Issues of the Online Catalogue Raisonné: A Mini Conference
Organized by the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association
Date: September 22, 2011, 2-5:30pm
Location: Dedalus Foundation, 555 West 57th Street, Suite 1222, New York, New York, 10019
Attendance by prior reservation only (currently fully subscribed, please contact
minicon@catalogueraisonne.org regarding waiting list status)
As catalogue raisonné scholars know, doing the research and compiling the catalogue is only half
the battle. The other is sharing this knowledge with the rest of the world.
Until recently this meant finding a book publisher who was willing to invest the time and effort
in producing a scholarly tome with a limited print run. Most often, the authors paid for the
publication of such an expensive but essential reference book. After publication of the catalogue
raisonné, the scholars maintained some sort of "supplement" of new information and new works,
which usually remained unpublished.
Today, the internet offers new methods of publishing that seem to solve some of the old
problems of print publishing, such as converting digital databases into ink and paper, searching
for specific information, and updatability. But while the internet has provided unprecedented
access to information that benefits the entire scholarly community, especially in the area of
collections databases, it has brought with it other problems of mutability, longevity, and
authority that print catalogues raisonnés do not have.
The CRSA mini-conference on "Issues of the Online Catalogue Raisonné" brings together a
group of experienced scholars, publishers, and web designers who have been working to make
the internet a welcoming site for the catalogue raisonné. In the first of two panels, we will hear
from those who facilitate the online publishing effort by designing software and manage
websites as well as those who advise on legal issues and serve as editors of online publications.
In the second panel, scholars who have worked with the organizational challenges of presenting
their research in an online format will discuss how this affects both the short term and long term
outcomes.
Welcome: Jack Flam, President and CEO, Dedalus Foundation, Director, Robert Motherwell
Catalogue Raisonné Project, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Art and Art History, Brooklyn
College and the Graduate Center, CUNY
Introduction: Nancy Mowll Mathews, Eugénie Prendergast Senior Curator of Nineteenth and
Twentieth Century Art, Emerita, Author, Prendergast Catalogue Raisonné
First Panel: Practicalities
Moderated by Carl Schmitz, Visual Resources and Information Management
The Richard Diebenkorn Catalogue Raisonné
Kate Zanzucchi, Senior Production Editor, Art Books, and Managing Editor, Special Projects,
Yale University Press, and Patricia Fidler, Publisher, Art and Architecture, Yale University
Press
Roger Shepherd, Creative Director, panOpticon (Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, Fitz Henry
Lane, Paul Cézanne, etc. catalogues raisonnés)
James Shulman, President, ARTstor
David Grosz, Editor in Chief, Artifex Press
John Gordy, Web Manager, National Gallery of Art
Virginia Rutledge, Art Law and Copyright Attorney and Art Historian
Second Panel: Scholarship
Moderated by Eileen Costello, Editor/Project Director
The Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings of Jasper Johns, The Menil Collection
Shaina D. Larrivee, Project Manager, The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné
Pamela Ivinski, Research Director, Mary Cassatt Catalogue Raisonné
Glenn Peck, Author, George Bellows' Catalogue Raisonné
Charles Ritchie, Associate Curator, Department of Modern Prints and Drawings, National
Gallery of Art (Editor, Gemini G.E.L. Online Catalogue Raisonné)
Adam Lauder, W.P. Scott Chair for Research in E-Librarianship, Scott Library, York
University (Co-Editor, IAINBAXTER&raisonnE)
Clare Bell, Program Manager, Roy Lichtenstein Foundation (Researcher, Roy Lichtenstein
Catalogue Raisonné)
First Panel: Practicalities
Moderated by Carl Schmitz, Visual Resources and Information Management
The Richard Diebenkorn Catalogue Raisonné
Kate Zanzucchi, Senior Production Editor, Art Books, and Managing Editor, Special
Projects, Yale University Press, and Patricia Fidler, Publisher, Art and Architecture, Yale
University Press
We will outline the current ways in which Yale University Press is involved with digital publishing, noting
specifically the experiences that we've had with illustrated books. Although there are new technological
advances on a seemingly daily basis, we hope to help to define and clarify the various forms of
electronic publishing (pdf e-book, epub, app, etc.) as well as identify ways in which we intend to be
working in the near future.
