A veritable art history degree’s worth of books digitized by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum are now available for free.
There’s Wassily Kandinsky‘s 1946 treatise, On the Spiritual in Art; books about movements from the Italian metamorphosis and Russian Constructivism; thousands of years of Aztec and Chinese art; and catalogs of work by the many greats to pass through the Guggenheim’s Frank Lloyd Wright-designed halls. Formerly locked in paper prisons (a.k.a., hard-copy books), analysis of work by Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, Dan Flavin, Robert Rauschenberg, Gustav Klimt, Mark Rothko, and more is now free to roam the web as PDFs and ePubs.
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Dan Flavin : the architecture of light : Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin by Flavin, Dan, 1933-; Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation; Deutsche Guggenheim
The initiative to publish certain entries from The Guggenheim’s vast library began with 65 catalogs published in 2012, and has now grown to 205 titles. This joins 43 titles available in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Online Reading Room, 281 from Getty Publications’ Virtual Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art MetPublications’s whopping 1,611 books you can download for free. That’s in addition to the 375,000+ high resolution images of the artworks themselves the Met dumped into the public domain earlier this year.
Here’s a taste of the stunning spreads from the Guggenheim’s archives.
Roy Lichtenstein by Waldman, Diane; Lichtenstein, Roy, 1923-1997; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.); Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Roy Lichtenstein by Waldman, Diane; Lichtenstein, Roy, 1923-1997; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles, Calif.); Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
The Aztec empire by Solís Olguín, Felipe R; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes (Mexico); Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (Mexico); China, 5000 years : innovation and transformation in the arts by Lee, Sherman E.
Mark Rothko, 1903-1970 : A Retrospective by Rothko, Mark; Waldman, Diane Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Paul Klee, 1879-1940 : a retrospective exhibition by Klee, Paul ; Grohmann, Will
Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele by Messer, Thomas M ; Dobai, Johannes ; Comini, Alessandra
Toshio Iwai. Photo from Mediascape by Klotz, Heinrich; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe; Guggenheim Museum Soho
Download books from the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s internet archive to your heart’s content here.
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