The Guggenheim goes digital

The Guggenheim museum has so far resisted inclusion in the Google Art Project but it has embraced the digital world in another way — by making available online a selection of facsimile exhibition catalogues dating back to 1937.

The reproduction quality is faultless, and the system, which presents the digital copy in the form of an actual book, allows a satisfying turning page animation as the reader flicks through. It allows visitors to view the images, and read the text, as if they were handling an actual physical copy of each catalogue, up to a point at least.

The essays here are lengthy, solid and cerebral, and it is interesting to read early interpretations of now-classic art such as Pollock or de Kooning. In keeping with reproductive limitations of the period, most of the early catalogues show many pictures in monochrome. Accustomed as we are now to full colour, this can at first disappoint. But, in a way, black and white can offer as much as it takes away: what is lost in colour is gained in an increased appreciation of mark and tone.

The vintage catalogues are also notable for the contemporary graphic design their front covers, which are often, stylistically, completely unrelated to the artists represented within. There are some classic mid-20th century minimalist designs here that are artworks in themselves.

The archive details some irresistible exhibitions. The 1966 Francis Bacon retrospective appears to have been an enormous and fascinating show, one I wish I could travel back in time to see. I would also visit the Antoni Tapies show of 1962 and 1999’s splendidly titled Amazons of The Avant Garde, which featured some of the leading female figures of early modern Russian art.

Some of the archive serves as a reminder of the significance of the less stellar names of the 20th Century. Albert Gleizes, for instance, is nowadays hardly remembered outside art history circles, but he was granted a full retrospective by the Guggenheim in 1964. The catalogue reminds us why: he was a supremely powerful painter whose influence spread from cubism to the Bauhaus to the birth of American modernism. (That's one of his at the top of this post.)

Viewed as a whole, the archive highlights changing fashions in art. What seemed of searing importance in the mid-20th Century now looks very dated. The Art of Tomorrow (two catalogues, 1939 and 1940) now seems very much like ‘The Art of the Day Before Yesterday’, devoted as it is to the fastidious abstractions of Bauer, Kandinsky and Moholy-Nagy. Very few artists are painting like this in the 21st Century.

While one would expect Bacon and Kandinsky at the Guggenheim, the catalogue detailing an exhibition by Mastercraftsmen of Ancient Peru comes as more of a surprise. It proves entirely in keeping with the language of the museum, confirming the similarities of visual language between ancient Peru and modern European sculptors like Brancusi or Moore.

On the negative side, some elements of the presentation are unwieldy. Viewing the catalogues is a fiddly task, though perhaps this depends on your interface. On my MacBook the full-screen version is too small to read the text, but zooming makes it too large to see the full page. Page-turning can only be done using the cursor, which means zooming out before turning the page and then zooming in again. This is not an insurmountable problem, but it’s an irksome one nonetheless. Skimming through on a touch screen phone may work well, so long as yours isn’t an iPhone, with its Flash Player embargo. If it is, you will see nothing at all.

This catalogue archive is, nevertheless, a formidable resource. Students of the featured artists will find much to savour here and the casual browser will be intrigued and excited — so much so that it is surprising (and disappointing) that the website offers no facility to buy physical reprints of these books. For a refresher on the delights of Alexander Calder or a primer on Cezanne’s role in Structure in Modern Art, this new collection is perfect, and free.

Solomon R. Guggenheim would be proud; his legacy lives on.

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