Roger Shepherd, Creative Director, panOpticon (Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent, Fitz
Henry Lane, Paul Cézanne, etc. catalogues raisonnés)
In Art History and Its Publications in the Electronic Age [2006], professors Hilary Ballon and Marët
Westermann observed, “Art history straddles the digital divide. Its pedagogical practices have been
transformed by digital technology, but its scholarship remains wedded to the printed page.” A great deal
has changed since this was written, since five years seems like a century in the electronic age. Yet, as
more and more scholars are prepared to believe that distinctive benefits will emerge from electronic
publication, they continue to express the same, very real concerns discussed in Ballon and
Westermann’s study. These concerns include questions about image quality, permissions and copyright,
permanent preservation of and access to digital materials, versioning (updating of content) and the
historiographic record, universal standards for recording data (particularly published references and
bibliographies), and delivery of properly formatted information. These concerns may be understood as
problems of transition in developing a new framework of scholarly communication. We have been
confronted with every one of them in developing Catalogue Raisonné software and we have addressed
each with solutions that may contribute to the eventual closing of the digital divide.
James Shulman, President, ARTstor
The ARTstor digital library was created by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to provide a cost effective
and programmatically effective means for institutions and individuals to work with images for noncommercial and educational purposes. Today, we provide over 1.3 million images from over 200 source
collections (as well as software and services) to over 1,350 educational institutions world-wide. By
providing a shared library of images for teachers, researchers, and scholars to use without each
individual or institution having to build their own collection locally, we believe that we have made a
positive contribution to the field and we have spared some non-trivial amount of redundant effort in
digitizing and cataloging.
In the last two years, we have also sought to help institutions manage locally-built collections and to
share them as they see fit. Shared Shelf is cloud-based software that allows campuses and museums to
create and manage cataloging records and image files and use those files for a range of purpose. In this
session, I would propose to introduce both ARTstor and Shared Shelf as non-profit, educational services
with whom the Catalogue Raisonné Scholars Association might collaborate in various ways – to be
explored with the membership. We have, for the most part, not been involved in questions associated
with publication thought we did create a service that we call Images for Academic Publication (at the
request of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) in 2008 that provides an environment for distributing
images for low print run scholarly publications without fees. Other than that, our experience building,
managing, and distributing image collections has solely been for on-line educational use.
David Grosz, Editor in Chief, Artifex Press
I will present a prototype of the Artifex Press digital catalogue raisonné system. This will include
excerpts of four catalogues we are publishing: Agnes Martin, Sol LeWitt: Wall Drawings, Jim Dine:
Sculptures, and Chuck Close.
John Gordy, Web Manager, National Gallery of Art
Technically what I’m working on is not a catalogue raisonné but functions as a comprehensive catalog of
a particular collection. But the transformation of what was originally a scholarly catalog into its online
form has brought up many of the same issues that people come across with a catalogue raisonné.
The 1995 print edition of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue Dutch Paintings of the
Seventeenth Century combines the collection records and scholarship surrounding 123 works including
paintings by Vermeer, Frans Hals, and Rembrandt. The associated records for a single work may include
artist, school, life dates, title, date of completion, medium, inscriptions, dimensions, accession number,
provenance, exhibition history, technical conservation notes (with illustrations), biography of the artist
(c. 600 words), summary narrative (c. 200 words), and extended narrative (c. 2000 words).
Our challenge is to present this the catalogue as a cohesive resource for scholars. Many questions
remain under discussion. How do we maintain a reliable method of citation while continuing to update
the catalogue with new scholarship? How does one display the primary object and the comparative
figures and allow room for the extended narrative all on the same screen? Do we extend our efforts to
put this data into standard formats that can be “harvested” later by other entities? If so, what formats?
And above all, how do we retain the aesthetic qualities of the printed catalogue? Can it be functional
and beautiful?
Virginia Rutledge, Art Law and Copyright Attorney and Art Historian
I will address the range of legal issues that may be involved with online CRs, focusing on copyright.
Second Panel: Scholarship
Moderated by Eileen Costello, Editor/Project Director
The Catalogue Raisonné of the Drawings of Jasper Johns, The Menil Collection
Shaina D. Larrivee, Project Manager, The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné
The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné is a program of the Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden
Museum, New York. It was initiated in the late 1990s and has gone through a series of sustained work –
the first between 2000 and 2004, and the most recent since 2008. Originally, the catalogue was
envisioned as a multi-volume print publication, but this program was abandoned in favor of a digital
publication around 2003. A major reason for this change was the consideration of the diversity of
Noguchi’s oeuvre, ranging from discrete sculpture to public plazas, manufactured designs, dance sets,
and other diverse sculptural endeavors. Noguchi often worked on varied projects simultaneously and it
was felt that an interactive, dynamic digital database would better convey the artist’s complex
chronology and output.
