Download 200 Free Art Books, Courtesy of the Guggenheim. Perusing through a beautiful, hefty art book is one of life’s simple pleasures, but beautiful, hefty art books can be pretty expensive.
Fortunately, the Guggenheim is on a mission to digitize its vast collection of titles. As Beckett Mufson reports for Vice, the museum has made 205 art books available for free download. The project began in 2012, when 65 titles were released online, and the Guggenheim has slowly been growing its digital archive ever since. Among the latest additions are works devoted to Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Roy Lichtenstein, Egon Schiele and Gustav Klimt.
Fans of Wassily Kandinsky can browse through a 1946 copy of On the Spiritual in Art, an influential treatise by the pioneering abstract artist. As KC Ifeanyi notes in Fast Company, most of the available books are rare or out-of-print titles, making the archive a great resource for art lovers—even those who aren’t strapped for cash. Download 422 Free Art Books from The Metropolitan Museum of Art. You could pay $118 on Amazon for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s catalog The Art of Illumination: The Limbourg Brothers and the Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duc de Berry.
Or you could pay $0 to download it at MetPublications, the site offering “five decades of Met Museum publications on art history available to read, download, and/or search for free.” If that strikes you as an obvious choice, prepare to spend some serious time browsing MetPublications’ collection of free art books and catalogs. You may remember that we featured the site a few years ago, back when it offered 397 whole books free for the reading, including American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life, 1885–1915; Leonardo da Vinci: Anatomical Drawings from the Royal Library; and Wisdom Embodied: Chinese Buddhist and Daoist Sculpture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Free: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online. If you like reading about visual art but don’t like spending the considerable sums required to build your own library of vintage exhibition catalogues, feel free to borrow from another collector.
Or rather, feel free to borrow from two collectors, both based in New York, both of some repute: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Early last year, we announced that the Guggenheim had made 65 art catalogues [now increased to 99] available for free online, offering “an intellectual and visual introduction to the work of Alexander Calder, Edvard Munch, Francis Bacon, Gustav Klimt & Egon Schiele, and Wassily Kandinsky” as well as ” other texts (e.g., Masterpieces of Modern Art and Abstract Expressionists Imagists) that tackle meta movements and themes.”
(That same post includes instructions on how to use the Guggenheim’s archive.) Related Content: MoMA Puts Pollock, Rothko & de Kooning on Your iPad Google “Art Project” Brings Great Paintings & Museums to You. Download Over 250 Free Art Books From the Getty Museum. Yesterday, we wrote about the Wellcome Library’s opening up of its digital archives and making over 100,000 medical images freely available online.
If you’ve already made your way through this choice selection (or if the prospect of viewing a 19th century leg amputation doesn’t quite pique your curiosity) have no fear. Getty Publications just announced the launch of its Virtual Library, where readers can freely browse and download over 250 art books from the publisher’s backlist catalogue. The Virtual Library consists of texts associated with several Getty institutions. Readers can view extensively researched exhibition catalogues from the J. 30 Classic Books That May Change Your Life. A classic novel need not be one that was penned a hundred years ago: rather, some of the traits that define the classic genre are timelessness, universality, truthfulness.
Will this work remain relevant as time goes by? Can the reader learn something heartfelt from the story? Does the narrative flow beautifully? Does it resonate with the reader? If these questions can be answered with a hearty “yes!” Universality is usually the most appreciated aspect of a book, in the sense that people of all different ages, social status, etc. can all relate to it, somehow. 1. Purposely didactic, this book forces us to re-examine what we believe to be Truth, and reinforces the fact that wisdom can come from the most unlikely sources. 2.
Sometimes, when we follow our dreams, we end up where we need to be, rather than where we think we want to be. 3. 4. 1984, by George Orwell Many would say that issues addressed in this (prophetic?) 5. Pain is inevitable: suffering is optional. 6. The Federalist Papers - Congress.gov Resources - Free Benjamin Franklin Essays and Papers. Founders Online: Search. What Should I Read Next? Book recommendations from readers like you.