Art News

Frick Art Reference Library photo archive records now accessible online

NEW YORK, N.Y.- Scholars in multiple disciplines around the world have long heralded the Photoarchive of the Frick Art Reference Library as uniquely valuable to research that relates to object-oriented study of works of art. Without this repository of an estimated 1.2 million images of works created by more than 40,000 artists, curators, art dealers, and authors of monographic catalogues would be hard pressed to find visual documentation of unpublished artand the preparatory studies, versions, copies, or forgeries that relate to those and even to more famous works. In recent years, the Frick’s Photoarchive has also played a key role in helping researchers compile provenance information about art looted during World War II. Lynn Nicholas, the highly respected author of The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (New York, 1994), recently noted that “to d