Rijks Studio Offers 125,000 Images Free of Copyright
After years of hearing that museums couldn’t provide high resolution reproductions of works in their collections because people might make t-shirts with them, we now learn that the Rijkmuseum is inviting us to do precisely that . . . and more. -CH
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As a prelude to its reopening 13 April 2013, one of the world’s leading museums, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, will launch Rijks Studio, a ground-breaking new online presentation of 125,000 works in its collection. Rijks Studio invites members of the public to create their own masterpieces by downloading images of artworks or details of artworks in the collection and using them in a creative way. The ultra high-resolution images of works, both famous and less well-known, can be freely downloaded, zoomed in on, shared, added to personal ‘studios’, or manipulated copyright-free. Users can have prints made of entire works of art or details from them. Other suggestions for the use of images include creating material to upholster furniture or wallpaper, or to decorate a car or an iPad cover for example.
To celebrate this digital milestone, the Rijksmuseum is asking leading international artists, designers and architects to become pioneers of Rijks Studio by selecting one work from the collection and using it creatively to create a new artwork. These will be released in the run up to the reopening of the museum. The first work to be unveiled, by Droog Design, is a tattoo inspired by a flower painting in the collection called Still-Life with Flowers by Jan Davidszn. de Heem and Rachel Ruysch from the 17th century.
Taco Dibbits, Director of Collections, said: “The Rijksmuseum is a museum for and of everyone, and with the launch of Rijks Studio we are excited to share the extensive collection with art lovers around the world using the latest digital technology. We created Rijks Studio based on the belief that the collection of the Rijksmuseum belongs to us all. The collection inspires, we want to unleash the artist in everyone.”
Conference | Art and Its Afterlives
Conference program from The Courtauld:
Fourth Early Modern Symposium: Art and Its Afterlives
The Courtauld Institute of Art, London, 17 November 2012
Organised by Laura Sanders and Francesca Whitlum-Cooper
Karen Knorr, The Green Bedroom of Louis XVI. © Eric Franck Fine Art
Art and Its Afterlives aims to address the ways in which the work of art continues to resonate after its creation. While much art history takes as its focus the initial facture of the work of art, this one-day symposium explores what happens to early modern art after the moment of its making. How did early modern works continue to be created in their display, preservation, and reception from the moment of their creation on? Papers will examine how art is shaped by its afterlives – whether these collect, curate, cut up, cut out, copy or correct it – and the ways in which art both persists and changes through time as a material object, a field of generative meaning, and a subject of debate and interpretation.
The question of afterlife is an pertinent topic for art history in general, where the work of art is uniquely tied to a particular assemblage of materials which inevitably change with time, rendering fraught questions of preservation, the presence or possibility of copies, the idea of original state, and how a work of art is staged for a viewer. Less material but no less concrete, the interactions between the work and the viewer, and between the work and the its assumed referent are not stable but open to change. The question of afterlife is particularly relevant for the early modern period, when emergent art markets and cultures of collection allowed not only the circulation of artworks, but also their appropriation and adaptation. Taking as its point of departure Bourdieu’s encouragement to investigate ‘not only the material production of the work but also the production of the value of the work’, this symposium privileges the afterlives of art and the alternative histories they present. Art and Its Afterlives is the fourth symposium of The Courtauld’s Early Modern Department.
Book online or send a cheque made payable to ‘Courtauld Institute of Art’ to: Research Forum Events Co-ordinator, Research Forum, The Courtauld Institute of Art, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN, stating the event title: Art and Its Afterlives. For further information, email ResearchForumEvents@courtauld.ac.uk
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P R O G R A M M E
9.00 Registration
9.30 Introduction – Laura Sanders and Francesca Whitlum-Cooper (The Courtauld Institute of Art)
9.40 Session 1: Finding the Original
• Stephanie Knöll (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf): Holbein’s Images of Death and the Construction of Authorship and Authenticity in Nineteenth Century Art Historical Discussions
• Antonia Putzger (Technische Universität, Berlin): What (or Who) Makes an Original? Maximilian I of Bavaria as Collector and Creator of German Renaissance Art
• Gabriella Szalay (Columbia University, New York): Wipe It With a Damp Cloth! Restoring Early Netherlandish Paintings
11.00 Coffee/Tea
11.30 Session 2: Contexts of Reception
• Christina Ferando (Columbia University, New York): From Altarpiece to Masterpiece: Titian’s ‘Long Unnoticed’ Assumption of the Virgin
• Giulia Weston (The Courtauld Institute of Art): Salvator Rosa’s British Afterlives
• Edward Houle (McGill University, Montreal): The Petits Appartements at Versailles and the Vicissitudes of Heritage
• Owen Hopkins (Royal Academy of Arts): Hawksmoor in the Twentieth Century
13.10 Lunch
14.10 Session 3: Appropriation and Re-making
• Jason Nguyen (Harvard University, Boston): Translation, Illustration, and Transmutation: Authorship and Authority in Claude Perrault’s Les dix livres d’architecture de Vitruve (1673)
• Amy Concannon (Tate Britain, London): Cut, Paste, and Copy: Hubert Robert, François Boucher and the Culture of Appropriation Amongst French Artists in the Eighteenth Century
• Heike Zech (Victoria and Albert Museum, London): From Sacred to Profane? The Afterlife of a Seventeenth Century Augsburg Masterpiece
• Sian Bowen (Northumbria University, Newcastle): Capturing the Ephemeral: Materiality and Transience Through Drawing Practice
15.50 Coffee/Tea
16.20 Session 4: Display and Preservation
• Anna Bortolozzi (National Museum, Stockholm): Notes from the Underground: The Afterlife of Old St. Peter’s in the Vatican Grottos and Other Stories
• Noémie Etienne (Barnard College, New York): From the Wall to the Museum: Material and Symbolic Transformations of Paintings in Paris in the Eighteenth Century
• Ronit Milano (Ben-Gurion University, Israel): On Trojan Dogs and Long-Lasting Artistic Quarrels: The Case of Jeff Koons in Versailles
17.45 Reception
Enfilade 
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