Art Institute of Chicago

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is well-known and world famous. But of course, it isn’t the only art museum working to get images of its art online. The Art Institute of Chicago recently put up a collection of CC0 images as part of a site redesign.

The Art Institute of Chicago had not had a site redesign since 2012—6 years in real time and maybe 50 years in internet time. The redesign included a release of more than 50,000 images of public domain artwork and continues to add to the collection.

Artwork pages, such as Vincent van Gogh’s The Bedroom (artic.edu/artworks/28560/the-bedroom), not only contain substantial information about the artwork itself (including a description, exhibition and publication history, multimedia resources, and educational resources!) but also high-quality images. A painting that impresses at first as just a pleasant image becomes more intimate when you zoom in and see the brush strokes that make the floorboards, the little bottles on the side table, and the sliver of blue that just barely makes itself known through the closed windows.

Of note also is how the Art Institute of Chicago manages to lead visitors from one image to another. Rather than being left with a list of related images by a single artist, the Art Institute of Chicago provides a set of related tags. Browse Post-Impress ionism and learn about the works of Picasso, Matisse, and Seurat. Choose Oil on Canvas and an entire universe of art opens up which includes artists such as Seurat but also artists far different from van Gogh, such as Ivan Albright, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Carl Blechen. I can imagine someone casually visiting the site might find this overwhelming, but I can also imagine an art lover finding something to binge on that will do much more for her artwork knowledge than a casual museum visit.