LibGuides: Modern Art (19th/20th Centuries): Images

Robert Rauschenberg

Firebird, 1998. Image courtesy of Larry Qualls Archive, ARTstor.

Digital Databases

ARTstor
The ARTstor Digital Library provides images with tools for teaching and research. Collections are comprised of contributions from museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, artists and artists' estates from all over the world. Collections encompass a wide variety of subject areas, including art, architecture, music, religion, anthropology, literature, world history, American Studies, Asian, Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

University of Manitoba Public Art Collection

Images - Free Access (mostly)

Museums/Galleries

The Rijksmuseum offers high-res digital downloads free for non-commercial use. https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/rijksstudio

Currier Museum of Art: A quick resource guide for fair use images here: http://currierartlibrary.wordpress.com/databases/image-collections/

NGA Images (National Gallery of Art in Washington DC) https://images.nga.gov/en/page/show_home_page.html

LACMA unrestricted images collection: https://collections.lacma.org/

The Walters Art Museum
http://art.thewalters.org/

The British Museum Free Non-Commercial Use Images:
https://www.bmimages.com/index.asp

Art Institute of Chicago Ryerson and Burnham Libraries. Another great resource for digital images http://digital-libraries.saic.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/mqc

Getty Open Content Program: High resolution images of works from the Getty Museum and Getty Research Institute that are in the public domain and may be used freely. http://blogs.getty.edu/iris/5400-images-from-getty-research-institutes-special-collections-now-available-as-open-content/

Universities

Brown University. The list is annotated and includes notes when images are freely available: https://libguides.brown.edu/c.php?g=1137911&p=8303733

University of Colorado, Boulder: https://www.colorado.edu/artandarthistory/resources/vrc/find (click on "external image sources")

UCLA : You might also find some use in the Creative Commons, Open Content, & Public Domain images tab of the Image Resources research guide at: https://guides.library.ucla.edu/images
Yale Digital Commons has 250,000 images "without license." http://discover.odai.yale.edu/ydc/

General Resources

Artsy (public domain images): http://artsy.net/post/christine-downloading-images-on-artsy

Flickr Commons: almost everything is downloadable. http://www.flickr.com/commons/

Wikimedia Commons tries to aggregate a number of institutions' free content. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Web List of Contemporary Art Museums Worldwide

One thing I always have hesitations about, in these lists we call "free" or "open" image sources, is that when I read the fine print on the museum sites there are often qualifications. Even Creative Commons licenses depend on the uploader in fact having copyright ownership of what s/he is uploading. There are Picasso paintings on Flickr with the photographer (not Picasso) giving an open access license.