A Century's Worth of Important Art History Is Going Online

A century’s worth of art history research will soon be coming online. According to Artnet, the nonprofit Wildenstein Plattner Institute plans to digitize its extensive collection of art records.

The nonprofit WPI, founded in 2016, is a scholarly endeavor created by the billionaire art dealer Guy Wildenstein, who runs an international art-dealing empire that includes the Paris-based Wildenstein Institute. The Wildenstein Institute publishes catalogues raisonnés (comprehensive listings of every known artwork an artist has created), and the nonprofit arm, WPI is going to receive the rights to publish those catalogues. The research materials amassed by the Wildenstein family over the last 100 years will be digitized and made available online, the WPI announced this summer.

Though the institute hasn’t announced an exact timeline for this project, it plans to develop extensively researched online catalogues raisonnés for Impressionist artists like Claude Monet and Edouard Manet within the next few years. They will be regularly updated as new scholarship becomes available.

The institute will also have research on individual artworks, stock books from art galleries, collections of artists’ letters, annotated sale catalogues, and other materials vital to art historians. According to Artnet, this includes materials that were previously unavailable to the public or thought to have been destroyed. A full list of the materials available within the archives is scheduled to go online by the end of 2018, allowing researchers to request certain items from WPI for study.

“We are committed to using the latest technology to reveal the scope and richness of these holdings for the first time,” the WPI’s executive director, Elizabeth Gorayeb, says in a press release [PDF].

[h/t Artnet]