Hammer Launches Collection Website
The Hammer Museum has debuted an ambitious collection website covering 47,733 works. The Mellon and Perenchio Foundations financed the project.
Though the Hammer has L.A.'s third-largest art museum collection, the majority of its objects have never been on view. Most are works on paper in the Grunwald Center Collection (UCLA's legacy holding of 33,920 prints and drawings) or recent objects in all media in a rapidly growing Hammer Contemporary Collection (4683 pieces assembled since 2005). There has not been a catalog, print or online.
The new website spans the aforementioned collections plus Armand Hammer's paintings and Daumier prints and UCLA's Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden. A search function allows filtering by artist, year, medium, whether the object is on view, and other criteria. Art nerds who want to know how many Lee Bontecou works they've got can quickly find out (three drawings, three prints, and a sculpture). There's a "show me a random artwork" command.
Megapixel images fill a desktop screen with full detail. Files for over 6000 older artworks (Rembrandt, Sargent, van Gogh, etc.) are open source and can be downloaded to use as you like.
Digitization is ongoing, so not every work has an image. Object pages have basic data but no essays. However, the site is well integrated with the Hammer Channel, and some works link to videos of the artist.
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| Lee Bontecou, untitled, 1987. Hammer Contemporary Collection, gift of the artist in honor of Ann Philbin |
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