Since 2009, we have been developing the structure of the Digital The Isamu Noguchi Catalogue Raisonné
with extensive testing and reconfiguring. In July, we will enter a formal beta phase and initiate a peer
review. I plan to share a preview of this website with the group and speak to our experiences. This will
touch on our use of Microsoft Access and (most recently) TMS, as well as our decision to use open
source software for the development of the actual site. I will focus on what we feel are the advantages
of digitally presenting certain types of information, what concerns have arisen, and our plans for
updating and maintaining the site moving forward.
Pamela Ivinski, Research Director, Mary Cassatt Catalogue Raisonné
The new Mary Cassatt Catalogue Raisonné revises and updates Adelyn Dohme Breeskin’s 1970 volume
on the artist’s work (though the new catalogue will not include drawings, unlike the Breeskin volume).
The online catalogue is not yet available for public use; we plan to launch in 2012. One of the distinct
challenges our catalogue faces is the fact that Cassatt, though born and raised in the U.S., spent her
adult life in France and therefore widely exhibited and sold works in two countries. In terms of
challenges of the digital age, we confront issues as both users and eventual providers of online
information. It is imperative to attempt to keep up with the vast amounts of new material now
appearing online, yet many archival sites do not make it transparent how often they add new items or
what they have added, which can lead to wasted research time. Furthermore, a number of important
archives still have not been digitized and therefore must be discovered and searched using timeconsuming traditional methods. As eventual providers of digital information, we continue to seek the
right balance between fulfilling the public’s needs and our own. For instance, when we asked a number
of potential users to review an early version of the online catalogue, they requested more information
on a number of fascinating subjects we felt were not necessarily within the purview of a catalogue
raisonné project. Will putting catalogues raisonnés online increase expectations for the amounts and
types of information included in them? There will also be a need to manage technological expectations.
While our online site allows for greatly expanded search capabilities, at this time it is not possible to
provide for every imagined type of search. Will users be frustrated when all their potential searches
cannot be performed? Also, we are still attempting to determine the best ways to present our
information to the public. For example, when previously unpublished works are added, should the entire
catalogue be renumbered from beginning to end, or should we use the methods of traditional catalogue
supplements, such as inserting catalogue numbers “100a” and “100b” between “100” and “101”?
Glenn Peck, Author, George Bellows' Catalogue Raisonné, owner of H. V. Allison & Co.,
Inc. of Larchmont, NY, private art dealer and independent scholar.
In preparing the George Bellows’ online catalogue, I have tried to address first and foremost the
question of audience. I want to make the site accessible to curious, as well as serious students of art. To
that end, the site was developed with the emphasis on visual linkage. Every painting has its own unique
information page. On this page are title, date, size, signature and an illustration of the work. Obviously
this information is static and doesn’t change once entered. The additional fields on the information page
do change with time. I have separated this additional information into three fields: Current owner
(Collection), Provenance and Exhibitions.
Collection and provenance are actually unique to each work, just as are size and signature. Also
Collection is only a continuation of Provenance, but for search purposes, it needs to have its own field.
Exhibition histories are shared between paintings and required the creation of an inter-relational
database.
I have presented the artist’s paintings on the site in two modes - first in five thematic categories and
second in chronological order. This may seem the wrong ordering, but in talking with students they have
pointed out that they have no idea of the date of a painting. The subject divisions allow them to enter
into the visual world of the artist. Without the subject headings, some curious viewers will give up after
the first few pages, even though each chronological page opens with an array of thumbnail views.
At this stage of the project, ease of search has been my focus. The exhibition histories pull up visual
thumbnails rather than lists of paintings in an exhibition. The same applies for ownership searches. I
have resisted entering elaborate cataloging of exhibitions because this information would clutter the
site and is basically the transcription of primary source documents. My goal in the future is to add layers
of primary source documents as visual images that can also be read for content. So, for example, if
someone wants to view the checklist of an exhibit, then they can read the original and glean whatever
information they need for their studies.
Charles Ritchie, Associate Curator, Department of Modern Prints and Drawings, National
Gallery of Art (Editor, Gemini G.E.L. Online Catalogue Raisonné)
Introducing the Gemini G.E.L. Online Catalogue Raisonné / Second Edition
Since 1981, the National Gallery of Art has been home to the Gemini G.E.L. Archive, representing an
example of each print and edition sculpture produced by this important contemporary workshop. The
newly expanded version of the Gemini G.E.L. (Graphic Editions Limited) online catalogue raisonné
introduces 333 works produced by the shop between early 1997 and late 2005. The catalogue now
presents 2,069 online editions, recording Gemini’s creative activity from its 1966 inception through
2005. Gemini G.E.L. continues to collaborate with important contemporary artists and future print and
sculpture projects will be included in updates to the online catalogue. Looking ahead, we are
considering having Gemini staff draft entries as print projects are produced. Questions include: what
kind of database will be used and what kind of complications might arise. Also, how frequently will we
upload new entries to the catalogue and to what degree will we enlarge and expand essays?
