Agreement Reached Between the Frick Art Reference Library and ARTstor

The Frick Art Reference Library and ARTstor announced today that they had
reached an agreement to collaborate on the digitization, preservation, and
distribution through ARTstor of approximately 20,000 high quality digital
images from the Library's famous photoarchive, one of the world's greatest art
historical research resources.

This collaboration will focus on the Frick Library's renowned Negative
Collection, an archive of approximately 60,000 large-format negatives that is
prized by scholars as a unique visual record of lesser-known and largely
unpublished European and American paintings. These paintings are often
documented with invaluable, unpublished information and scholarly opinions
assembled under the Frick's auspices. The Negative Collection is the product
of both ongoing acquisitions programs and dedicated photographic campaigns
sponsored by the Frick Library. One of the Frick Library's top priorities is
the digital reformatting and preservation of deteriorating negatives from the
Negative Collection. The present collaboration will advance this key
institutional goal, building upon support previously proffered by the Carl and
Lily Pforzheimer Foundation.

The present project will involve two key archives from the Negative Collection.
The first archive consists of nearly 9,000 large-format, glass plate negatives
produced in the early decades of the twentieth century by the Italian
photographic firm of Sansoni. The Sansoni archive richly document fresco
cycles and other forms of architectural decoration in many remote sites
throughout Italy, including significant works that have since suffered
irreversible damage or destruction.

The second archive consists of nearly 10,000 large-format glass plate and
nitrate negatives, as well as polyester "interpositives," produced by the
archives of the firm A.C. Cooper, Photographers, London, and related
photographic archives. These photos principally document paintings as they
passed through art auction galleries in London in the 1920s and 1930s, often in
transit from one private collection to another.

These two landmark archives will greatly enrich ARTstor's value to a wide
academic and museum audience. In reaching this agreement, Anne L. Poulet,
Director of the Frick Collection, and James Shulman, Executive Director of
ARTstor, expressed their enthusiasm in collaborating to use digital
technologies to make these unique scholarly resources more broadly available
for noncommercial educational and scholarly purposes. "Just as the founding of
the Frick Art Reference Library marked an extraordinary milestone in providing
an image repository for in depth scholarly research, our collaboration with
ARTstor will set us on a sure and valuable course to preserve and develop the
Library's mission through digital technology," comments Poulet.

ARTstor (www.artstor.org) was created in 2001 as a nonprofit initiative of The
Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and is now an independent non-profit organization
dedicated to serving education and scholarship in the arts and the humanities.

The Frick Art Reference Library was founded in 1920 by Helen Clay Frick as a
memorial to her father, Henry Clay Frick. Its mission was and remains to
gather photographs of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and illuminated
manuscripts executed between the fourth and the mid-twentieth century by
European and American artists; to collate with each photograph facts relating
to the object's history and present location; and to create a comprehensive
research library for the study of Western art. Today the Library's holdings of
books, periodicals, auction sale catalogs, special collections and archives
complement the photoarchive to comprise one of the world's most valued art
research centers and the most comprehensive resource on the history of
collecting and patronage.

For further press information about The Frick Collection and Frick Art
Reference Library, please contact Heidi Rosenau, Manager of Media Relations &
Marketing.
Media Relations Phone: (212) 547-6866
General Phone: (212) 288-0700
Fax: (212) 628-4417
E-mail address: mediarelations@frick.org