Detail of a Bergdorf Goodman sketch (1937), part of a collection of drawings given to The Costume Institute Library in 1966
«Since July of last year, we've added over eight hundred titles (just over twenty-three thousand pages!) to our Digital Collections, which have reached nearly fifty thousand titles in all. Everything from fat exhibition catalogues (like this and this and this) to fashion plates to ephemera can be read online or downloaded, in their entirety, as PDFs. Served up below are some of our most recent additions, providing a glimpse into the diversity of this ever-expanding online collection.»
In 2017, The Met exhibited the works of legendary fashion designer Rei Kawakubo, founder of Comme des Garçons. We recently made the exhibition checklist and didactic materials available through our Digital Collections, so you'll now be able to peruse everything in the exhibition from this very screen.
An installation view of Rei Kawakubo/Comme Des Garçons: Art of the In-Between at The Met. The exhibition checklist has recently been digitized.
If, however, you're interested in something a little further away (in both time and space), might I recommend one of the nearly one hundred catalogues from Hungarian gallery Nemzeti Szalon? Check out this one, for instance, on Hungarian sculptor Miklós Borsos, which was digitized in the last six months.
Miklós Borsos, Borsos Miklós, Szobrászművész: Kiállítása 1957, Nemzeti Szalon (Budapest: Műcsarnok, 1957).
Curious what's been happening in Watson Library? We've recently added our quarterly newsletters to the Digital Collections, so you can get a sense of how the library has been evolving.
A snapshot of the Thomas J. Watson Library Newsletter from Summer 2017, which is now available online.
We've also added thousands of Bergdorf Goodman sketches from 1929 to 1952, like the one below from 1934.
Thousands of sketches of Bergdorf Goodman clothes, such as this one from 1934, are available for viewing online.
Interested in Dada? We just digitized an important issue of a periodical from the movement, The Blind Man. It was edited by Marcel Duchamp and includes an image of his scandalous masterpiece, Fountain, which he signed "R. Mutt, 1917" (the same year this issue was published).
An image from Marcel Duchamp, ed. The Blind Man, no. 2 (May 1917).
And for a special sneak peek behind the scenes here, below is a sample book I recently catalogued while working on this post (it's filled with paper samples from the 1950s). After I finished creating the record for it, I sent it along to Book Conservation for appropriate treatment, after which it will enter the queue to be . . . digitized. We can't help ourselves.
Muster-Sammlung 1951 (Aschaffenburg: Buntpapierfabrik A.-G. Aschaffenburg, 1951).
Again, these are just a few of the hundreds of things we've been digitizing and making available online. Here's a fun one from way back, our parting gift to you.