Adam Lauder, W.P. Scott Chair for Research in E-Librarianship, Scott Library, York
University (Co-Editor, IAINBAXTER&raisonnE)
The IAINBAXTER&raisonnE is an experimental online catalogue raisonné ("raisonnE") being developed at
York University in Toronto, Canada, that looks to the 18th-century origins of the catalogue raisonné
format in search of solutions for the "social" media landscape of the present-day. This presentation will
review the 18th-century catalogues raisonnés of the Parisian art dealer Gersaint and contemporaries as
early social media, whose collaborative design embodied amateur compilation practices that were
circulated through the commercial and scientific networks of publication and auction (not unlike digital
networks today!). Taking its cue from the respect for personalization and potential for creative reuse
found in the catalogues of Gersaint and peers, the IB&raisonnE grows through interactive collaboration
with an international network of scholars and students currently researching Canadian conceptual artist
IAIN BAXTER& (a.k.a. Iain Baxter, a.k.a. N.E. Thing Co.)--himself an early adopter of new technologies
such as Telex and telecopier in the 60s. Looking to the pre-modern, pre-hierarchical catalogues of the
early to mid 18th-century, the IB&raisonnE seeks to innovate within an increasingly social and
networked environment composed of "flat" technologies, all the while learning from the past. The
principal lesson to be learned from older technologies is the necessity of avoiding asymmetrical forms of
user participation that breed dis-enabling forms of inter-"passivity" instead of mutually productive interactivity. This "long view" of the catalogue raisonné will instil confidence in the exciting possibilities
offered by new technologies through underlining that there is, after all, nothing (or very little) new
under the technological sun.
Clare Bell, Program Manager, Roy Lichtenstein Foundation (Researcher, Roy Lichtenstein
Catalogue Raisonné)
Online Catalogues Raisonné
Description and Challenges
Roy Lichtenstein Foundation
Polaroids kept by the artist of his works upon which he wrote titles, dimensions and the date of the
photo were the initial building blocks of the studio’s database which was implemented in 1991. Using a
random-style numbering system, the Museum Systems (TMS) provided a way to track and record
information on these works and his ongoing production. Yearly dates within a series provided a basic
chronology. A physical archive of documents and ephemera retained by the artist during his lifetime
provided important historical records. Work on a catalogue raisonné of the artist’s prints was
undertaken by the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. and was published in 1994 during the
artist’s lifetime. An expanded version was published in 2002. Research for a catalogue raisonné of his
paintings, sculpture and works on paper began at the same time with the cooperation of the artist and
the Leo Castelli Gallery under the direction of Robert Pincus-Witten and his team at the Gagosian
Gallery. Questionnaires reflecting critical data on these works received from collectors were kept in
binders. With the establishment of the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation in 1998, the project was brought inhouse and information that had been gathered thus far was added to TMS. The Foundation added
commissions, editioned sculpture and other types of multiples not covered by the print catalogue
raisonné to its research. Dedicated to creating a comprehensive and scholarly record for each work, the
Foundation deemed that its goal should be to physically examine every work possible in order to record
pertinent information necessary for a full-fledge catalogue raisonné. TMS is now the repository of the
Foundation’s research for its catalogue raisonné which includes new photography of works, digital
examination photographs of the works’ rectos and versos and citations of all the printed materials from
the artist’s original archive and those that have been obtained by the Foundation. The goal of the
catalogue raisonné is to examine, research, photograph and thus, accurately document the artist’s
works in every media with the exception of prints.
Images for most of the 5,000 known works of art and some of their sources have been steadily uploaded
to an auxiliary website named imageduplicator.com along with their titles, dates and media information.
The website does not subscribe to the traditional catalogue raisonné model as it was designed to
provide immediate access to ongoing research. As such, it allows visitors to explore the interrelationships between the artist’s subjects, sources and media as if they were in his studio at the time of
their creation. Challenges include creating a meaningful chronology of works within the artist’s oeuvre,
indexing works to their historical data, and providing as much textual research as possible while
maintaining the visual dimensionality that we believe makes the site extraordinarily dynamic.