Gernsheim Photographic and ARTstor

Collaborative Agreement Reached Between the Gernsheim Photographic Corpus of Drawings
and ARTstor

The Gernsheim Photographic Corpus of Drawings and ARTstor are pleased to announce that
they have formed an ongoing collaboration with a goal of creating a digital version of
the Gernsheim Photographic Corpus of Drawings, the renowned photographic archive of more
than 184,000 old master drawings.

For more than half a century, the Gernsheim Photographic Corpus of Drawings has been
documenting old master drawings in scores of archives, libraries and museums around the
world. An ongoing effort of Dr. Walter and Dr. Jutta Gernsheim, the Corpus embodies an
unsurpassed commitment to serving the scholarly needs of the international community of
art historians. The Corpus presently embodies more than 184,000 extraordinary
black-and-white photographs of European old master drawings from the 15th to the early
20th century. As a subscription service, the Corpus is available in its entirety at only
a very small number of scholarly photo archives in Europe, Britain and America.
Incomplete copies of the Corpus may be found in a few other locations. But this
remarkable resource has never been readily accessible to the majority of scholars,
teachers and curators who would benefit from consulting its riches.

ARTstor has now developed an ongoing partnership with the Gernsheim Corpus, the goal of
which is to progressively digitize and distribute through ARTstor a comprehensive online
version of this invaluable art historical resource. As the project proceeds, the two
partners will seek to engage the participation of the many museums whose drawings
collections are represented in the Corpus, and ARTstor accordingly anticipates making
digital versions of the images available to ARTstor participants in phases.

The British Museum has already expressed its enthusiasm for the distribution through
ARTstor of the nearly 17,000 old master drawings from its collections that have been
photographed over the decades by the Gernsheim Corpus. These will be the first fruits of
this exciting collaboration. The British Museum will also share with ARTstor its online
cataloging data for these drawings. Antony Griffiths, Keeper of Prints and Drawings at
the British Museum, voiced the museum's strong support for ARTstor's effort to both
preserve the Gernsheim Corpus and help it enter a new era as a key resource for the art
historian - something that has been high on the agenda of the larger community of
drawings curators. "The British Museum has been associated with the Gernsheim
Photographic Corpus since its beginning, and has seen it grow into the greatest archive
of photos of Old Master drawings in the world. We are now delighted that it will be made
more widely available through ARTstor." ARTstor is now inviting further museums to
participate in this important project. The Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and
the Philadelphia Museum of Art have recently added their support to that of the British
Museum.

In reaching this agreement, James Shulman, Executive Director of ARTstor, expressed
ARTstor's enthusiasm in collaborating to use digital technologies to make this unique
resource more broadly available for noncommercial educational and scholarly purposes.
"The Gernsheim Corpus is truly a unique labor of love," says Shulman. "We at ARTstor are
privileged and excited to be playing a role in making this unrivaled reference resource
more widely available to the community of scholars and curators in a new medium."

ARTstor anticipates inviting a team of collaborators, including both collaborating
museums and such key photo archives as the Biblioteca Hertziana (Rome), The Frick Art
Reference Library (New York), and the Getty Research Institute (a program of the J. Paul
Getty Trust in Los Angeles), to join in a coordinated effort to normalize, enhance and
convert to electronic form the cataloging data associated with the Gernsheim Corpus.
ARTstor also welcomes the collaboration of the Cleveland Museum of Art in this project.
The museum's copy of the Gernsheim Corpus is both comprehensive and well-preserved, and
using this copy as a scanning source will allow ARTstor to take full advantage of the
enormous care with which the photographic prints have been developed by the Gernsheims.

ARTstor  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. Currently, more than
530 non-profit institutions in the U.S. and Canada are participating in ARTstor. A pilot
distribution is underway in the UK and Australia/New Zealand, and further international
availability is being actively explored.