Is there a high quality repository of art images?

February 27, 2009 6:52 AM

Is there a website or anything with high quality art images? All kind of artists, from Picasso to Hundertwasser. I think there should be a torrent tracker or anything related to art/artists.
posted by Leech to media & arts (11 comments total)

Are you affiliated with any sort of educational institution? If you are, and your org has a subscription, you could try ArtStor.

Outside of that, a monolithic, cross-institution repository's kind of a tough thing to build because of IP laws.
posted by COBRA! at 7:10 AM on February 27

Well, it's for my sister, she's an art teacher.
She usually shows art posters to the kids and they breaks the posters all the time which means a lot of money spent on posters.

So we want to print the posters ourselves in our inkjet printer (no great quality, but at least it's not blurry/pixelated like the common images you find on google images searches).

We don't plan to sell anything, it's just as a helper in her job.
posted by Leech at 7:16 AM on February 27

If she's a teacher, she might have ArtStor access through work. Otherwise, I'd say your best bet would be to track down which museum owns the works you want prints of, and see if they have their collection up on their website and what their policies are.

It's kind of a wild and woolly time for art museums right now, trying to figure out what's what with collections online. Interpretations of the relevant IP laws vary really widely from institution to institution, so some places are really liberal about making hi-res images available for all comers, while others will only put up thumbnails and want you to jump through a bunch of hoops to get to decent images.

The Smithsonian is kind of a leader in the wide-open liberal side, and have a pretty big commons group of images available at Flickr; so that might be a good place to look.
posted by COBRA! at 7:49 AM on February 27

I'm an idiot. Here's the Smithsonian on Flickr.
posted by COBRA! at 7:52 AM on February 27

Thank you Cobra, I'll check this out!
posted by Leech at 8:55 AM on February 27

Wikimedia commons has some decent images of art now in the public domain (for example).
posted by JonB at 10:05 AM on February 27 [1 favorite]

The Smithsonian American Art Museum, where I work, has a pretty large percentage of its collection online (and you can download fairly large images of each). In addition, we have many on our flickr photostream, including some from an exhibition that just opened called 1934: A New Deal for Artists on works from Public Works of Art Project, the precursor to the WPA.
posted by Taken Outtacontext at 10:29 AM on February 27 [1 favorite]

Th Art Renewal Center might be a good source.
posted by hootch at 1:09 PM on February 27

The US Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog has a vast, vast digitized collection online, some in remarkably high resolution (like, 50 MB big)...not all of it is in the public domain, but that doesn't really matter for your purposes.

Not sure about western art, might take some exploring, but I know for a fact that their collection of ukiyo-e (Japanese woodblock prints) is virtually endless.
posted by Bobby Bittman at 7:20 PM on February 27

The Web Gallery of Art might be useful.
posted by Phanx at 11:28 AM on March 1

Thank you everyone!

It's very useful for me. Thank you!
posted by Leech at 7:00 AM on March 2