Hanna-Leena Paloposki, PhD, Archive and Library Manager, Chief Curator, Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki
29 March 2018
In February the Finnish National Gallery released more than 12,000 images of copyright-free artworks into the public domain. With this great opening up we are of course reaching out to anybody interested in art but we also hope it will help and inspire researchers internationally as they can now freely download high-quality jpeg images for study purposes, presentations and online publications. These 12,000 artworks represent 1,144 artists, including many renowned Finnish artists, such as Helene Schjerfbeck and Hugo Simberg, as well as international artists such as Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch.
At the same time the Finnish National Gallery is preparing to start using its new collections management system, which brings all the collections – artworks, objects and archive collections – into one and the same database for the first time. We are also planning our new collections online web pages which will be launched next year. Improving the online availability of our collections is a pivotal way to enhance research related to them, through providing more opportunities for study.
The images under the CC0 license are available on our Art Collections online website, but they have also been released at Europeana, a digital platform for European cultural heritage, and can thus be downloaded from the Europeana portal, too, as we want to share them with as wide and as international an audience as possible, researchers and students included. From now on we will be using the CC0-licensed images in FNG Research, too, whenever it is possible.
In this issue we are examining the research related to the Finnish National Gallery from three different angles: our research internship programme, FNG staff undertaking specific research, and international co-operation. The article by one of our research interns for 2017, Irene Riihimäki, sheds new light on the early stages of Finnish art education in the middle of the 19th century. Our senior conservator Dr. Ari Tanhuanpää is scrutinising the lifespan of artworks from a philosophical perspective and boldly questions whether an artwork does in fact have a lifespan. As an example of international co-operation is the article on the Russian artist Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe (1969–2013), written by two prominent researchers from St. Petersburg, Dr. Olesya Turkina and Dr. Victor Mazin, published in connection with the retrospective exhibition of the artist at The Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma.
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Finnish National Gallery Art Collections online
http://kokoelmat.fng.fi/app?lang=en
Europeana Collections
https://www.europeana.eu/portal/en
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Featured image: Vincent van Gogh, Street in Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890, oil on canvas,
73.5cm x 92.5cm
Antell Collections, Finnish National Gallery / Ateneum Art Museum
Photo: Finnish National Gallery / Yehia Eweis
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