stolen Treasures of The Ancient World focuses on stolen antiquities, offering a tour of some of the world's finest museum holdings and the countries from which their artifacts were illicitly taken. Museum rights and ethics are discussed.

Two essential websites are the blog Art Theft Central and the Art Loss Register.

In the realm of feature films there is Dr. No which includes a shot of James Bond sighting Goya's portrait The Duke of Wellington on the walls of Dr. No's den. When the film came out in 1962, this painting was in fact missing, having been stolen from London’s National Gallery the prior year. Other films include Entrapment, The Maiden Heist, and The Maltese Falcon.

Bibliography:

Loot: The Battle over The Stolen Treasures of The Ancient World by Sharon Waxman (Times Books, 2008).

Museum of The Missing: A History of Art Theft by Simon Houpt (Sterling Pub., 2006).

Priceless: How I Went Undercover To Rescue The World's Stolen Treasures by Robert K. Wittman with John Shiffman (Crown Publishers, 2009).

Rogues in The Gallery: The Modern Plague of Art Thefts by Hugh McLeave (D. R. Godine, 1981).

Sotheby's: The Inside Story by Peter Watson (Random House, 1997).

Related blog entry:

Purge and Plunder: Art under The Third Reich [September 3, 2009]

Mark Rothko and Film

And what is art, if not a world in a frame?

(from David Anfam’s essay)

The library’s most recent book on Mark Rothko, entitled simply Rothko explores works created during the last decade of the artist's life. These works, called the Seagram Murals, are a set of nine large-scale paintings donated to the Tate under the condition that they always be displayed together. Among the essays in this book are two, 'The World in a Frame' by David Anfam and 'Rothko and the Cinematic Imagination' by Morgan Thomas, which reinterpret Rothko's later paintings and their relationship to film, through the lens and language of cinema.

From comparisons between Rothko's forms and the black monolith in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to the shared thematic concern with identity in John Frankenheimer's Seconds (1966), these essays explore the conversation between these two mediums

This book also reveals direct influences between the painter and filmmakers. In an account involving Michelangelo Antonioni, one learns that the filmmaker, while in New York presenting his L'eclisse, paid a visit to Rothko. For over an hour, the painter brought out his work one piece at a time and was full of anxiety due to Antonioni's complete silence. When the latter finally spoke through an interpreter he stated that they both had the same subject matter: nothingness. Another version has it that the filmmaker said, "Your paintings are like my films. They are about nothing . . . with precision." Antonioni's Il Deserto Rosso was made after his meeting with Rothko and is considered a departure from Antonioni’s signature style of filmmaking.

For more related library materials on Rothko and/or Antonioni please see:

The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko; edited and with an introduction by Christopher Rothko.

Mark Rothko, 1903-1970: Pictures As Drama by Jacob Baal-Teshuva.

Mark Rothko: Subjects In Abstraction by Anna C. Chave.

Antonioni: The Poet of Images by William Arrowsmith; edited with an introduction and notes by Ted Perry.

The films of Michelangelo Antonioni by Peter Brunette.

The Architecture of Vision: Writings And Interviews On Cinema by Michelangelo Antonioni.

In addition, for readers with a purely technical interest in Rothko’s Seagram Murals, pages 86-87 of this title thoroughly document the paint and chemical substances used in the ground, field, glaze and figure of each of these nine paintings.

Indexes to Painting Reproductions

The World Wide Web has opened up an amazing array of images in digital format. However, even though the internet provides a true bounty, it is by no means complete and it is not as well-organized as the indexed bibliographies created by a librarian’s hand.

The library has a number of resources for finding paintings that go beyond websites like Google Images, Yahoo Images, or the Artcyclopedia. The Art Museum Image Gallery is a database of high quality digital reproductions of more than 150,000 artistic works. It is available in the library, and remotely to San Francisco Public Library card holders.

Perhaps the most in-depth source is the World Painting Index by Patricia Pate Havlice, first published in 1977 and supplemented by three later editions. This set is comprised of volumes indexing paintings both by artist and by title. It provides citations for reproductions in thousands of books published between 1940 and 1999. The works indexed may include any painting rendered using oil, tempera, gouache, acrylic, fresco, pastel or watercolor. The index also indicates whether the reproduction is in color, or whether only a detail is reproduced.

The World Painting Index builds on the work of earlier works by Isabel Stevenson Monro and Kate M. Monro – their Index to Reproductions of American Paintings (1948) with its supplement (1964), and Index to Reproductions of European Paintings (1956). These reference books along with the later Index to Reproductions of American Paintings (1977) by Lyn Wall Smith and Nancy Dustin Wall Moure share an important feature. They provide indexing for paintings not only by the artist’s name and the painting’s title but also by their subject matter. Thus, there are listings for categories like children, animals (by name), churches, circuses, cities (by name), railroads, etc…

Do not overlook our department’s Picture File. This resource also provides access to thousands of images organized by subject.

Related blog entry: Images from Life.


World Painting Index by Patricia Pate Havlice. (Scarecrow Press, 1977).

Index to Reproductions of American Paintings: Guide to Pictures Occurring in More Than Eight Hundred Books by Isabel Stevenson Monro and Kate M. Monro. (H.W. Wilson Co., 1948).

Index to Reproductions of American Paintings, First Supplement : Guide to Pictures Occurring in More Than Four Hundred Works by Isabel Stevenson Monro and Kate M. Monro. (H. W. Wilson, 1964).

Index to Reproductions of American Paintings Appearing in Over 400 Books Mostly Published Since 1960 by Lyn Wall Smith, Nancy Dustin Wall Moure. (Scarecrow Press, 1977).

Index to Reproductions of European Paintings: A Guide to Pictures In More Than Three Hundred Books by Isabel Stevenson Monro and Kate M. Monro. (Wilson, 1956).