As usual, one thing led to another, and I ended up discovering a delightful online art museum, known simply as the webmuseum. It turns out they are hosted as one of many specialized sites that together comprise ibiblio, an organization that seeks to be “the public’s library and digital archive”. Based on a quick look at their site, they have a chance of achieving that goal.
One of the featured sections of the webmuseum is the Famous Artworks exhibition. There is a wide variety of material available and the oldest paintings were painted over 500 years ago. By no means complete, the museum does appear to offer a good representative example of a large variety of famous artworks through the ages. Due to modern copyright(wrong) restrictions, there are some gaps in the 20th century material, but there’s plenty that did make it into the collection.
Actually, I discovered all the above only after I had been visiting the site for a while. I came across a link to the very colorful, expressive paintings that were created by Wassily Kandinsky, known as one of the primary founders of the modern abstract art movement. In his paintings and writings he spoke of how music and color were intertwined in his mind. That reminded me of a phenomenom I noticed when listening to Jerry play live; his lower register notes sounded blonde to me and as he worked his way up the register they would eventually be more of a reddish-purple. A minor form of synethesia, I believe. (hey, you … stop smirking back there.)
Here are a couple of my favorite images; click on either of the images to find out more about the artist and to see more of his works. Also, one of the cool things about the iblibio site is that most of the content may be mirrored using the standard rsync protocol!
