Art historians and dealers researching works of art will soon have a new trove of materials to work with, courtesy of the Wildenstein Platter Institute (WPI).
A century’s worth of documentation from WPI—featuring materials like stock books from art galleries, artists’ correspondence, and annotated sale catalogues—will be digitized to develop online catalogues raisonnés (a comprehensive list of an artist’s known works) for artists including Edouard Manet, Berthe Morisot, and Claude Monet. These documents and publications will eventually be accessible free of charge. While most of these artists have catalogues in print, the digital versions will reflect new scholarship and can be updated on an ongoing basis.
“The exciting thing about the archive is that there are materials here that were long thought to have been destroyed, and others that have not been available to the public at large, so this is an important development for art historians, dealers, and provenance researchers,” Elizabeth Gorayeb, WPI’s executive director, told artnet News. read more